[Closed] Sugar - why is it so bloody hard to give up?

It's a drug, and more addictive than cocaine. Realise the fact it's a legitimate addiction and you can start to create a treatment plan to get off it (as someone who has the same addiction - actual addiction)

https://www.theguardian.com/society/2017/aug/25/is-sugar-really-as-addictive-as-cocaine-scientists-row-over-effect-on-body-and-brain

"Ziauddeen added that it was not surprising that even rats hooked on cocaine might prefer sugar, pointing out that many animals would naturally look for sweet things, not cocaine."

Lindt white chocolate is devine. I can make a £2 bar last a week as it's super creamy and very sweet.

Quality over quantity.

Is it the sugar you crave or the fat?

It’s a drug, and more addictive than cocaine.

... Sugar and Hookers from now on then....

Sugar and Hookers from now on then….

I'm not sharing my chocolate, not with no one! Even if they do that thing.....

Red wine and long ago cigarettes but no problems giving up sugar.

I can't give it up mate. I tried a few years ago and had a month where I massively cut down and the cravings went but now I'm back on it

I have to have something sweet after every meal otherwise I don't function. I sometimes try and have a square of dark chocolate after a meal amd that's it but it's like cold turkey. I soon succumb

[url= https://i.postimg.cc/0Nk9bJsh/CFe-CW6-JWEAEQaz-T-1.jp g" target="_blank">https://i.postimg.cc/0Nk9bJsh/CFe-CW6-JWEAEQaz-T-1.jp g"/> [/img][/url]

Anyone who can eat a Toblerone like that is a ****ing monster.

Another addict here, I’m trying to just get my hit through fruit.

It's a bit like freebasing coke into crack.

Your seriously better off getting a posher type of chocolate as you'll only need a little nibble rather than doing a whole bar.

It’s impossible to have a bar of chocolate and not eat it all in one go

Part of the problem is that it's in everything, and for those of us with addictive personalities, a little bit here and there always leads to craving more.

For me personally, it's all or nothing. If I remove all refined sugar from my diet I'm fine after the initial trauma. In fact sugar starts to taste really weird when you do have it. But you need to read the ingredients when you're shopping. The amount of crap in most of our food is bonkers.

I have to have something sweet after every meal otherwise I don’t function.

Same here. No idea why as it didn't used to be the case.

But you need to read the ingredients when you’re shopping. The amount of crap in most of our food is bonkers

Indeed. We're doing a trial at work and a savory blend we demo'd today is 5% brown sugar and 22% icing sugar.

I can't eat added sugar, or drinks like coke, tastes horrible, and aspartame makes me gag, no sugar in the house, and the same applies to all foods, anything with too much sugar I find inedible, truly disgusting, icing sugar makes me puke, ok with chocolate and decent ice cream but then avoid sweet things for about a week.

Why is that?

I tend to dash sugar when I am a bit depressed or anxious.

After finally getting some help this year I was given a tip to take one bite of something* and seriously think about it, taste, texture and how it feel. Then after 4 do it again and see how these things have changed.

Its quite effective for me and whats interesting is that sweeties and crisps and chocolate fall away very quickly and I can stop where as fruit, especially apples barely drops away.

Not saying it always works but today I only had a large bar of galaxy, one small can of coke and stopped half way through a family bag of fruit gums.

Didn't even open the chorizo crisps!

*not just bad foods but the good ones too.

Is your issue sugar or chocolate?

Sugar = buy sugar-free drinks and sweeteners. It'll taste like shit for about a fortnight and then you'll never notice the difference again.

Chocolate = buy decent quality dark chocolate. You'll get through a square of 80% in the time it would have taken you to drop a four-pack of Mars bars.

There's a big basket in a cupboard in our kitchen at work, that gets filled about once a week with insane amounts of cheap chocolate bars. It's so hard to resist. I'm really working on it at the moment, and I have to just completely ignore the cupboard as even opening it means I start eating. On the upside, I'm losing a pound every week or two at the moment.

