I’m sure you’ve read an article (or 779 of them) or heard a news report about the benefits of giving up sugar. So, I’m not writing about any of THAT other than to point out that while all the touted benefits may be true, any article I’ve seen omits the “descent into madness part”. If you have never cared for sweets and always asked for a second serving of Kale when the cake was brought out and your BMI has never been more than 19, screw you and find another blog. (Just kidding- but quitting sugar does make you a little testy. At least for the first 76 days.
I quit sugar 75 days, 21 hours 19 minutes ago. Well, not permanently, but I want to see how far I can go before I succumb to Baskins Robbins. Or Marble Slab. Or Cinnabon. Or a cannoli. See, that descent into madness.
You think at the beginning you just need to give up sweets but OOOOHHH NOOOO, it’s not that simple. Sugar is everywhere- breads, pasta sauce, salad dressings, KETCHUP….I’m not giving up ketchup, I’m just not. Is there anything more depressing then reading food labels? Right?
Trying to quit sugar is as bad as quitting smoking. If when you quit smoking EVERYONE around you was smoking, and everything had nicotine in it.
After about a month, I started hallucinating about ice cream. A lot.
I daydream about making it another 146 days, 11 hours and 58 minutes till my birthday on August 12, then eating nothing except sugar all day. Cinnabon for breakfast, cannoli for lunch. Baskin Robbins for dinner. Then the thought make me a little ill. Ahhhh, the split personality, schizophrenia of it all. (Yoga class, breath, Zen, peace, love)
I’m sure you’ve heard of the rat, sugar cocaine experiment? http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1931610/
In case you didn’t, basically Rats who were given a mutually exclusive choice between saccharine, sugar and cocaine picked saccharine (or sugar) 94% of the time. This was repeated using Oreos by enterprising research students at Conneticut College. http://www.conncoll.edu/news/news-archive/2013/student-faculty-research-suggests-oreos-can-be-compared-to-drugs-of-abuse-in-lab-rats.htm#.VQosHBj3arU. I mention this for two reasons. First, in writing this article I discovered, by googling “rat sugar cocaine experiment” that there are numerous side splitting articles on the web which I thought I should point out to you. And secondly, my convolution for this descent into madness is that in none of these experiments, did any of the rats kill the other rats. I guess I’ll be okay.