Breaking a Sugar Addiction (Part 1)
Giving up smoking is dead easy. I bet that got some ex-smokers’ attention.
A smoker is addicted to nicotine. Nicotine is found in cigarettes, cigars, tobacco, nicorettes and insecticide. It’s not the kind of thing you’re likely to come across by accident. In fact anyone consuming it, is doing so very much on purpose.
If you decide that you no longer wish to be addicted to nicotine, there is a very short list of things you should stop doing:
- Do not put cigarette in mouth.
- If you discover a cigarette in your mouth do not light it.
- Do not drink insecticide.
There. Done. Now you just need to wait about three weeks for the addiction to pass. Easy.
A Sugarer (the collective noun for people addicted to Sugar – and yes I did just make that up) has a much more daunting task ahead of them.
The active ingredient (from an addiction point of view) in sugar is fructose. Thanks to the marvels of modern food production, fructose is now embedded in almost every single food item on the supermarket shelf. Imagine how hard it would be stop smoking if everything you ate or drank contained the addictive ingredient.
Giving up fructose is far harder than giving up nicotine. You still have an addiction to fight but before you even get that far you’ve got to pick your way through a minefield of fructose filled foods. But there are some big food groups that anyone giving up fructose should absolutely avoid. They are:
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Confectionary and Bikkies (I know you knew that already but just in case you forgot
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Flavoured drinks (Not just softdrinks. This includes juice and flavoured milk)
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Breakfast cereals
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Condiments (For example BBQ sauce has more sugar than chocolate sauce)
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Muesli Bars
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Yoghurts
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And anything you add table sugar/honey/fruit juice concentrate/ rice syrup/agave syrup etc to..........................tea, coffee, baking. If sweetener absolutely required, try a small amount of glucose powder (sold as Glucodin in the pharmacy) or experiment with whey protein concentrate in baking!
Avoid those foods and you will have skipped 90% of the fructose you are likely to encounter in a day. Obviously there are exceptions. For example you can eat natural yoghurt (but you’d better get used to the sour taste) and you can eat porridge and most other unflavoured oat cereals. But it’s better to avoid the whole category to start with and then fine tune your selections once you become a little more experienced as a fructophobe (yep, another made up word).
Part 2 - Why Willpower is not required (Members only)
Part 3 - Thinking about addiction the right way (Members only)
Part 4 - Overcoming Temptation (Members only)
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