Sugar

"Hi, my name is Kristyn.  And I'm addicted to sugar."

"I could quit if I wanted to!!"

"I only need a little bit every day, then I'm good."

"There are worse things I could be addicted to: cigarettes, drugs."

Yup.  Those are things I've been saying for a long time.  Several years ago I realized I had a true physical addiction to sugar when I tried to stop eating refined sugar for a week.  I lasted about 4 of the most miserable days I've ever had (and the most miserable days Jeff has ever had) because I was so incredibly grumpy, cranky, and irritated. I can remember eating a bowl of strawberries (the least satisfying strawberries have ever been, probably) after dinner one night and glaring at him for no reason, and the look of fear on his face. I didn't realize at the time exactly what was happening, but I was going through withdrawal.

Disclaimer - I understand this sounds a little #firstworldproblems to be complaining about sugar addiction (poor me with this abundance of sweets available to me), but it is actually way more serious than I realized now that I've been looking into it a bit further.  Disclaimer 2 - I'm in the early days of my research, so sharing only my limited understanding of this issue.

Refined white sugar was never a key part of a human diet - only showing up about 200 years ago.  Our bodies are equipped to deal with the breakdown of a small amount of a wide variety of natural sugars (e.g. fructose in fruit, lactose in milk, honey (pillaged from bees)), and have absolutely no idea what to do with the deluge of sucrose, fructose, maltose, etc. being barraged at us daily.  I have read some disgusting statistics about average folks eating 50 kg of sugar per year.  EWWWW!!!  That's crazy!

Sugar can be found in nature, for sure.  But the processing required to distill out a highly concentrated portion of a plant is comparable to how they get cocaine out of the coca plant.  And in the end: a fine white powder that in both cases alights the senses and leaves people craving more, in an endless cycle.  The damage done to our bodies by both is, sure, minimal each time, but over time can launch a cumulative assault that can eventually be deadly.

Where sugar comes from: sugar cane and sugar beet

Where cocaine comes from: coca plant

Sigh.... it's hard for me to malign my best friend sugar in this way. Those who know me well know my sweet tooth is absolutely out of control. Cookies, ice cream and chocolate are my favourites. Cake, candy, pop - I'll take it all.  After every single meal my gut starts pinging my brain: "sugar!" "sugar!" "sugar!".  As an intermittently health conscious person (in that I'm always conscious of what the healthy choices are, but don't always make them) I have creatively found my way around this issue while still managing to maintain or (when I'm motivated) lose weight.  My workarounds include 2 squares of 70% dark chocolate after lunch and dinner, eating my healthy ("healthy?") snack every day of plain Greek yogurt sweetened with 1/2 tbsp PC Blue Menu reduced sugar jam, raspberries and topped with granola (sanctimonious non-health food in disguise #1! but man I love it!!), drinking hot water with lemon and honey, and drizzling my favourite cold tomato salad with 1/2 Tbsp of balsamic reduction (basically tangy sugar).  If I'm dying for something sweet but know I need to cool it with the chocolate, I reach for super sweet fruit (apples, pineapple, mandarins).  My. Sweet. Tooth. Rules. My. Life. Jeff is afraid of it, in his adorable supportive-husband-battling-concerned-husband way, and doesn't at all understand it. It's gotten so bad that I have to manage my own chocolate supply when sharing a cottage with coworkers for a week in the field (because if I didn't have those two squares after field lunch one day, I'd wig out, likely on whoever ate them), and I nearly decimated the group chocolate supply while on a camping trip this summer. I can't reduce sugar/calories without a firm supply of fake-sweet Coke Zero nearby because even though it's not real, it's a reprieve from the blandness of food that's not brimming with sugar. I always offer to bake when I have to bring food somewhere because I know I get to nibble at what I'm making, lick the bowl and have some of whatever delicious concoction I've made when I get to wherever I'm going (plus I'm pretty good at it!).

This seems like a reasonable amount of cookies, no?

