Don't Eat Sugar to Beat Sugar
One question I am often asked is "how do I beat my sugar cravings?". My answer - "don't eat it”. One of the simplest and most effective ways to beat sugar cravings is to avoid sugar. The concept of sweet is completely relative. How sweet you perceive a food is dependent on how much sugar you eat. When someone with a high sugar diet eats carrots alone, they often report that they taste "bitter" and "bland". After a sugar detox that same person will report carrots tasking "sweet" and "flavourful". The carrots did not change; their taste buds and perception of sweet changed.
The same applies for sugar in coffee. If you usually take double, by weaning yourself to a lower dosage over days, weeks or even months and eventually take your coffee black, there will come a day when having sugar in your coffee will taste "grossly sweet".
The first few days of a sugar detox are the hardest. Your body will go through withdrawal. Bad bacteria in the body feeds off of sugar (yeast and parasites) and will crave it initially.
Sugar cravings can be the body’s way of correcting a deficiency in Vitamin C or other essential nutrients or to balance a diet too low in carbohydrates. A good way to manage these first few days is to get enough Vitamin C and quality carbohydrates such as fresh fruits, vegetables and whole grains. Food sources are always preferred over supplements – strawberries, citrus fruits, currants and red peppers are good sources of both Vitamin C and carbohydrates.
There are some very tasty Vitamin C supplemental drink mixes available that are naturally sweetened with stevia and taste like a favourite childhood drink, Tang. I use one called C Plus BioFizz and it can help get through difficult sugar cravings.
You can slowly detox your body of added sugars by eating more whole foods from the earth in the form as closely as they were intended. For example, you are always better to eat an apple than apple juice or even worse, apple drink.
Read labels more closely. The ingredient that is listed first is found in the food in the highest quantity. Look for labels that show no sugar or where it is listed near the end rather than near the beginning of the ingredients list. The best food choices have no ingredients list or packaging at all.
Don't be tricked by "low sugar", "reduced sugar" or "light" products - research has shown that replacing sugar with artificial chemical sweeteners will not help you learn to adapt to the real taste of whole foods. You will just replace one bad habit for another.
I would love to tell you there is a better way to beat sugar cravings, but the reality is anything that we have too much of in our diet, the best way to beat it is to simply not eat it.
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