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I'd love to have some help with this. I was able to drop meat, most dairy, and salty junk food without problem. I eat plenty of green leafy vegetables. But sug

I'd love to have some help with this. I was able to drop meat, most dairy, and salty junk food without problem. I eat plenty of green leafy vegetables. But sugar. Fuuuck I cannot walk past sweets. Sugar has claws in me I cannot shake. I hope we someday understand that mechanism better, maybe enough to give me a little help.

csours 4y ago
I hear you. Controlling your food environment is so important. It's candy on desks season again. I can usually walk past the candy, but not always.
- drowsspa 4y ago
  Willpower is a finite resource indeed, you can't rely on that.
  - freddie_mercury 4y ago
    Current research suggests that willpower is not a finite research and "ego depletion" was a spurious finding. https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/how-do-you-know/202011/how-willpower-wasnt-the-truth-about-ego-depletion https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/how-do-you-know/2020...
    - csours 4y ago
      I think willpower is a description of the human experience. I don't know if it's a good mechanistic description or not. It does not seem to be taken seriously as a cause by many psychologists. Whatever you think of willpower, I think controlling the food environment (don't bring it home from the store, don't eat at restaurants with mainly junk food, etc) is the most effective intervention. After that, things like substitution, delay, smallest possible portion, and putting the tempting food in an inconvenient location may help.
    - drowsspa 4y ago
      Psychology research is all over the place. If they mean willpower as this general concept, then probably it's not a thing. But if you have junk food in your home some people (like myself) will eat it compulsively at some point.
  - pstuart 4y ago
    True, but it can be trained to a degree. If one can make it through the sugar detox phase then it's pretty easy because the cravings do go away. The other part is stress management; when something bad happens it's so tempting to say "fuck it, I deserve this <insert bad thing>". That's the harder part.
formerly_proven 4y ago
Sugar is unreasonably instantly addictive and harmful in relation to its abundant availability. More so than alcohol or tobacco.
leidenfrost 4y ago
Curiously I tried something similar yet opposite: I stopped eating junk food and I started eating more leafy vegetables, but also I stopped eating seed oils (except for olive oil and chia oil which is rich in omega3), and gave myself green light to eat whatever amount I want of foods rich in proteins and fats, as long as it's not ultra processed. To my surprise, my weight hasn't skyrocketed, I feel full way faster without having to exert loads of willpower to stop eating and my sugar cravings have reduced by a lot. Only from time to time I want to taste something sweet and even then I'm happy with just a green apple. Sugar is a drug and it messes with our satety hormones. No matter how much you eat, you end up always wanting more
- tsol 4y ago
  Having had a drug problem at one point and having learned well out to titrate off of drugs, I feel it's helped me a lot with sugar. They function basically the same. You don't need it, but if you take it you feel nice. You also will then crave more, and feel sick if you don't take it in. The key isn't to stop all at once but to slowly lower the amount you take in over time and let your body slowly adjust.
verisimi 4y ago
Don't drop salt, imo. It is essential for strong stomach acid (a whole system benefit), your body always ensures the salt level in the blood (and will even extract it from bones). Ask yourself - 'what is the most common medical intervention' and you will see it is a saline drip. And farmers ensure that salt is available to the their cattle for their health. And Japanese have a highly salty diet and live long, with fewer bone breaks. And, and.... Salt is essential, and a low salt diet is terrible. Then ask, why is a low salt diet recommended to people, if it is so good? The answer, sadly, is that the 'health' industry actually requires ill people - they make money treating disease, not from keeping people healthy. It is in the big pharma's interests to encourage poor behaviour, and, yes, they will even lobby governments to mandate behaviour that creates disease.
- InCityDreams 4y ago
  Don't drop sugar imo For all the similar reasons you gave, except - no sugar, no energy. You may wonder why a skinny af cyclist will happily consume 6k+ calories a day, as well as shovelling glucose gels down. Endurance athletes get it best: long distance cycling is just an all-day eating competition.
  - bluescrn 4y ago
    Most people on here are probably spending 10hrs/day in front of a screen, though. And in that case, more calories is unlikely to be the answer to a lack of energy/focus.
  - Telemakhos 4y ago
    Endurance athletes are getting frequent and strenuous exercise. Most people don't. There's a lot of concern and advice in this thread about diet, but exercising more is the step that's missing. We live in the hydrocarbon era of easy transport, which means cheap food and little exercise. Both of those have to be addressed for good health, not just the food.
  - adrian_b 4y ago