I have wondered about the psychological effects of eating one chocolate bar - once you've cracked, do people tend to just keep eating the stuff? I've even had ideas about running an experiment on my colleagues, where I count the number of chocolate bars eaten if I leave a load out in a bowl compared to just having them in all hidden in the cupboard. Probably ethically dubious though...

I do have an addictive personality, and this is the latest in a series of attempts I'm making to get aspects of my life under control.

It’ll taste like shit for about a fortnight and then you’ll never notice the difference again.

Sorry cougar but that's horse shit. I have become accustomed to the taste now but only as a compromise. Sugar free drinks do not taste anywhere near as nice as the real deal*

*except irn bru which tastes so rank anyway I'd rather have the diet.

#imdeadtoscotland.

There is also definitely something to buying much higher-quality desserts though. Nice (and expensive) chocolate and cakes are delicious and satisfying because they use high-quality ingredients. Cheap stuff is unsatisfying by design. It's specifically designed to be tasty but ultimately unsatisfying, so you eat more. You can do a lot with cheap ingredients and a careful selection of cheap chemicals/processes.

Is it the sugar you crave or the fat?

Breast milk is apparently the only food in nature that combines both. So try imagining that chocolate, ice cream etc is essentially breast milk. Maybe that helps?

I got concerned about my sweet tooth a couple of years ago. I found i just couldn't help myself and I'd make excuses like i'd been exercising a lot.

Weirdly enough I was able to quit really easily. It helps that my wife is a legend at this kind of thing. Wwapping it out for unrefined equivalents that have a lot of fibre - fruit, fresh and dried - really helps. After a year or so I succumbed to eating it again in moderation but I don't crave it as much or get carried away.

80% dark chocolate?
Pffft.
Move onto 100% or cooking chocolate - should put you off the stuff for ever.
Having said that, in cooking...

Sorry cougar but that’s horse shit.

Well, no, it's a difference of opinions and experiences.

Cougar
Full Member
Is your issue sugar or chocolate?

Sugar = buy sugar-free drinks and sweeteners. It’ll taste like shit for about a fortnight and then you’ll never notice the difference again.

Chocolate = buy decent quality dark chocolate. You’ll get through a square of 80% in the time it would have taken you to drop a four-pack of Mars bars.

Mainly its chocolate and sweets, oh and cake. I don't eat loads but as soon as i see a cake or any of my other poisons the switch in my brain goes into hyperdrive.

It just screams at me. Eat , eat , eat. 🙂

80% dark chocolate?
Pffft.

Honestly, I worries I'd gone in too high. Trying to wean the OP off chocolate, the opening gambit isn't "have you considered heroin?"

Like the sugar-free stuff, darker chocolate is an acquired taste if your starting point is Milky Bars and Creme Eggs.

Mainly its chocolate and sweets, oh and cake.

I appreciate this is harder than it sounds but the flippant yet 100% effective answer is, stop buying it.

More realistically: if you want sweets, you don't have to buy a kilo at a time. Or if you are buying [food] in bulk then plate it out when you want some. Faced with a packet of Jaffa Cakes I will totally trough the lot; throw three on a plate and the rest back in the cupboard and I'll have three and the itch is scratched. I do this with "sharing" bags of crisps, it's much easier to stop when a bowl is empty. You (probably) wouldn't swig wine out of the bottle, same idea, decant it out and walk away.

Breast milk is apparently the only food in nature that combines both

And no coincidence that the most popular foods are exactly the same combination of 50% sugar and 50% fat, Ice cream, chocolate, macaroni cheese etc.

Ok, here goes...

What is needed is a hard reset, no excuse for a dependency on a bad diet, not having this namby pamby stuff, body needs a clean out and adjustment to real food, no soft solutions here it's time for...the starvation diet.

