How I overcame my addiction to sugar

> When I returned from my trip, my fridge was empty, so I resisted the temptation to buy those products.

This has to be my reality. If I buy treats, no matter how good my intentions are to make them last, they just don't survive in the cupboard more than a couple of days. I have to leave my kitchen mostly empty apart from: diet soda, meat, cheese, yoghurt, peanut butter. Everything else is just too addictive and I keep eating it until it's gone. I do have other stuff, but have to buy it as and when I need it in a quantity that will only last one meal.

One suggestion I can give if you like chocolate is to buy some 90% or 95% chocolate. It's hard to eat more than one piece at a time without your mouth feeling quite dry, and a 100g bar can easily last a week. After a while, if you have anything else, even 80%, it'll taste really sweet. But it only take a bar or two of the really easy to eat sweet variety before you'll be hooked on it again.

Quitting cold turkey after a change of environment (moving somewhere else) is a good tip not just for addiction, but for any change in habit.

However, a more practical approach is to reduce the dosage slowly. That works especially well for sweet drinks. If you have a soda maker, you can slowly reduce the amount of syrup you use.

After a while, your tolerance for sweetness goes down, so things that previously felt not sweet enough feel just right, and things that felt just right before will now feel overly sweet. This will then also help with reducing sweet food.

What I learned from my weight loss journey is that good sleep does wonders for my brain. It helps me remember my long-term goals and resist those pesky urges for sugary, fatty snacks.

Plus, when I'm well-rested, my brain seems to actually register when my stomach isn't empty, so it doesn't send out those annoying craving signals.

And after all that health talk, I'll probably still end up scrolling through Reddit for a couple of hours before bed.

Since I was a teenager, a mild but persistent acne has plagued my daily life. Up until the age of 30, I always believed that only medications, impeccable hygiene and weekly physical activity could help reduce the effects. Then, after a complete change of diet due to my move to Asia, I realized that the main factor was sugar. By going completely sugar-free in my diet, I no longer have acne at all as long as I keep away from it. It really got me thinking that most people should explore how their bodies work, without necessarily relying on what works for others or what modern medicine advises, and also that severe fasting is a good way to start the comparison.

It's nefarious!

Especially if you have a dopamin deficiency (ADHD, etc.) and you eat so you aren't bored.

I can eat 500g of m&ms in one sitting, no problem, and I'm not even overweight or something.

To compare it to heroin is a horrible trivialization of something that destroys a person and at time those around the person.

I feel that to make this statement in any genuine way, the author should spend 6 months developing a serious addiction to heroin then attempt to get clean.

I am blessed I have never done heroin and hopefully I never will.

I have gone weeks without sugar and had a craving, some mild headaches and at times been a bit grumpier. That is not even a measurable fraction of trying to get sober from a heroin addiction.

Sugar is everywhere, cheap, legal and culturally important (birthday parties, weddings, farewell parties, etc). Very difficult to create isolation environment, unless one goes full Ted Kaczynski.

I don’t want to discourage the author, but i am old, so yeah been there, done that. But avoiding sugar like its evil is not healthy. Nor is it sustainable.

It appears that the author is probably young and single. That may help with this regimen. However, it is best to adopt a less extreme strategy for stress free happiness.

Everyone's struggle with addiction is different. I'm glad this person found a good way for them and I'm sure it might help others as well. Don't be discouraged if it doesn't always work for you, maybe you just need to try a different approach.

I'm 254 days into switching to a ketogenic diet (complete with at home instant ketone finger prick blood tests using the very affordable keto mojo), and can't believe I waited so long.

I was roughly surfing sugar highs for 39 years.

Would highly recommend looking into this if you are a sugar/carb addict like I was.

All the tips given in the article are very useful, but for me it was also useful learning how to make different types of jam or cakes helps you understand the amount of sugar and butter used. Replacing store-bought sweets with homemade options gives you a sense of appreciation and a 'ritualistic' aspect when enjoying something sweet, which may reduce how often you indulge in sugary treats.