    The analogy between salt and sugar does not really work. Sugar is not an essential nutrient. You can eat absolutely no sugar without any ill effect. If you eat some starchy vegetables, that provides all the carbohydrates you need. Even if you want to eat 6000 kcal as carbohydrates, you can eat that easily from rice/maize/bread/potatoes etc., with no sugar. In fact it is much easier to eat a huge amount of food when it does not contain sugar, because even if sugar is addictive and makes you crave for it, when you eat too much sugar during a short time, it becomes disgusting when you try to eat more. On the other hand, if you stop eating salt, or even if you just eat too little salt, you will die soon, and not in a pleasant way (e.g. one of the symptoms of hyponatremia caused by eating too little salt is severe constipation, because various muscles, including the muscles that are used for the peristalsis of the intestines, lose their strength). Like for any essential nutrient, both eating too little salt and eating to much salt is bad. The recommended daily intake of salt is between 4 and 5 grams of salt. In order to be able to control precisely the daily intake of salt, I prefer to not add any salt to food during cooking (and I do not buy industrially made food). Instead of that, I add the salt only immediately prior to eating, so I can know exactly the amount added during a day.
asciimov 4y ago
Advice from a T2 Diabetic and regular Keto dieter. If you have never given up sugar before, it will take at least 6-8 weeks of non-use before the cravings go away. These will be some of the hardest weeks too. 1) everything has sugar in it, and you have to absolutely avoid it, not just sweets, fruits, juices, I'd even tell you diet drinks and artificial sweeteners too. That means no ketchup, sauces, breads, and most processed and store bought foods. 2) your body will do everything to remind you about those easy access sugars. During your detox, you will have cravings, dreams about sweets, even the overwhelming urge to eat stuff you might not even thing about "oh god, i could really go for some prunes right now" sort of thing. After your body gets it figured out that your no longer getting access to easy glucose it calms the hell down. You'll notice one day that sweets just don't seem that appealing. You'll get better at detecting sweetness in things you would have never considered sweet, like lettuce. I warn you sugar is insidious and everywhere. One day, you will sit down to some mundane meal, nothing special about it. After a few bites, you will say, wow this is wonderful, its the best thing I have ever tasted, I absolutely must have more of this very mundane thing, I'll need seconds, thirds, more if available. That meal you were eating was loaded down with sugar, it probably didn't taste sweet but it will taste like the best thing ever. That's how sugar gets you.
- oifjsidjf 4y ago
  I had the same experience when I tried keto. The first ~12 days were hell, as if the devil possesed me, that is how strong sugar addiction is. But then all of the sudden it was as if cravings reduced by 95% in just 24 hours around day ~12.
- omgwtf1000 4y ago
  I so want to do this, but I have such a sweet tooth I don’t think I can succeed. I can go a few days without sweets but then the urge is just overwhelming. I want to try weaning, by just eating fruit instead of processed treats. Will that have any effect at all, make it harder overall, or is the only way to just cut sugar completely?
  - maxk42 4y ago
    Merely tasting sweetness causes an anticipatory rise in insulin which shuts down fat metabolism. Best to go cold turkey, unfortunately. You can control cravings, however, by raising your fat intake to the point where you're too full to find eating more appetizing. You will still lose weight like this on a ketogenic diet.
deleted 4y ago
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deleted 4y ago
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huntertwo 4y ago
Maybe eat dairy and meat instead? These foods are less harmful to you and less likely to leave you hungry than sugar and processed foods.
- socialismisok 4y ago
  Meat is tricky. I won't support industrial meat production, that's a hard line for me. Finding local farmers to supply meat takes time. But yes, that's an approach I could take.
beebeepka 4y ago
Fruits and nuts. I used to consume about 1.5 litres of ice cream every day. I still get the cravings but less and less. Good thing my wife is making fruit salads for me.
hanniabu 4y ago
> But sugar. Fuuuck I cannot walk past sweets. Sugar has claws in me I cannot shake. Do you know how many calories you're getting from the healthy food? It's actually tough to maintain 2k calories while eating very healthy so your body will get cravings for candy which it knows is calorie dense.
- socialismisok 4y ago
  So, when I switched to keto and tracked everything I ate, you are absolutely correct. It's hard to eat enough calories some days. But when I'm not totally focused on eating clean, I will eat as much sugar as I can reach. Keto helps, but it's anything but automatic. (Especially around the holidays.)
ddorian43 4y ago
> I was able to drop meat, most dairy, and salty junk food without problem. You are doing this completely in reverse. You need to drop sugar & carbs. And eat fatty-meat/low-carb.
- socialismisok 4y ago
  No. I will not eat industrially produced meat. I dropped that a long time ago. Meat from local farmers with ethical practices is a sometimes food. Dairy is sugar... I'll have some cottage cheese or other cheeses. And salty junk food (chips, cheese crackers, etc) is almost always high carb.
  - ddorian43 4y ago
    Like Eminem said: Be smart, don't be a retard. See keto diet. (I do it and carnivore).