Which is nothing really to do with starvation before anyone freaks out and dies just on the thought of it, it's just a thing that lets your body adjust to what humans are designed to eat, essentially you stop eating meals(these regulate your current diet so need to stop) and you graze pretty much constantly, nuts and tomatoes and anything healthy, you do this for about 3 days or so, as much as you want as long as it's not all in one big meal shaped lump.

After 3 days you start craving things, and should, this is your body telling you what you are deficient in, I craved tomatoes and ate them by the pound, this is the hard stage but it doesn't last long, the psychological need to eat full meals passes strangely quick, couple of weeks later try eating crap, your body will reject it...just happens, body is reset and doesn't need sugar if you eat the right things, I ate a whole cucumber, like a banana, if this sounds odd think about which is more natural..a can of dissolved sugar and flavouring or a vegetable?

Edit: sorry got carried away there and forgot the actual point of it, the whole thing here is reverting your body to how humans evolved to eat, early humans didn't eat 3 meals a day, their gut developed to digest smaller amounts of fresher food and digest it faster, hence why we struggle with distended bellies today, and so on, all apparently, but to me it makes sense,

There is more, you have dramatically more energy when you digest smaller amounts of food more consistently, you are no longer using all of your energy immediately after a bloat to digest it, and it is much easier for your body to use it's own fat stores for energy which is losing the lumps.

... so do you then just carry on not eating meals?

FWIW my youngest son regularly eats whole cucumbers. My boys have always been grazers and madly devour fruit over cake. I'm pretty jealous.

Cougar, yea i know the only way to stop is to not have any in my eyeline. Ever 🙂

My post was more of an observation really as i am in work tonight and found myself chomping into a big lump of chocolate again. I've known that at times i can go overboard, i'm just amazed at how certain chemicals can really grab a hold of you.

… so do you then just carry on not eating meals?

My experience was you don't really want them as much, I guess the practicality of that works differently for everyone, but the potions shrink by a scary margin, I eat way less than I used to in total, apparently this is normal as we get older but some want to keep eating teenage amounts of food after we stop growing.

It’s impossible to have a bar of chocolate and not eat it all in one go

^ Me 6 months ago (and the preceding 30 years)

Disagree now, as in April I decided to kick the sugar-addiction (chips or chocolate were the main culprits) so tried 100% then settled on 85% dark chocolate (the Lidl one I like the best) and happy with 1 x or 1.5 x square a day. The taste is amazing, really intense and satisfying, dense, complex. Easy to savour it. But it isn’t addictive in an ’empty’ fashion like the family sized bars of Galaxy or Dairy Milk etc that I used to inhale.

That’s my 2pence worth on chocolate,

The chips are proving the more difficult challenge by far.

Sugar-free (isomalt) rhubarb and custard or fruit drops also serve as a midday or late evening diversion if I start getting edgy for something sweet and tasty. It works for me. As does fruit if I’m honest. But fruit doesn’t have that ‘naughty’ feel about it. It’s (like dark chocolate square) a ‘grown-up’ treat.

When I first confronted that concept it struck me as odd how we readily infantilise ourselves around the issue of sugar-addiction. Almost treating the condition as if it is somehow ‘cute’ and attractive. Like overgrown school-kids performing an affected little panto for the promise of pudding. It’s a bit weird tbh, when viewed in full light. I see it all the time in my family who are variously diabetic, obese, and all sugar-addicts. The familial attitude around sugar is titter oo naughty me, just the one then, oh go on two…well what’s life without a little treat (and a cupboard full of biscuits, crisps and chocolate)

Argh. It’s tough when it’s been ingrained from a young age, no denying it.

Now just find I have to have the ‘grow the **** up’ talk with self and grab an apple or banana. The odd Freddo frog or scoop of ice cream once a blue moon is now achieved and I don’t want to eat it all. I actually just want the dark choc square of an evening, along with a decaff coffee.

Thanks @espressoal

As you get older the dietitians recommend reducing calories, but increasing the balance of protein to carbs.