My girlfriend works at a hospital, where ironically there's always a steady supply of sugary treats on hand. It's a crutch as they're constantly dealing with truly unpleasant situations, but ultimately very unhealthy. I wish they had something to kick them out of the cycle. Years ago, I pitched the idea of armbands for staff that pledged abstinence. It fell flat. I don't have a problem with sugar but probably only thanks to my weird environment and being extremely active.

I cut out sugar for a month recently and my sleep cut in half and my depression really worsened. Really affected my job performance. I didn't think it would last that long or be that bad. It's crazy.

I went back to eating bit of sugar and the same night had a great sleep.

Not sure what to do now. I find it easy not to eat it but the side effects are very difficult to deal with

When I'm working on the computer late, eating chocolate or other sweet things was a real crutch. Not doing it required a lot of willpower, so I could sometimes limit my consumption for some periods, but I gave up on quitting sugar in the long run.

For other health-related reasons (migraines) I went keto since a few months ago and had no problems at all quitting sugar altogether. Nuts, cured ham are great for occasional nibbling. My sweet thing is a 'keto cream' with a blend of cream and yogurt whipped to be fluffy and topped with peanut butter and crushed nuts.

I do have some very occasional cravings for fries or chocolate, but it is very very rare, almost nothing compared to a normal high-carb diet. (I break the ketosis for a carbful meal from time to time, so it's not like alcoholism where seeing carbs or sugar is a problem that would cause a relapse either.)

A decade ago I got into intermitted fasting and forced myself to drink my coffee black at work. Going from a double-double (x2 cream, x2 sugar) at timmies to black. big change but the IF motivation for mental clarity, and increasing my metabolism worked out so well that I didn't mess with the regiment until recently adding oat milk to my coffee, or butter. its really about dealing down the dark coffee flavour.

beyond the benefits, I find that my palette rejects anything too sweet now. my wife's family loves mangoes and its one of the first things they eat in the morning. I just can't. grapes, mangoes, lychee.. all way too sweet for my liking.

if it comes to sweetening a summer lemonade for guests, real maple syrup over sugar and it really helps when your circle of friends are also on a similar kick. no one brings donuts to gatherings any more.

For me the solution has been blackberries + peanut butter (natural).

No sugar, when I really get a craving for something sweet, I eat about 50g of blackberries with 2 teaspoons of high quality peanut butter. Delicious and the craving stops. Also, about 100 calories at most

I'm not sure I believed in sugar as an addiction at first. Then I tried this keto diet because I had seen my friend try it and he lost a lot of weight.

And then I had this phenomenon that was so strong that I still remember it years later - I started having fantasies about soda/milkshakes in the middle of a workday. Like so intense/ongoing that the only thing I can compare them to is a teen's sexual fantasies. Mind you I wasn't even somebody who drank soda every day or week.

I found some voice in the back of my head saying "We could literally go get a cherry coke in under 4 minutes, there's a CVS around the corner, or a root beer? Or a root beer float? Dr pepper? We could get two." I ended up drinking diet soda for a few weeks (which I normally find disgusting).

Anyways after a certain point (3 months?) the cravings died and never came back the same way. Your mileage may vary.

Replacement works for me. Replaced all added sugars stuff (drinks, ice cream, cookies) with fruit and the difference was very noticeable. Fruit also has its own kind of sugar, but my body runs differently on that compared with food with added sugar.

As a sugar addict the only thing that has ever worked for me was doing a 3 day fast.

For about 6 months afterwards I just seemed to not need sugary things as much and I didn’t crave it in the same way. I also had a lot more control over my hunger, being able to ignore it for longer, so I guess that probably helped.

Eventually it wore off and I was back to being an addict again, but I thought it was interesting because I never expected that to happen. I guess it was a ‘cold turkey’ episode.

I was in Florida. The nitrogen runoff created an algae bloom that suffocated thousands of fish and manatees. As a joke at the hipster coffee shop I picked up a packet of sugar and said I was boycotting sugar because what the big sugar did to the environment. I didn’t make any difference except I’ve had perfect blood work and zero cavities since. I also lost a lot of weight. Maybe I didn’t make the environment healthy however I sure am a lot healthier.

