Can You go without sugar?

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I've eliminated sugar from tea and coffee over the last two years, having previously thought I couldn't imagine drinking either without, but I think I've upped my consumption of chocolate bars. So what was previously an afternoon cuppa with a teaspoon of granulated sugar, is now a sugar-free cuppa with a four-bar KitKat. Oops.

Also, I work in an open-plan office where people are continually bringing in sweet stuff from all over the world. You don't get away with a trip to Jordan, Canada, Spain, India, wherever without having to bring back (airport-bought, no doubt) sugary goods. There's a bit of a baking culture in one department too. You could graze on crap all day.

cup of steaming hot black coffee paired with a chocolate bar - take a bite of chocolate then take a sip of the coffee, letting the coffee melt the chocolate IN YOUR MOUTH - so decadent

I've eliminated sugar from tea and coffee over the last two years, having previously thought I couldn't imagine drinking either without, but I think I've upped my consumption of chocolate bars. So what was previously an afternoon cuppa with a teaspoon of granulated sugar, is now a sugar-free cuppa with a four-bar KitKat. Oops.

― Michael Jones, Tuesday, 20 August 2013 13:04 (10 minutes ago)

tea without sugar i adapted to very quickly

with coffee i still add sugar sometimes if the coffee isn't that great and/or i just want something with more calories in lieu of proper food

please note that i do not dilute my sugar with liquid (coffee, soda, etc) -- i take it straight in candy form, usually.

Except for a teaspoon of honey in my morning tea, I don't eat sugar at all. Except I do miss those Hail Merry raw chocolate ganache tart things.

I could far more easily go without sugar than salt.

I had a raging sweet tooth for decades, but it seems to have dropped off a lot in the past 5 or so years. No idea why. Still take a teaspoon in my coffee in the a.m., and the sugar in fruits and and in some condiments (ketchup, errrrr other stuff I'm not recalling). Oh and sometimes I make pickles that have some sugar in them but aren't particularly sweet in the end. But man if I had to choose between sweet desserts and cheese for the rest of my days, I wouldn't have to think about it for even a nanosecond.

lol i can tell my levels are fucked up right now.

i mean, this MIGHT have something to do w/ sugar.

if i go get a vanilla coke right now there's a chance i will feel more "normal" or w/e

are you sure that's not an exisential normal rather than just a glycemic normal

huh?

maybe you're just thirsty and need to drink water

i haven't done well w/r/t eating or anything really in the consuming department today but this isn't exactly a new thing for me

i haven't even finished getting dressed today. so i think i should do that and go get a soda at walgreens.

Working long shifts in a restaurant where often all i manage to ingest are broken cookies & fountain drinks = i don't wanna think too hard about this question

has anyone tried to reduce their sugar intake by eating higher quality sweets? when I found myself hooked on stuff like pretzel M&M's and Twix Peanut butter cookie bars, I tried to improve my habits by trading the convenience store crap for lolgourmet candies like Ritter Sport bars and Brookside chocolate-covered acai jellies. I figured the upscale candy would be so rich and fulfilling (and expensive) that it would satisfy all my candy needs for 3 or 4 days, but then I'd end up eating the whole Ritter bar in 20 minutes and buying some M&M's later that same day, because German dark chocolate sugar highs don't really last any longer than ordinary Mars/Hershey's/Nestlé sugar highs. It's not easy to ration your candy when you're really only eating it to fulfill a base craving.

regardless of all that, I've nearly cut my candy consumption in half in recent months, partly because I no longer live next door to a convenience store and partly because my dentist found two cavities during my last visit. the lack of ready access to junk food and the measurable damage to my body have steered me away from junk food more effectively than a bare act of will power ever could.

I really only started eating candy compulsively after I lost a distressing amount of weight (something like 15 pounds over the course of a month) last summer, and I convinced myself that I could eat anything I wanted as long as it would help me beef up. with all the rubbish I've been eating lately, I think I've only put on about 3 pounds over the past year, so one of my main motives for eating a lot of candy has been effectively put to rest.

well shit, now I am eating chocolate chips straight out of the bag

Skittles and coke this evening

Ate something like 9000 cookies today

I'm not supposed to eat sugar per my GI doc. I'll buy sugar-free sweets (generally Russel Stover, or from this choc shop if I'm in the area) and have 1 every other day on average for dessert. Sugar version of methadone, satisfies the craving, but you're fully aware it's not nearly as good as the real thing. Every couple of months or so I'll allow myself to have a real deal sugar concoction, and OMG I nearly lose my goddamn mind when I do, brain's pleasure center firing like 4th of July. I like to tell myself that the rarity of these sugar experiences increasing my enjoyment of them makes up for not being able to have it on a regular basis, but we all know that's probably bullshit. But that factor in addition to sugar being "toxic" and possibly root of many health problems allows me to not want to kill myself for not being able to have a Snickers or a nice banana shake whenever the mood strikes.