I'm hitting mid-40s and fractionally lighter than I was when i was 18. Still probably eat a similar amount ... maybe 10 pints less beer a week though! I'd love to lose 5kg but I think that childhood drumming about not leaving the table until everything has gone has left me with a fear of going hungry, so i'm always having something extra that i probably don't need.

Actually, if i think about it on weekdays i tend to graze more while i'm at work, until the evening when i have a big meal. I have a reputation at work for appearing to always be eating 🙁 but it's almost always unprocessed foods at least. At the weekends i'm on the move so tend to stop to eat

I am in a phase of trying to cut it out but ever since I was 4 I loved sweets, spent pocket money on sweets and eat just as many now (at 53).
As others, I gave up smoking (20+ a day for 10 years) easily once I decided to give up but can't ever completely stop eating sweets.

I have lost 5kg recently, still want/need to lose another 5kg.

I have to go cold Turkey with sweets, cake, choc. Moderation does not work for me.

Watch out for high sugar foods that might be keeping your addiction going like muesli, sugary yoghurt etc.

I find it easier to stick to a good diet if I am exercising regularly ie "you've been for a run don't **** it up with that cheesecake"

**** sweeteners, you need to get away from having a sweet tooth.

As some who is totally hooked in the stuff, they only way I have found to ease it is in the shops/ supermarket.

If it's not in the house I can't eat it.

Or cookie mix, if you want something sweet you have to put the time in to actually bake it.

# looks on mirror still a stone over weight, might have start again.

Well, no, it’s a difference of opinions and experiences.

Yes but its a really really big difference of opinion that cordial debate will not cover.

I put it to you that you are a liar liar and that your undergarments are ablaze.

What helped me...

1. Ease up on yourself. Food companies know way more about food composition that you will ever do, and they do it on purpose so you buy their crap. It's not you, it's them.

2. the sweeties and all that crap? If you really want to cut it out, stop buying it and don't have it in the house. If you have to go out to the all night petrol station to get a fix, if you're a lazy arse like me, the chances are you won't go

3. Try not to buy food with added sugar in it. This is the moment you become one of those weirdos in the supermarket staring at the label of everything

4. cook most of your food from scratch with ingredients.

5. Don't kill yourself if you fall off the wagon or feel bad about yourself if you have a Twix on the 4th day of your new regime. You're a human not a robot. Just start again. most of us fail before we succeed etc etc.

6. drink lots of water.

7. Exercise, you get endorphins as a reward, almost as good as the sugar high.

Or something like that...

*except irn bru which tastes so rank anyway I’d rather have the diet.

#imdeadtoscotland.

I'm with ye mate, it's rank! 🤣

^ What nickc said.

buy sugar-free drinks and sweeteners.

I'm no nutritional expert but I believe the link between obesity and sweeteners is well documented, the reason being that it induces sugar cravings. If you're trying to break that cycle, replacing sugar with highly concentrated, synthetic equivalents is probably not the best way to go about it.

For anyone trying to use less in tea/coffee, buy sugar cubes.

Standardised amount (and far less than most folk have when using loose sugar and a teaspoon).

@MoreCashThanDash no need to share, coat hookers in chocolate of choice and get going.

For those that want to put sweetener in drinks or baking, then Stevia is meant to be the best alternative without the alleged side effects of other sweeteners. iirc it is basically the same chemical composition as sugar with the opposite helical structure, leading it to have the same effect on the sweet sensors but not absorbed by the body.

It is a shame the fizzy drinks and food industries haven't adopted it to a much greater degree.

I rarely drink fizzy pop, and can't deal with the aftertaste of sweeteners, so I've been using honey in my tea instead of sugar. I now find that if I have a cuppa somewhere that doesn't have honey I'll use barely any sugar at all. Baby steps and all that..

Stevia is meant to be the best alternative without the alleged side effects of other sweeteners

I used to buy the Cologran Stevia powder from Lidl in a 75g tub for a quid something. It was handy to make homemade cakes and desserts, ie rice pud etc.