One of the most helpful things for me was eating more fruit, particularly citrus. I believe the sugar craving may be a disguised vitamin c craving.

This was a great, uplifting post. I'm happy for the author.

I love sugar. Sugar cereals, sugar snacks, and especially anything that has peanut butter. But I've recently started to cut back. (i.e. Greek yogurt with fruit for a snack). So far, about a week in, things feel good and I've dropped about 6 pounds. (!!) I hope I can find more ways to make it easier.

I tried not buying food with added sugar but it’s surprisingly difficult. Here is an interesting analysis I did some time ago which shows that for half of the food items, sugar is the main ingredient: https://scrapingfish.com/blog/scraping-walmart

I started a strict Keton diet back in April. I started by doing a 48 hour fast to completely eliminate stored glycogen stores. I also began with intermittent fasting by skipping breakfast. It was hard at first, but thankfully I never experienced the "keto flu" that some people do. I wonder if the initial fasting helped with that.

Difficylty level: impossible

Living with someone who doesn’t want to give up sugar and keeps bringing lots of it home.

Sugar is one of my downfalls, but unfortunately I have to keep some sugar around for when I have a blood glucose low (I'm diabetic and have a pump). Of course, I could focus on more healthy versions of sugar (like juice instead of candy), which I almost never do.

Before I go shopping, I drink a full glass of water. This has helped suppress or avoid the urge to making impulse purchases at the supermarket. Almost always I regret having bought them; and almost always, I eat them because I don't want to throw them out.

It was fairly easy for me. After two weeks without foods with added sugar, I stopped craving it.

There are skinny folks who had the exact same diet growing up. It's luck of the draw.

Very long article, for something so simple.

Stop eating i.e. fast. The cravings go away within 48h.

Done, solved.

What’s worked for me …

Only eat what’s in your refrigerator, and don’t eat anything from a pantry or freezer.

Sugar (and carbs) are predominately found in pantry and freezer goods.

You can eat whatever you want if you just work out seriously an hour a day. If you do that properly, gaining weight will become the challenge.

An interesting question is what behavior the author has developed as an alternative to sugar. If anything.

I think the author read atomic habits. Even the story about vietnam is in there.

I just switched to Pepsi Max, cut my sugar intake by 75%

Is semaglutide to sugar what naltrexone is to opiates?

My diet used to be as bad as Hansel and Gretel's. A long-term keto diet neutralised the habit for a few years. But after it returned, what worked for me in changing it was to rigorously substitute plain foods for the richly processed stuff (meals and snacks) until I learned to appreciate simple tastes. For instance snacking on fruit, nuts, crackers and ryvita, buttered toast, cottage cheese and natural yoghurt. I wasn't able to shake my chocolate cravings, but over time, the pull of intensely sweet stuff died back, to the point where the sugar rush from ice cream or wedge of chocolate cake makes me feel sick enough for me to prefer to avoid them. To anyone who tries this approach, good luck.

I quit sugar after a stint volunteering in a homeless shelter, where I saw how people were with sugar. I was horrified, so I went cold turkey! Some say that going to an abattoir means becoming an instant vegan, seeing zombies with sugar at three in the morning had a similar effect on me.

I don't see sugar as the root of all evil, the master of all addictions. However, it is easy to quit and, if you can do that, you can quit anything else, including addictive substances. The reason is that, if you are avoiding all added sugar, then you have to cook. It means no more processed food and an improvement to the metabolism.

However, the quit sugar idea does attract people that want to lose weight, which is a noble goal, but not the same thing as wanting to live an active life at a healthy weight.

This means that most people drawn to no sugar are on a keto diet with all that this entails. For the keto diet person all carbohydrates are the enemy, with fat and protein as the allowed macronutrients.

I was open to completely changing my diet as, until the eye-opening experience, I had always put employers or others first and not really thought a great deal about nutrition. My 'intellect' was more concerned with programming languages than what I should be stuffing my face with!

