advice on quitting sugar

[Vedius Pollio]

Basically, I want to lead a cleaner existence now that it's my Honours year, and I've decided to do three things:

1. Quit sugar.
2. Stay clear of caffeine for a while.
3. Excercise more.

The first thing I want to do is quit sugar. Any advice on how to do it?

I read somewhere that sugar addiction is about as hard to kick as cocaine addiction (but, obviously, most people are perfectly happy to be constantly addicted to sugar and never bother quitting).

[Vedius Pollio]

Also, I found a whole bunch of articles which claim that sugar affects the brain's mu-opioid receptors in a similar way to hard drugs:

"Recent behavioral tests in rats further back the idea of an overlap between sweets and drugs. Drug addiction often includes three steps. A person will increase his intake of the drug, experience withdrawal symptoms when access to the drug is cut off and then face an urge to relapse back into drug use. Rats on sugar have similar experiences. Researchers withheld food for 12 hours and then gave rats food plus sugar water. This created a cycle of binging where the animals increased their daily sugar intake until it doubled. When researchers either stopped the diet or administered an opioid blocker the rats showed signs common to drug withdrawal, such as teeth-chattering and the shakes. Early findings also indicate signs of relapse. Rats weaned off sugar repeatedly pressed a lever that previously dispensed the sweet solution."

Hmmm. Naltrexone makes sugar non-pleasurable...

Anyway, the main reason why I want to quit sugar isn't really health related, but to prove to myself that I have some willpower.

[RavenxDrake]

The first thing to consider is: How much sugar DO you go through in a day? (and for "sugar" I'm counting any sweetened processed food, which is what I assume you meant).

How many sodas do you drink a day? A week?
Cookies, Cake, pie or other Pastries?
Candy, Chocolate and Confections?
Ice Cream or other deserts?

Figuring out what you eat, and when, will help you you pinpoint what areas you need to work on, what time-frames you're going to be most tempted, and just how much sugar you are actually taking in. Try to avoid making "1 for 1" substitutions, especially if your subbing something else sweet for your sugar (ie: "I normally grab a couple of doughnuts on the way to work, instead I'll grab some fruit.") You'll be retaining the same addiction patterns, and if you use fruit in place of processed sweetners you'll just be subbing one sugar for another, and you probably won't even break the physical or mental addiction patterns.

I would highly suggest that, after you catalog your current intake of sugar, you do some research on metabolism and blood sugar and retool your diet as a whole to help accommodate the changes that are going to come from eliminating processed sweets.

[LeftTentacleGreen]

1. drink grape juice and eat fresh fruit
2. go off caffeine slowly (switch to tea)

No advice on exercise. I've yet to find a way to get myself motivated enough to do it... I'm typing this from bed.

[Aeridus]

Well, your body needs sugar to survive, but yeah it's hard to transition from simple carbohydrates to complex carbohydrates. I've tried eating bananas to ease cravings for chocolate but they don't help much.

[Vedius Pollio]

1. drink grape juice and eat fresh fruit
2. go off caffeine slowly (switch to tea)

No advice on exercise. I've yet to find a way to get myself motivated enough to do it... I'm typing this from bed.

Grape juice is basically sugar water, so no, bad idea.

[Xero]

I do a couple min of streching and squats/crunches before bed

as for sugar
I just just don't do sweets so you're SOL there

the caffine is something you need to ween off of or have iron will and go cold turkey

think of it this way, the less you spend on sugar and caffine more for the working girls
which I guess counts as exercise....

[Vedius Pollio]

Ok. This is problematic. I've just relapsed accidentally.

I went to a restaurant and ordered a burger that I was certain had no sugar in it, and then I discovered that the burger had caramelised onions inside it (which I carefully set aside with my fork) and then I ate a few chips which I had dipped in Heinz ketchup.

The damned ketchup, I later discovered, was full of sugar. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. (I knew there was some reason why the ketchup tasted like... relief... and consolation.)

Why do people have to put sugar in fucking everything? If a restaurant owner was spiking his food with morphine, he'd go to jail for sure. But including hidden sugar is perfectly legal for some reason.

At least I'm well caffeinated with some nice iced tea (no sugar included).

VP.

[Aeridus]

What's wrong with caramelized onions? There's no unnatural sugars in that, only what comes out of the onion itself. Just avoid stuff with high fructose corn syrup and simple carbohydrates. It's fine to get natural sugars from fruits and vegetables as those take longer for the body to process.

[WangyJohn]

Not quitting altogether, but I've been cutting down on sweetstuffs, moslty also because I'm shit nout of cash most of the times recently.

It wasn't all that hard, since I have little trouble not doing something. My promise to work out more was harder to keep, but I've managed to do something every day for a few dozen days now. I think I'll be able to keep it up.

[Vedius Pollio]

At the moment I'm getting my caffeine from English Breakfast tea. But I can't stand it hot, so I ask the restaurant staff to cool it with ice cubes. Some restaurants do this better than others

To be honest, I was never much of a tea drinker until now. But it's the only way to get caffeine out of a cold drink without using sugar. (Previously my DOC was an iced mocha.)

[Ce6]

Black coffee can still be drunk cold (or even with creme or skim milk) if you're trying to cut down on the sweets before the caffeine.
As for the caffeine itself, it probably comes down to how well you can tolerate headaches and how badly you're addicted. I've quit the stuff a few times myself, and the headache takes about a week to go away if I go cold turkey. After that, I'm good to go.
Exercise, you just have to make time for it. Find a point in your daily or weekly schedule and fit it in there, and force yourself to stick to it. ie: every Saturday around 11am I go to the gym and lift weights for a bit. or every Tuesday and Thursday do some cardio (run, stairs, DDR, etc.) after getting home from work and before dinner time. Something like that. Taking someone with you to work out helps too.