It's embarrassing too.  Agh, that's hard to admit.  I've always done such a great job of owning and loving that I'm a sweet person, not a salty one, that sugar satisfies me like nothing else can, and that I just adore it. But honestly, when you've been with me in public and I've ordered that massive dessert in a restaurant, or eaten one too many cookies from the platter that were supposed to be for everyone, trust me, it's embarassing.  Because, like a drug addict, I really don't have control over my actions, which is mortifying.  I'm an autonomous adult - why can't I control what I put in my mouth!?!!!  I recognize it's not like I'm alone in this in the world, and obviously I have SOME control over what I put in my mouth otherwise I'd be 400 lbs. But I'm tired of letting my urges and instincts control me.  I want to be controlled by rational thought - wouldn't that be nice!!

Again, this seems like a reasonable quantity of chocolate cake...

I'm absolutely terrified of the idea of detoxing.  I don't want to be that angry and cranky again.  And if you think about it, there's actually no good time to detox. I don't want to take any of my precious vacation time and spend it clattering around the house, groaning like an angry sugar monster.  I do NOT want to do this while things are stressful at work - who knows what I'll say!!  I am already not particularly nice when people interrupt me when I'm in the middle of something important/stressful - I can actually envision a particular coworker of mine lying unconscious on the floor with Kristyn fingernail marks across his face, and you can just see my rushed trail of destruction downstairs to the convenience store that is my office window looks onto downstairs in the mall........

I sometimes stand in front of the chocolate bars at a convenience store and can't believe this is allowed in this world. Probably how a trying-to-quit smoker feels staring at the wall of cigarettes, or an alcoholic in the LCBO.  "Why is (insert name of massive corporation producing product) allowed to make this largely unhealthy product, and tempt us like this?  Don't they know they're actually killing some of us with these offerings?!"  But of course it's not "their" fault.  It's our inability to control our impulses. I would do very well in a temptation free world, though.  Honestly, I would.  I'd nibble on my dark chocolate daily and get by.  This is what I do in the controlled environment of my home.  But the second there is a dish of candy or plate of cookies on the kitchen table at work, it's a constant struggle to stay out of them - every single time I walk past them, they call my name.  If I make the mistake of picking up the "healthy" ice cream sandwiches at the grocery store, I spend a lot of time at home convincing myself why I shouldn't have more than 2 a day, and often finish that train of thought licking my fingers from the third one.  If I'm at a social event, all bets are off.  If the sweet stuff is near me, I am in the sweet stuff.  Back and forth between my seat and the sweet stuff like a wasp at a BBQ in August.  If only temptation wasn't there, this would be SO MUCH easier.  But it is there, and I certainly don't want to stop seeing my friends and family, or going to work for that matter, so I need to figure out some workarounds.

Temptation, thy name is a convenience store

The full on sugar detox/quit sugar diet sounds a little wild for me.  This is the one where you don't even eat fruit.  You completely eliminate sweet flavours from your diet.  And after several horrible weeks, your taste buds, your brain, your gut finally all get the message, calm the f*ck down and stop sending you messages to eat the sugar.  Then it's easy breezy, and you're done with it - you actually no longer want sugar, or think about it.  OR it  continues to be a difficult struggle, and you always think about it (This reminds me of my mom smoked, who for a few years when she was a teenager.  Forty years later, she says if diagnosed with a terminal illness the first thing she'd do would be to light up. The love of your addiction never actually goes away).  What I'm surmising from the anecdotal research is that for some the pathways of "want sugar!"/"eat sugar"/"feel happy" probably never really go away, they just dry up a little, while the rushes of messages are diverted to other neural pathways like "want something!"/"eat vegetables"/"feel full". <-- so lame.  Haha.  I think that snide comment was my gut flora talking, don' t mind them.  They've just been eating copious amounts of sugar for life and don't want me to give it up because it would make them sad, and die.  What was I saying?  (Now I'm thinking about eating sugar...) Oh, right: the unknown of quitting and if you'll ever really stop wanting it.  It's advised for North Americans to consume < 20 g sugar per day (about 4 tsps, or just over 1 tbsp).  Some people count fruit in this.  If that was the case, I'd be allowed my couple servings of dark chocolate (about 3g each), a couple of pieces of fruit and no added sugar lurking anywhere else (it's always hiding!! in ketchup, pasta sauce, the weirdest places where you didn't even know you wanted/liked it).