Knowing nothing about the subject, I did want to know why I felt so much better from giving up sugar. So I investigated diet and nutrition. I developed new habits including when shopping. I mostly buy vegetables and supplement vitamin B12. The experiment is going very well. I quit coffee and much else, to arrive independently at a 'whole food, plant based' diet, which is 'closet vegan'. I clung on to butter for quite a while, but cut that cord to reject a lot of the 'anti-carb' thinking that goes with the keto diet.

I don't eat a lot of 'evil carbs', as viewed by the fat eating keto people. This is because I usually have so many leafy greens, legumes and other vegetables that I just don't have the need for a plate full of rice, pasta or whatever else is 'evil carbs'.

The thing is that every calorie has to have nutrition, so sugar is 'empty calories' with no nutritional value. I seem to be fine without it, I can go cycling for all the daylight hours in the day and not need anything more than a few pieces of fruit and a sandwich made with the help of a bread machine.

I don't think that not eating sugar is that big a deal, but it can be a very useful stepping stone towards arriving at a sustainable lifestyle that is not a 'diet'.

Much of the 'science' regarding why sugar is allegedly bad is not as clear cut as it should be. I have heard all about 'fructose' and 'ketosis'. I have also learned a little bit about history and how we came to be living a pastoral life in the UK before the Romans arrived. There has always been conflict between the people that farm grains and the people that eat animal products, with an overlap between the two camps. This is why we have people insisting that full keto, whale blubber only, is the way to go, then we have people insistent on vegan as the way to go, with the majority being okay with 'everything in moderation'.

In conversation I have mentioned that I 'quit all processed food' and that does not seem to trigger anyone. I really did manage to quit everything I was addicted to, but I don't see sugar as an addiction, even though I ate it every day for decades.

I did take sugar for granted and I would eat things in front of the TV without truly savouring the taste. I can't quite remember what those sticky toffee puddings tasted like, or some chocolate bars that I had thousands of times. I would recommend quitting sugar, however, you must be open to the possibility that you really will want to quit for good, to be eating fruit out of choice, and to want herbs and spices rather than biscuits and chips in the supermarket. If you get a figure that you enjoy living in and see cancerous moles vanish on your skin, then it can be hard to want to go back to a diet that includes sugar. There are no upsides to it once you get the health gains.

Hence, before you quit sugar, compile a list of your favourite things and spend a solid month savouring them, as a farewell tour. Enjoy with the TV off, in that way, when you have gone past the point of turning back, you can remember what these things tasted like, to not miss them or wonder.

I always keep my receipts for my grocery shopping. I would not be full of shame if someone were to read them and try to mock my food choices. Everything is healthy.

I have not used my fridge or freezer with this experiment, so they are turned off at the wall. My food is always fresh. It turned out that everything in my fridge was just trying to kill me and vegetables prefer being outside the morgue that is the fridge. My food waste is almost zero, although I did throw half a turnip out recently. Even my recycling bin is getting to zero, that has not seen plastic in a very long time, glass jars are rare and even tins are getting rare.

Sometimes I think about quitting my peculiar lifestyle, to turn the fridge and freezer back on, to stock them with sticky toffee puddings, vast slabs of cheese and everything else laced with fat and sugar. I could toss the vegetables out and put ready made meals in the microwave, or frozen pizza in the oven.

I found that we put the horse before the cart with 'exercise'. I found that, get the nutrition right, and the physical activity comes naturally. But, playing devil's advocate, I think about going to fizzy drinks, sticky toffee puddings and beer. I could get man boobs and a beer gut, maybe with an extra chin or two. I would never need to spend twenty minutes chopping vegetables ever again, oh, it could be so easy!

But no, I am staying off the sugar. However, it is no big deal, I just live in a parallel universe of vegetables with no processed sugar or silly science about the evils of fructose. Sugar is not evil, I just prefer the whole food, plant based life as a 'closet vegan'.

My son is struggling with this right now and it's entirely my fault.

I've never been outside of 15 pounds what I weighed in High School and I was underweight in High School. As a man in his 40s, I'm in better shape than I was back then, lower body fat, slightly more muscle, triglycerides/LDL/HDL better[0].