Then they stopped stocking it. Looking online it seems ‘actual’ Stevia powder is at least 2x-3x more expensive than what I’d been buying. So I looked further into the Lidl Cologran Stevia powder and seems it’s 98% Maltodextrin.

Has to be one of the most misleadingly-packaged items I’ve seen:

Now sweeten porridge with whatever fruit we have in. Usually (diced) apple. Good crop of raspberries this year and discovered that raspberries in porridge is lush.

@MoreCashThanDash no need to share, coat hookers in chocolate of choice and get going

Always someone on this forum with a solution....👍

For anyone trying to use less in tea/coffee, buy sugar cubes.

Standardised amount

If it's a standard amount you're never going to less than 'one' though.

What I did was taper off. I used to take two heaped teaspoons in both tea and coffee. Over time I went to less heaped spoons, to one and a half, to one... Today I find sugar in tea to be spit-across-the-room disgusting, it's rank. Coffee I still have half a spoonful, but I've mostly switched to granulated sweeteners (the little tablets are too much).

Thinking about it, I have very little refined sugar any more. I'll have the odd chocolate bar occasionally, usually if I'm out and about and have missed a meal. Even then I'll often pick a flapjack or similar. I still have an untouched Easter egg in the cupboard, that'll probably last me till Christmas.

I used to get kilo tubs of Haribo and nip a few occasionally but since inheriting a brace of 20-somethings in the house I gave up even doing that because they get through an astonishing and frankly scary amount of sugar. Non-stop sweets, cake, chocolate, they drink full fat pop like it's... uh, pop. They're surely on a fast-track to diabetes and no teeth in their heads. Bringing more sweets into the house would be a ludicrous thing to do because there's never the remotest chance of a shortage and they'd probably scoff it before I got a look-in anyway.

Evil stuff and it irks me that it's the norm. Buying a drink in smaller shops especially, you've often to really hunt for something that isn't laden with sugar. Looks like I'll be paying twice the price of petrol for a bottle of something that's literally fallen out of the sky, then.

So I looked further into the Cologran Stevia powder and seems it’s 98% Maltodextrin. So why doesn’t say MALTODEXTRIN on the front instead of STEVIA?

The problem is, most sweeteners are really strong compared to sugar. It's bulked out, well, yes, because it's probably cheaper, but so that you can use it like granulated sugar. 2% Stevia in that tub there, if it was neat you'd have to measure out 1/50th of a teaspoon. You probably wouldn't want to pop one of those little Hermesetas tablets on your cornflakes.

Always someone on this forum with a solution….👍

Cost Cutters, was that supposed to be?

Bulked out with....

Maltodextrin has 4 calories per gram — the same amount of calories as sucrose, or table sugar.

Now sweeten porridge with whatever fruit we have in

Porridge tastes better with a pinch of salt rather than a pinch of sugar.

Irn Bru however needs to be the traditional sugared recipe to retain its hangover curing properties.

Im in the same boat, trying to cut down as i found myself eating a lot of stuff with sugar, breakfast was porridge with sugar on top, possibly a banana.
3 bits of fruit a day as snacks, then normally a big choccy bar or bag of sweets like fruit gums in the evening, not your normal small bars a proper big bar/bag meant to "share".

Ironically i cant stand fizzy drinks unless theres booze in it, but thats a different hurdle for a different time.

I cant go cold turkey, so started by just having plain porridge in the morning and treat myself once a week to a bit of sugar added, swapped a couple of peices of fruit a day for two boiled eggs with a pinch of salt.

And slowly cutting down to one evening a week where i allow myself to have a chocolate bar/bag of sweets, usually a friday.

Going well so far and by not cutting it out altogether means that my brain doesnt go all out craving it all the time.

Ironically i cant stand fizzy drinks unless theres booze in it

Ice cold FLAT diet pepsi and vodka. Remarkably good.

