How To Quit Sugar Cravings: What Actually Worked For Me
How to quit sugar cravings: the short answer
I did not beat sugar with willpower. I have none where cake is concerned. What changed it was getting quiet enough to see what I was actually doing, and then changing it in stages over several years. Yoga is what made the seeing possible.
- Cutting sugar “a bit” did not work. Sooner or later the cravings came back and so did I.
- The pantry had to go. Three garbage bags of food with added sugar. Practically every item was stacked with it.
- Sugar works on your brain, not your character. The brain has sweet receptors, and the more sugar you eat, the more you crave.
- Read the label and look for about 3% sugar. That single habit changes what goes in the trolley.
- Fructose is the one to watch. It blocks your natural signal to stop eating.
- Mindful eating is the skill, and yoga is how you get it. You cannot eat mindfully while your mind is racing.
- Change is possible, but it takes stages. Cut the added-sugar products first.
This is my own story, and this page is drawn from a talk I gave at our Bali retreat. Chris Lalor, Flametree Yoga Studio.
It started at a retreat, by accident
When I came to our 2014 retreat, my normal food simply was not available. I loved the retreat food, and I did not miss bread, cheese and sugar at all.
When I came home I noticed something I had not expected. My stomach upsets were gone.
Then the cravings arrived, for bread and cheese and the rest, and I began eating the same way again. The stomach upsets came back with the food.
That is the experiment, really, and I ran it on myself without meaning to.
Changing slowly, over years
So I began to change my diet, very slowly. It took another retreat to move to being vegan. I was already vegetarian.
The yoga practice is what allowed the insight: the ability to take an emotional step backwards and change a habit. Bread with everything was a lifelong habit, and lifelong habits do not respond to being told off.
I made those changes and I was still addicted to sugar.
What did shift was that I became more interested in what I was eating. More mindful. The retreat food helped, because it was low in sugar and I could feel the difference without having to believe anything.
I started researching the effects of high sugar. I watched documentaries, read books and articles, including a long-term study of the food habits of 600,000 people. I became more mindful about the impact of diet on me and on the planet. I could see I could be part of cutting diet-related greenhouse gas emissions by nearly half while also improving my own wellness.
Although it was not my focus, I lost weight along the way, and kept it off.
The thing I had to admit
Eventually I had to face two things at once.
The first was that sugar, for me, was an addiction. And that it was delusional to think cutting it just a little was going to hold. Sooner or later the cravings would return and win.
The second was the contradiction in having a holistic yoga practice designed to promote health while eating a great deal of sugar.
So I cleaned out three garbage bags of food that contained large amounts of added sugar. It turned out practically every item in my pantry was stacked with it, which is true of a huge percentage of supermarket food.
These days I see the consequences of too much sugar everywhere: weight, diabetes, liver, cancer, heart disease, depression, mood, brain fog, skin ageing, disrupted sleep, systemic inflammation and arthritis.
Why sugar is so hard to resist
It is worth knowing that this is not a failure of willpower.
Sugar works via chemicals in your brain. Your brain has sweet receptors, and the more sugar you eat, the more you crave it. That is the loop, and it is doing exactly what it evolved to do.
Your brain also needs energy. It is the most energy-demanding organ in the body, which is the argument people reach for when they say they need the sugar to think.
But you can get that energy without sugar. I now know I can get all the energy I need, and that I generate my own, through what I eat and through my yoga and pranayama practice.
The low-fat trick, and how sugar got everywhere
There was a debate in the 1950s about whether sugar or fat drives weight gain. Low fat won.
The problem is that for low-fat food to taste of anything, large amounts of sugar get added. So the victory of low fat is one of the reasons sugar is now in almost everything, and in large amounts.
How much sugar is safe, and where from
Two questions worth settling.
Look for around 3% sugar maximum on the label, per 100 grams. That is a blunt rule, and it works. Most of what you thought was fine will fail it.
Not all sugar is equal. Table sugar is half glucose and half fructose, but some sweeteners carry much more fructose.
Why fructose is the one to watch
Fructose is less absorbed than glucose, and too much of it causes fatty liver disease.
It is also likely to increase harmful systemic inflammation, which is where the immune system is working overtime for no good reason.
And this is the part that matters most for cravings: fructose blocks our natural desire to stop eating, by preventing us from feeling full. That is why you can eat an enormous amount of something sweet and still want more.