I eat how a 10-year-old kid would eat if he didn't have parents. All of my breakfast foods (which I never eat in the morning) have cartoon characters on the box. Fruity/Cocoa Pebbles, Honeycomb, Cookie Crisp, Lucky Charms, Cocoa Krispies, Fruit Loops, Frosted Gluten-Wheats, (of course) Cap'n Crunch ... actually, worse -- I buy the Malt-O-Meal generic versions of each that come in the cement bags.

I can't think of the last time I drank water. I drink Coca-cola, instead. At least twice a week I make a half-gallon chocolate malt and consume the entire thing. Sometimes that's dinner. It's the only reason I own a blender. It's the reason blenders last about 2 years, tops, for me -- typically with dead motors or a shattered carafe[1]. I make the whole carafe for myself (the kids split half of one). I rarely eat Breakfast or Lunch. Dinner is something frozen and tossed in an Air Fryer or ordered. I often add a meal just before bed that consists of several bowls of one of the previously mentioned cereals.

I do none of this with any sort of planning. I get hungry, I find food, I eat it. If I'm depressed, I don't eat. If I'm busy doing something else I might forget to eat. When I'd travel solo for work, I'd go through my receipts and find out I ate twice at the airport on the way out/in, and spend an hour looking for meal receipts until I figure out that -- yes, I actually did only pay for three meals that week. Yes, one of those "meals" was an Arizona Peach Tea, half of which was left somewhere and for some reason I felt it necessary to both get and keep the receipt for the $1.00 purchase but at least the expense department will be satisfied ... if not a little surprised.

My 16-year-old son is having success with a restrictive Low Carb/No Sugar diet and I've found myself at a loss as to how to help him, but many of the things the author mentioned (short of a vacation I can't afford) have worked very well.

My observation is that the author's top two items are the most effective parts if you can do the first.

My alternative to the "vacation" for him is distraction. He's a lot like me: an indoor cat who likes computers and video games and doesn't like sports. I focused on things he really liked that were active and upgraded him -- he got a better VR kit and we upgraded the OneWheel[2]. He learned the first few days that when he gets hungry, the best thing to do is use one of those and the one that gets him out of the house is the one that works best. Though we could have taken a vacation for the cost of the upgrade, he wouldn't be putting in ten miles on it every day.

And I think that's part of it: finding something he loves to do which involves a lot of exercise. So far, that's the OneWheel GT (and I feel the same way). He uses the VR. It's about what you'd expect. The few games he enjoys aren't much exercise and the ones that are exercise focused aren't any fun. Luckily he doesn't get motion sick, but that was a pointless purchase for these purposes. And I assumed it would be: I've been through all of the previous attempts to make exercise fun with video games: Wii, every version of Kinect, various others dating back to the Nintendo floor pad with their weird Olympics game, both of which I destroyed in my youth. They usually make some form of exercise less effective while making "wanting to do that form of exercise" slightly more attractive for a brief period of time.

The optimal situation would be a game that can be played at home with low-cost equipment which "people want to play because it's fun to play" that happens to require a reasonable amount of physical exercise to use. Ideally, it'd be something that wouldn't be "more enjoyable with a more common control scheme", nor would physical strength greatly improve ones ability to master the game (so, like most video games, they're more mental strategy vs precision muscle memory) and would be multi-player. I've yet to encounter something that doesn't fall over on all of these points so badly as to make it worse than traditional exercise.

[0] I was a kid during a brief period when they advocated giving children as young as 10-years old cholesterol tests and then putting them on low-fat diets when they (generally) had "High Cholesterol".

[1] Which is only a problem if the carafe is for an ALDI Aisle of Shame $39 blender and finding a replacement is either impossible or almost as expensive. After every expensive blender I owned failed, I'd somehow end up finding a crappy one at ALDI figuring "The $200 one died quickly, might as well save the money this time."

[2] We had a Pint and we've gone through a few tires and about 9K miles on that one. When ridden hard, you come home soaked head to toe in sweat, but it's one thing that he enjoys as much as (if not more) than playing video games.