Sugar Zen: Putting a Space Around Sugar by Joan Kent, PhD
Sugar Zen: Putting a Space Around Sugar
By Joan Kent, PhD
In the process of emptying files and file drawers recently, I unearthed several articles I’d written – and several that I’d read – quite a few years ago.
The idea for this post was prompted by the thoughts triggered by the combination of those old articles. For what it’s worth, none of the articles was about sugar!
How About Clean Plates and Other Myths?
During the office-clearing project, I found an article I had written about a book by Hirschman and Munter. They advocate 3 rules for approaching food whenever you feel like eating.
Rule 1: Ask yourself if you’re hungry.
The purpose of food is to fuel us when our bodies need it. That’s signaled by physical hunger. Asking this question over and over reinforces the critical connection between hunger and eating.
Rule 2: Ask yourself what you’re hungry for, what you feel like eating.
The idea is to tune in to what your body is telling you. This assumes that the body will know what it needs nutritionally. You can then choose in accordance with that.
Rule 3: Stop eating when you’ve had enough.
This also involves tuning in to what your body is telling you and recognizing the feeling of “comfortable fullness” as the right amount of food.
Take it from a sugar addiction expert: these 3 rules could easily backfire when it comes to sugar.
Why Don’t They Work When Sugar’s Involved?
First, clients who eat sugar frequently may not get hungry. As explained in a previous post, my research hasn’t yet uncovered a solid explanation for exactly why that is. Still, too many clients have described this phenomenon for me to think it’s not real.
These clients may even get symptoms (headaches, queasiness, and so on) instead of physical hunger. The symptoms can typically be traced back to low glucose.
Second, it’s not surprising that someone who’s hooked on sugar feels like eating sugar. Frequently.
How can it be helpful to tell someone who’s going through sugar withdrawal – which may include cravings – to tune in to the body and eat what she/he wants?
Third, the comfort stopping point works well only for those who tend to eat to fuel.
It’s not always easy to stop eating sugar at the comfort point if (and when) the client’s “relationship” with sugary foods is based on satisfying a craving or an addictive urge.
Athletic Training Theories Apply To Sugar Addiction?
My athletic coach used to say – among many other things – that the purpose of training is to bring consciousness to the process.
When athletes talked about the pain of athletic training, the coach would say that pain stimulates resistance. But through continued training – and by adding consciousness to it – our response to pain changes. We become nonreactive to it.
It doesn’t feel any better, he’d say. It just doesn’t bother us as much.
Once you remove an addictive substance, like sugar, from the diet, the body may start to display different signals. Hunger pangs may return – or show up for the first time – reflecting the body’s needs. Control over food may increase. Appetite may decrease. Awareness may increase and unconscious reactions decrease.
Significantly, over time, we become less and less reactive to external sugar triggers.
The triggers might include the sight of appetizing foods, the delicious smell of baking cookies – or even sounds that bring on cravings. For example, someone fond of candy might have been triggered in the past by the sound of someone unwrapping a candy bar. Once they’ve been “off” sugar for a while, that sound could become less automatic in triggering the desire to eat candy.
It’s not that the foods lose their appeal; it’s just that they bother us less.
These changes may take time, but staying off sugar long-term could be considered continued, long-term training.
What Athletics and Sugar Have In Common
Athletic performance triggers the ego. It brings forward conflict, discomfort, anxiety, self-defeating thoughts, and doubts about what’s possible and what’s not.
In athletics, you do what’s necessary. You have the above thoughts without reacting to them – and stay with the event. The athletic objective is to learn to be nonreactive to distractions, including pain.
Giving up sugar can also bring forward discomforts – such as withdrawal symptoms and cravings – plus the anxiety, doubts, and self-defeating thoughts that may go with them. None of them is permanent.
You do what’s necessary to eliminate them and stay with the plan.
One difference is that, in athletics, it helps not to derive an identity from your performance. That identity, my coach said, is just ego.
In contrast, I say, what’s good about going through the process of quitting sugar is the sense of 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 stop – deliberately, consciously – putting junk into your healthy body.
• People stop trying to get you to eat what you’d rather avoid.
• People stop giving you gifts of tempting sugary treats.
Again, it’s not that the foods don’t look appetizing or smell delicious. But they don’t bother us because we view them as something we simply 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 and many other books, talks about putting a space around thoughts, pain, memories – especially negative ones – by continuing to stay present in the moment.
Basically, that’s becoming nonreactive.
Once this addictive food – sugar – has been removed from your diet, the right foods you’ve added along the way can (and will) improve your focus. It’s brain chemistry. Meanwhile, a different brain chemical will put a space around what’s happening (and make you less reactive) by literally increasing the time between thought and action.
The non-reactivity holds true whether the trigger is external – seeing chocolate cake, smelling freshly baked cinnamon buns – or internal – having a small taste that triggers the desire for lots more.
I talk to my clients about eating to become stable. Stability applies to both brain chemistry and glucose.
When both are stable and even, you’re able to 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 food and sugar.
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Currently, there’s awareness that sugar sabotages health and causes several health, appetite and mood issues.
I’m passionate about helping you go beyond reacting to sugar, passionate about making quitting possible and easy, and passionate about helping you quit sugar so you can transform your health, your moods and more. Please visit the Home page and sign up for a free Food Breakthrough Session. No obligation! Coaching may be exactly what helps you quit sugar for good!