doing well with this

no soda in over three weeks

no candy either

i'll still have orange juice and shit that has some sugar in it

what i have to say beyond this probably goes more in "healthy snack ideas" or something tho

so off to that thread

Made a concerted effort 1.5 weeks ago to severely cut down on carbs and refined sugars. I'm not going full-tilt Atkins induction, but I have managed to stay pretty much below the 50g net carbs per day limit with the exception of one cheat day.

Oh wait, it was 2.5 weeks ago. Damned fleeting moments of brain fog.

It hasn't been an ordeal to not eat pastas and breads, and I haven't gone "GAH CAAAAAAAAAAAAAKE" more than once or twice. Basically mixed drinks are my downfall, but even there I'm just trying to drink spirits neat.

markers how do you feel? in the past when i've drastically cut carbs/sugar i go into ketosis tailspin and have a lot of fatigue/headaches until the clouds break and then i feel better than ever.

i've had some bad headaches for sure, which i think stress might've played a factor in, but the start of them coincided with my trying to pull this shit off, so i think that was at least a big part of why i was suddenly clutching my head at times. it was also caffeine though, which i was getting mostly from soda and an occasional tea too. if i drink tea now it can't have caffeine. i'm glad i did it though. i don't seem to have such sharp mood dips that probably coincided with sugar highs and lows or whatever. that being said, i've still been eating stuff like wheat thins, pringles, etc., and my plan starting today was to get off of them too, but we'll see if that happens

markers ✓

beyond the psychological benefits though, there's the physical stuff too insofar as i'm not polluting myself with that garbage

Soda was easy. I gave up caffeine four years ago.

i've lost my enthusiasm for most sugary foods in the last few years
i even find a lot of new world red wines too sweet now even though the residual sugar content there is small
an exception is coffee in the morning, where the sugar accentuates the caffeine rush

the other side of this is adding in good stuff. so far today i've had oatmeal, eggs, fruit, peppers, a little bit of a pork chop, and more, and not really anything i can recall that'd be classified as super bad for you.

xpost that's good though. you're probably not having too much a day then?

now i drink seltzer a lot

xposts: that's a pretty solid diet. and sustainable too, i think.

if i can get some of the other bad stuff out of it permanently that'd be good. as long as i can at least lessen the amount of it sooner rather than later.

find it more difficult to eat 'good' things than to avoid 'bad' ones

even then i don't integrate it with what i normally eat so i order salad with a steak but i have the steak and then afterwards the salad

i've been experimenting with a hemp protein + chia seed shake in the morning to head off the rush of midday hunger that ends up in me getting a grilled cheese sandwich or something.

has it been working?

a little bit! i've been trying to get my protein up (i try not to eat a lot of meat, for other reasons than health) to see if it'll help with cravings. been exercising quite a bit too and that can lead to bad dietary choices for me.

xp:
Carbs are fine in the form of starches, its the fructose (in HFCS, table sugar, and worst of all, agave) that has all the adverse health effects.

I went off all fruit, grains, and added sugar for about 5 weeks, and found it wasn't actually very hard. On the other hand, my weight didn't change and I didn't feel any different. My conclusion is that people have drastically different levels of sugar-crave and it's the people who crave it most who are the most badly affected by it, unfairly enough. (Or maybe: people who crave sugar more eat way more sugar than I do when I'm not restricting sugar, thus going down to near-zero is a bigger dietary shift? Like, I never put sugar in coffee anyway.)

There's much evidence in favor of some fruit consumption (files on berries and other fruit), particularly those with higher densities of flavonoids per calorie (in descending order: elderberries, blackberries, blueberries, cranberries, lemons, strawberries, currants, kumquats, raspberries, grapefruit...). Sure these range from 7-44% fructose (by calorie), but if you're taking them in with fiber (not as juices) that slows absorption, and the adverse metabolic effects largely arise from overloading the liver & kidneys where almost all fructose is metabolized, shunting them to the de novo lipogenesis pathway. Spread intake of 3 servings of whole berries/citrus through the day, avoid added sugars, and you're still only getting about 4% of your calories from fructose (vs. about 14% in the average American diet).