csours 4y ago

I hear you. Controlling your food environment is so important. It's candy on desks season again. I can usually walk past the candy, but not always.

drowsspa 4y ago
Willpower is a finite resource indeed, you can't rely on that.
- freddie_mercury 4y ago
  Current research suggests that willpower is not a finite research and "ego depletion" was a spurious finding. https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/how-do-you-know/202011/how-willpower-wasnt-the-truth-about-ego-depletion https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/how-do-you-know/2020...
  - csours 4y ago
    I think willpower is a description of the human experience. I don't know if it's a good mechanistic description or not. It does not seem to be taken seriously as a cause by many psychologists. Whatever you think of willpower, I think controlling the food environment (don't bring it home from the store, don't eat at restaurants with mainly junk food, etc) is the most effective intervention. After that, things like substitution, delay, smallest possible portion, and putting the tempting food in an inconvenient location may help.
  - drowsspa 4y ago
    Psychology research is all over the place. If they mean willpower as this general concept, then probably it's not a thing. But if you have junk food in your home some people (like myself) will eat it compulsively at some point.
- pstuart 4y ago
  True, but it can be trained to a degree. If one can make it through the sugar detox phase then it's pretty easy because the cravings do go away. The other part is stress management; when something bad happens it's so tempting to say "fuck it, I deserve this <insert bad thing>". That's the harder part.

formerly_proven 4y ago

Sugar is unreasonably instantly addictive and harmful in relation to its abundant availability. More so than alcohol or tobacco.

leidenfrost 4y ago

Curiously I tried something similar yet opposite: I stopped eating junk food and I started eating more leafy vegetables, but also I stopped eating seed oils (except for olive oil and chia oil which is rich in omega3), and gave myself green light to eat whatever amount I want of foods rich in proteins and fats, as long as it's not ultra processed. To my surprise, my weight hasn't skyrocketed, I feel full way faster without having to exert loads of willpower to stop eating and my sugar cravings have reduced by a lot. Only from time to time I want to taste something sweet and even then I'm happy with just a green apple. Sugar is a drug and it messes with our satety hormones. No matter how much you eat, you end up always wanting more

tsol 4y ago
Having had a drug problem at one point and having learned well out to titrate off of drugs, I feel it's helped me a lot with sugar. They function basically the same. You don't need it, but if you take it you feel nice. You also will then crave more, and feel sick if you don't take it in. The key isn't to stop all at once but to slowly lower the amount you take in over time and let your body slowly adjust.

verisimi 4y ago

Don't drop salt, imo. It is essential for strong stomach acid (a whole system benefit), your body always ensures the salt level in the blood (and will even extract it from bones). Ask yourself - 'what is the most common medical intervention' and you will see it is a saline drip. And farmers ensure that salt is available to the their cattle for their health. And Japanese have a highly salty diet and live long, with fewer bone breaks. And, and.... Salt is essential, and a low salt diet is terrible. Then ask, why is a low salt diet recommended to people, if it is so good? The answer, sadly, is that the 'health' industry actually requires ill people - they make money treating disease, not from keeping people healthy. It is in the big pharma's interests to encourage poor behaviour, and, yes, they will even lobby governments to mandate behaviour that creates disease.

InCityDreams 4y ago
Don't drop sugar imo For all the similar reasons you gave, except - no sugar, no energy. You may wonder why a skinny af cyclist will happily consume 6k+ calories a day, as well as shovelling glucose gels down. Endurance athletes get it best: long distance cycling is just an all-day eating competition.
- bluescrn 4y ago
  Most people on here are probably spending 10hrs/day in front of a screen, though. And in that case, more calories is unlikely to be the answer to a lack of energy/focus.
- Telemakhos 4y ago
  Endurance athletes are getting frequent and strenuous exercise. Most people don't. There's a lot of concern and advice in this thread about diet, but exercising more is the step that's missing. We live in the hydrocarbon era of easy transport, which means cheap food and little exercise. Both of those have to be addressed for good health, not just the food.
- adrian_b 4y ago
  The analogy between salt and sugar does not really work. Sugar is not an essential nutrient. You can eat absolutely no sugar without any ill effect. If you eat some starchy vegetables, that provides all the carbohydrates you need. Even if you want to eat 6000 kcal as carbohydrates, you can eat that easily from rice/maize/bread/potatoes etc., with no sugar. In fact it is much easier to eat a huge amount of food when it does not contain sugar, because even if sugar is addictive and makes you crave for it, when you eat too much sugar during a short time, it becomes disgusting when you try to eat more. On the other hand, if you stop eating salt, or even if you just eat too little salt, you will die soon, and not in a pleasant way (e.g. one of the symptoms of hyponatremia caused by eating too little salt is severe constipation, because various muscles, including the muscles that are used for the peristalsis of the intestines, lose their strength). Like for any essential nutrient, both eating too little salt and eating to much salt is bad. The recommended daily intake of salt is between 4 and 5 grams of salt. In order to be able to control precisely the daily intake of salt, I prefer to not add any salt to food during cooking (and I do not buy industrially made food). Instead of that, I add the salt only immediately prior to eating, so I can know exactly the amount added during a day.