No no no, after some really sensible advice from loads of people the creep is creeping back, face it, if you need to sweeten it there is something wrong with the thing you are eating..or you, there is something wrong with your taste buds, when you stop eating sugar you don't die, or feel pain, you just change and then when used to it sugar tastes horrible...this is you tasting it properly for the first time.

Sweeteners are like vaping, an artificial substitute that poisons you in a slightly different way while you pander to your childhood craving, it can be different, you can be free, have a six pack and wear those jeans you can't put out on the washing line without sunbathers wondering what blocked out the sun, you can do this people(my boss actually said that once) (actually ex boss, turned out he couldn't do it) it's time for the change, more energy and less waistline awaits, and all you have to do is nothing, less than not doing something, just don't put it in, save yourself 99p or whatever sugar costs(the shame of knowing that eh?) and discover if you actually like the taste of normal tea and coffee or if you are just drinking it as an Iron Bru substitute.

It's time people, you know and that is why you are here, this is the push you need, you can do it and you are worth it.

dcwhite1984 - Im in the same boat, trying to cut down as i found myself eating a lot of stuff with sugar, breakfast was porridge with sugar on top, possibly a banana.
3 bits of fruit a day as snacks, then normally a big choccy bar or bag of sweets like fruit gums in the evening, not your normal small bars a proper big bar/bag meant to “share”.

Ironically i cant stand fizzy drinks unless theres booze in it, but thats a different hurdle for a different time.

I cant go cold turkey, so started by just having plain porridge in the morning and treat myself once a week to a bit of sugar added, swapped a couple of peices of fruit a day for two boiled eggs with a pinch of salt
And slowly cutting down to one evening a week where i allow myself to have a chocolate bar/bag of sweets, usually a friday.
Going well so far and by not cutting it out altogether means that my brain doesnt go all out craving it all the time.

Switch out 'sugar' for heroin and this reads strangely normally like a well managed substance abuse situation.

 

swapped a couple of peices of fruit a day for two boiled eggs with a pinch of salt.

There's nothing wrong with eating fruit. You are an animal that's literally designed to run on eating fruit and veg. The sugar in veg and fruit while being the same thing chemically, as processed sugar is not treated in the same way as added sugar in your body. That's because of the way sugar is contained in fruit and how it's processed by your liver, and the fact that it's almost impossible to eat sufficient fruit to do you significant harm.

The sugar you need to cut from your diet is the added sugar, put there by processing, or by you throwing refined sugar on your cereal or tea. Naturally occurring sugar is just fine, even to the point of the dried fruit in your muesli, or adding a banana to your porridge, these aren't going to do you any significant harm and can stop you going mental.

Just cut back on Mr Kipling, Coke/pepsi,  Twix/mars/Snickers/Tangfastics, and the all the rest of the processed shit.

Whittle one of your fillings out, jobs a good en.

an artificial substitute that poisons you in a slightly different way

Everything else you said I agree with, but this is nonsense.

exactly what nickc says.

"4. cook most of your food from scratch with ingredients."

I'd agree this is a great way to tackle it. Start here and GET to dealing with sugary bits. But start here. The *slow* buildup of GREAT habits is the only real path to lasting change

I often find when you muscle in good habits, it leaves less and less room for the bad ones. Rather than you having to tackle the bad habits face-on, then to be left with only average habits to then deal with, if ygm..

Some good advice here, IMHO:

The *slow* buildup of GREAT habits is the only real path to lasting change

I often find when you muscle in good habits, it leaves less and less room for the bad ones. Rather than you having to tackle the bad habits face-on, then to be left with only average habits to then deal with, if ygm..

+100

I cant go cold turkey, so started by just having plain porridge in the morning

For me that is cold turkey! I started putting chopped apple in my porridge oats, with a very small pinch of salt. Now will add any fruit going. I don’t see an apple or banana or some berries every day as a bad thing.