What Sugar and Athletics Have in Common by Joan Kent, PhD
Athletic performance brings out conflict, discomfort, anxiety, self-defeating thoughts, and doubts about what’s possible and what’s not.
In athletics, you do what’s necessary. You experience these things without reacting to them — you stay with the event. The objective is to learn to be nonreactive to distractions, including pain.
Quitting sugar can also bring out discomfort — withdrawal symptoms and cravings — plus anxiety, doubts, and self-defeating thoughts. None of them is permanent.
You do what’s necessary to eliminate them, and you stay with the plan.
One difference is this. In athletics, it helps not to identify with your performance. That identification, my coach said, is just ego.
In contrast, I say what’s good about quitting sugar is the identity you develop when you do it. Your identity shifts.
You become The Person Who Doesn’t Eat Sugar, and things change.
• You stop finding sugary foods tempting. You know they’re Not Food.
• You deliberately, consciously stop putting junk into your healthy body.
• People stop trying to get you to eat junk.
• People stop giving you gifts of tempting, sugary treats.
It’s not that the foods don’t look appetizing or smell delicious. But they don’t bother us because we see them as things we don’t eat.
They’re no longer who we are.
Brain Chemistry Puts a Space Around Sugar
Eckhart Tolle, who wrote The Power of Now, talks about “putting a space around” thoughts, pain, memories — especially negative ones — by staying present in the moment.
Basically, that’s becoming nonreactive.
Once this addictive food, sugar, is removed from your diet, the right foods you’ve added along the way can and will enhance dopamine and improve your focus. It’s brain chem.
Meanwhile, increased serotonin will “put a space around” what’s happening — and make you less reactive — by literally increasing the time between thought and action.
That non-reactivity holds true whether the trigger is external — seeing chocolate cake, smelling fresh cinnamon buns baking — or internal — having a small taste that triggers the desire for lots more.
I talk to my clients about eating to stabilize both brain chemistry and glucose.
When both are stable and even, you can make decisions about food, instead of reacting to every treat you see.
You make decisions, instead of succumbing to the urge to eat what you know won’t do you good, just because you can’t resist. Or think you have “decision-making fatigue.”
Once my clients are stable, I know they’re on the ‘Zen path’ to making clear decisions about sugar and food.
And now I’d like to invite you to discover how small changes in your food can transform your health, control your appetite, and boost your mood. Just visit LastResortNutrition.com and grab your free Food, Health and Mood consult. See how easy it is to start feeling fantastic!
Brought to you by Dr. Joan Kent, best-selling author of Stronger Than Sugar.