asciimov 4y ago

Advice from a T2 Diabetic and regular Keto dieter. If you have never given up sugar before, it will take at least 6-8 weeks of non-use before the cravings go away. These will be some of the hardest weeks too. 1) everything has sugar in it, and you have to absolutely avoid it, not just sweets, fruits, juices, I'd even tell you diet drinks and artificial sweeteners too. That means no ketchup, sauces, breads, and most processed and store bought foods. 2) your body will do everything to remind you about those easy access sugars. During your detox, you will have cravings, dreams about sweets, even the overwhelming urge to eat stuff you might not even thing about "oh god, i could really go for some prunes right now" sort of thing. After your body gets it figured out that your no longer getting access to easy glucose it calms the hell down. You'll notice one day that sweets just don't seem that appealing. You'll get better at detecting sweetness in things you would have never considered sweet, like lettuce. I warn you sugar is insidious and everywhere. One day, you will sit down to some mundane meal, nothing special about it. After a few bites, you will say, wow this is wonderful, its the best thing I have ever tasted, I absolutely must have more of this very mundane thing, I'll need seconds, thirds, more if available. That meal you were eating was loaded down with sugar, it probably didn't taste sweet but it will taste like the best thing ever. That's how sugar gets you.

oifjsidjf 4y ago
I had the same experience when I tried keto. The first ~12 days were hell, as if the devil possesed me, that is how strong sugar addiction is. But then all of the sudden it was as if cravings reduced by 95% in just 24 hours around day ~12.
omgwtf1000 4y ago
I so want to do this, but I have such a sweet tooth I don’t think I can succeed. I can go a few days without sweets but then the urge is just overwhelming. I want to try weaning, by just eating fruit instead of processed treats. Will that have any effect at all, make it harder overall, or is the only way to just cut sugar completely?
- maxk42 4y ago
  Merely tasting sweetness causes an anticipatory rise in insulin which shuts down fat metabolism. Best to go cold turkey, unfortunately. You can control cravings, however, by raising your fat intake to the point where you're too full to find eating more appetizing. You will still lose weight like this on a ketogenic diet.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

huntertwo 4y ago

Maybe eat dairy and meat instead? These foods are less harmful to you and less likely to leave you hungry than sugar and processed foods.

socialismisok 4y ago
Meat is tricky. I won't support industrial meat production, that's a hard line for me. Finding local farmers to supply meat takes time. But yes, that's an approach I could take.

beebeepka 4y ago

Fruits and nuts. I used to consume about 1.5 litres of ice cream every day. I still get the cravings but less and less. Good thing my wife is making fruit salads for me.

hanniabu 4y ago

> But sugar. Fuuuck I cannot walk past sweets. Sugar has claws in me I cannot shake. Do you know how many calories you're getting from the healthy food? It's actually tough to maintain 2k calories while eating very healthy so your body will get cravings for candy which it knows is calorie dense.

socialismisok 4y ago
So, when I switched to keto and tracked everything I ate, you are absolutely correct. It's hard to eat enough calories some days. But when I'm not totally focused on eating clean, I will eat as much sugar as I can reach. Keto helps, but it's anything but automatic. (Especially around the holidays.)

ddorian43 4y ago

> I was able to drop meat, most dairy, and salty junk food without problem. You are doing this completely in reverse. You need to drop sugar & carbs. And eat fatty-meat/low-carb.

socialismisok 4y ago
No. I will not eat industrially produced meat. I dropped that a long time ago. Meat from local farmers with ethical practices is a sometimes food. Dairy is sugar... I'll have some cottage cheese or other cheeses. And salty junk food (chips, cheese crackers, etc) is almost always high carb.
- ddorian43 4y ago
  Like Eminem said: Be smart, don't be a retard. See keto diet. (I do it and carnivore).