APPARENTLY once you train yourself away from refined/added sugar, things start to taste much better.  Faint sweetness in unsweet products like coconut oil, cinnamon and low sugar fruits (mainly berries) really ramps up and becomes "enough".  Then when you reach for that refined sugar baked good, it's actually too much sweetness for your tastebuds/tummy to handle.  AND, AND, everyone - I have seen proof this!  I had a very healthy coworker several years back, for whom I baked a Kristyn Birthday Cake.  Full on chocolate with rich vanilla frosting, and messy blue icing writing on the top: "Happy Birthday!".  After I served everyone, I watched her gently scrape some crumbs away from her piece and lick them delicately off the fork, savouring them, and eventually pushing her cake away not even half eaten, saying "it's delicious, thank you, but it's just too much for me."  I looked up from my nearly finished second piece, a heaping forkful of chocolate en route to my mouth (add icing smeared onto my cheek for effect) and wondered what the heck that must feel like!

To my girls, who won't be surprised, but may feel sad for me: I ate the whole box of Katie's Christmas chocolates in one sitting.  I was SO SAD afterwards.  I did that thing I do, where I feel stressed, because I wasn't feeling well (massive headache), and then I ate all the chocolates in an effort to "feel better" (sidenote: Kate, they were delicious!).  I emerged from a chocolate haze wondering who I was, and what the heck I was doing.  To the masses - can you imagine eating 7 truffles in a row, essentially chain-smoking truffles???  Most people likely wouldn't be able to stomach it. My former coworker would have lost her mind!  I, however, took it like a champ. That kind of sugar binge is no big deal for me - my body can handle it. And that's a bit scary.

That brings me back to gut flora (ah gut flora - it's exactly what you wanted to be thinking about, right?). After some chats with a coworker over my squares of dark chocolate after lunch the other day, I was floating my musings about quitting sugar, and she was telling me about new research she'd read regarding the differences in gut microbiota (the lil guys that live in all our guts that help us extract nutrients from our food and digest away) between sugar eaters and non-sugar eaters, between obese people and thin people, and how it can take a concerted effort to really change the make-up of who's hanging out in your insides.  If I starve the refined-sugar loving gut bacteria, they are going to wig out and send me lots of cues - cravings for sugar, headaches, dizziness... but eventually they're going to starve, not be able to reproduce, and start to die off.  The plan is that I'd be concurrently feeding some of the good guys down there (I do occasionally eat vegetables..) and encouraging them to reproduce and take up some of the real estate of the baddies, and eventually all I'll hear from my lower half is: "dang girl, get me a salad!" (wouldn't that be nice. :))

You almost thought it was a picture of Goodies licorice candy, but instead it was gut bacteria...

The warnings I'm taking from my preliminary (anecdotal) research is that this process goes differently for everyone, and you can tailor it differently depending on what amount of sugar you want in your life - there are no hard and fast rules other than the more sugar you eat, the more you will continue to want it.  I'm not sure that I never want to be able to eat a piece of cake again!!!  But I may be like the alcoholic who can't just have one drink without falling off the wagon face first into a bucket of ice cream.  Maybe I'll need to ensure I'm handcuffed and tied to a couch, have Jeff feed me the cake, and then writhe around a little while I fight the urge to have another piece, try to negotiate with him to bring me another piece, and then eventually give up.  Man, I would be quite the party spectacle!

I don't know that I don't ever want to bake again.  My granny's chocolate chip cookie recipe is a legacy!

I don't know that I don't ever want an ice cream after a long hot day in the field again.

I don't know that I want chia seeds on my daily yogurt instead of granola.

I don't know if I could ever enjoy my morning oatmeal without the teaspoon of brown sugar.

I don't know if I can resist the social pressure of people foisting sugar on me; noting that this IS the world we live in.  Dessert comes after dinner!

However.

I don't know if I want to ravage my body with this drug anymore.

I don't know if I want to die years earlier from the damage I've done to myself by eating so much sugar all the time.

I don't know if I want to develop type II diabetes when my body eventually gives up the good fight and can't regulate my insulin anymore.

I just don't know if I want to be ruled by something OTHER than my rational brain anymore.

To be continued....