What Sugar Addicts Can Learn from Athletes by Joan Kent, PhD
Athletic performance brings up conflict: discomfort, anxiety, self-defeating thoughts, doubts about what’s possible and what’s not.
In athletics, you do what’s necessary to stay with the event. You have the thoughts but learn to be nonreactive to those distractions – and to pain.
Giving up sugar can also bring up discomfort – withdrawal symptoms and cravings – along with anxiety, self-defeating thoughts and doubts. None of these is permanent.
You do what’s necessary to stay with the plan. And you become nonreactive.
But Here’s an Important Difference
In athletics, it helps not to derive an identity from your performance. Identifying with your performance, my coach said, is just ego.
When it comes to sugar, however, I say the shift in your identity is what’s good about going through the process of quitting. You develop a new identity.
You become The Person Who Doesn’t Eat Sugar, and things change.
- You no longer find sugary foods tempting. You know they’re Not Food.
- You deliberately and consciously stop putting junk into your healthy body.
- People stop giving you gifts of tempting, sugary treats.
- People stop trying to lure you with junk you’d rather avoid.
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. We become nonreactive.
Sugary foods are no longer who we are.
Brain Chemistry Puts a Space Around Sugar
Eckhart Tolle, who wrote The Power of Now and several 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 healthful foods you’ve added along the way can, and will, enhance the brain chemical dopamine and improve your focus.
Meanwhile, enhanced serotonin will put a space around what’s happening. Serotonin makes us less reactive by literally increasing the time between thought and action.
The Zen of Sugar
The non-reactivity holds true whether the trigger is external (seeing chocolate cake, smelling freshly baked cinnamon buns) or internal (tasting a small amount, which triggers the desire for lots more).
My clients learn to eat for stability. It applies to both brain chemistry and blood glucose.
When brain chem and glucose are stable, you can make decisions about food, instead of reacting to every treat you see.
You make decisions, instead of succumbing to junk just because you can’t resist. Or you think you have “decision-making fatigue.” Or you feel as if you’re “running out” of willpower.
Once my clients are stable, I know they’re on the Zen path to making clear decisions about food and sugar.
Sugar sabotages health and causes several health, appetite and mood issues. I’m passionate about making it simple to quit so you can transform your health, your moods and more. Just visit LastResortNutrition.com and grab your free Craving Crusher Consult. Find out how easy and effective it can be to put a space around sugar.
Brought to you by Dr. Joan Kent, best-selling author of Stronger Than Sugar: 7 Simple Steps to Defeat Sugar Addiction, Lift Your Mood, and Transform Your Health.
