How did you do? I emerged fine, with a little chocolate slip-up, but the entire process was very enlightening not only for myself, but for what I can now bring to my clients: a better understanding of how powerfully trigger foods work on our physiology. Trigger foods are foods that cause you to lose control and binge, or exacerbate the cravings cycle. This could be sugar, white flour, dairy, chocolate, even corn, or any food you might be allergic to. I’ve explained before that you often crave or binge on foods to which you are intolerant/allergic, because the body sends an endorphin rush to counteract the inflammatory effects the food has on the body when you eat it. This endorphin rush gives you a “high,” causing you to crave or binge on that food, but the internal inflammation is causing great stress inside the body. You may feel a drugged or pleasurable feeling. It often happens with white flour refined foods or sugar, but any food could be a trigger food.
Discover and remove your trigger foods or the foods to which you’re allergic/intolerant, especially if weight loss is your goal–unknown food allergies are a main reason people have trouble losing weight. On another note, if you crave sugar, you may have candida (yeast) overgrowth, and removing sugar from the diet starves out of the yeast. Sugar feeds yeast, so sugar cravings are a main signal of candida overgrowth, and consuming sugar exacerbates the candida. If it goes unchecked, candida can wreak havoc on your health, causing major gut problems, weight gain, foggy thinking, hormonal issues, and yeast infections.
Back to the sugar detox. Removing sugar can have so many beneficial effects on your life, especially if you are sugar sensitive, as I’ve mentioned before. If you lose control and tend to binge on sugar or alcohol or white flour foods, or if you have a tendency toward hypoglycemia, you would most benefit from a long period of time without sugar. Can you go longer than 21 days? How about 3 months? 6 months? You may be surprised by the profound effects on your life. It’s like removing a drug from your life. You are able to get in tune with your authentic self–your true energy levels and feelings when not affected by the drug-like effects of sugar. Not to mention the health benefits! Sugar (and white flour, which breaks down and acts like sugar in the body) is one of the greatest health destroyers.
If you suffer from regular sugar cravings, consider a sugar-free anti-fungal diet to starve off any candida that could be exacerbating the cravings, and make sure to get good high quality protein at each meal to keep blood sugar balanced. This means no fruit, fruit juice, white rice/flour, sugar of any kind, or mushrooms (fungus). There are a number of anti-candida supplements to assist this cleanse. Contact me for an evaluation to get specific recs for this.
There are a couple options for a life without sugar: totally sugar free with no honey, stevia, natural sugars of any kind, save for fruit, or just natural sugars. What would a life without sugar look like for you?
Mary Vance is a Certified Nutrition Consultant and author specializing in digestive health. She combines a science-based approach with natural therapies to rebalance the body. In addition to her 1:1 coaching, she offers courses to help you heal your gut and improve your health. Mary lives in San Francisco and Lake Tahoe in Northern California. Read more about her coaching practice here and her background here.
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