So the sweeteners higher in fructose are the ones to be careful with. High fructose corn syrup, caramel, honey, molasses and palm sugar all sit in that group. Check labels, because palm sugar in particular turns up in products that read as healthy. Limit packaged baked goods, confectionery and sweetened drinks, which is where high fructose corn syrup mostly lives.
Where yoga actually comes into it
This is the part people do not expect, and it is the reason the change finally held.
Mindful eating is the ability to move the emotion out of eating. Once the emotion is out of it, you can see the consequences of what you are eating, and gradually cut what you do not want.
The trouble is that mindful eating is a skill that needs a quiet mind, and most of us do not have one to hand. Asana and pranayama quieten the mind, so you are more able to be reflective and mindful about what you eat. You get the space to look at cause and effect.
You also come to understand that transformation is possible at all, which is not obvious when you are in the middle of a habit.
Your yogic practice gives you a detachment, and that detachment is what lets you make a conscious decision about a habit instead of running the habit.
I used sugar as a reward and a pick-me-up. That is emotional eating, and you cannot argue your way out of emotional eating. You can only get far enough back from it to see it happening.
What I would actually tell you to do
- Cut the added-sugar products first. An addiction still requires determination, and you may need to work in stages.
- Read every label for a fortnight. You will be angry, and then you will shop differently.
- Be aware of the higher sugar content of some fruits. Limit dried fruit and mangoes, and white rice while you are at it. Try alternatives.
- Swap, do not just remove. One apple instead of a chocolate is a real strategy, not a consolation prize.
- Monitor how you handle stress and mood when you have less sugar. That is the information you need.
- Monitor cravings and when they arrive. Pre-menstrual and menopausal cravings are real, and knowing they are coming takes most of their power away.
- Build the quiet mind alongside it. Yoga and pranayama are what make the rest of this possible rather than exhausting.
In time you may find your body becomes intolerant of too much sugar, or of gluten, and does some of the work for you.
You can debate the science endlessly and find support for every view you want. You will know the truth when you do it and track your own results.
Questions people ask
How do you stop sugar cravings?
Get the added-sugar products out of the house first, because willpower loses to proximity every time.
Then work on the emotional side, because most cravings are not hunger. That is the part yoga helps with, and it is why cutting sugar without changing anything else tends not to last.
Why am I craving sugar?
Usually one of four things: you ate sugar recently and the loop is running, you are stressed and reaching for a reward, you are tired, or it is a hormonal point in the month.
Work out which one it is before you decide what to do about it.
How long do sugar cravings last when you quit?
The sharp ones ease within one to two weeks. The habitual ones, the biscuit with the cup of tea, take longer, because they are attached to a moment in your day rather than to sugar.
What is mindful eating?
The ability to take the emotion out of eating, so that you can see what you are actually doing and what it leads to.
It is not eating slowly with your eyes closed. It is eating with the same attention you would bring to a pose.
Do I have to give up sugar completely?
I had to, because for me a little always became a lot. Other people manage a middle path perfectly well.
You will find out which one you are quite quickly, and there is no virtue in pretending you are the second kind if you are the first.
Is honey better than sugar?
Not for this purpose. Honey is high in fructose, and fructose is the one that blocks your sense of being full.
It has other things going for it, but it is not a free pass.
Will quitting sugar make me lose weight?
It did for me, though that was not what I was aiming at and I would not promise it to you.
What I would say is that when stress comes down and awareness goes up, eating habits change on their own, and that is a much more comfortable way to arrive at it than dieting.
What if food feels genuinely out of control?
Then please talk to your GP or a dietitian, and do that alongside rather than instead of anything here. Disordered eating is common and it responds to proper help.
Yoga supports that work well. It is not a substitute for it.
Where do I start with the yoga part, in Darwin?
Beginner classes at Woolner (near Parap), Coolalinga, Casuarina, Palmerston and the CBD, plus online. Your first class is free. See the timetable and book here.
Our Bali retreats are also where a lot of this started for me, and the food there is still the best argument I know.
What I learned, in one list
- Yoga is quietening your mind so as to develop self-awareness
- Learning to live in the present, and not going back to the past
- Not looking back or forwards so much
- Through practice, you see yourself better
- You see that change is possible
- Habits become more obvious
- It translates into everyday life, including eating
- The change is much wider than just improving your postures
When it comes to sugar, you reap what you sow.
