The motivation I have to offer you today is very simple because I didn’t write it, one of you did! 🙂 Please head on over to my post Is Life Boring Without Sugar? and read Billy’s comment. She is very inspiring, writing that she has been sugar free since June 1! She gave up both refined sugar and artificial sweeteners (7 weeks ago), saying that she just wished she had done it sooner.
She does include that she eats dark chocolate occasionally. I don’t know what the ingredients are of that chocolate, but the dark chocolate that I’m familiar with is sweetened with sugar. At this point, I would not be able to do the same that she is doing (eating a square of dark chocolate occasionally) because it would trigger me to want more.
Unfortunately, one just isn’t enough for me. However, if you don’t get cravings from doing what Billy is, then this could work for you. The best way to figure it out is to keep a food/emotion journal.
In your journal, keep track of everything you eat and how you feel. Note if you have physical cravings for food, or emotional food cravings. Look back through your journal and look as what you ate. If you see that whenever you eat “X” you crave sugar or some other food that isn’t healthy, then you know to eliminate “X”. This is actually something that you can start immediately, even if you aren’t eating the healthiest of food. It will become clear to you exactly how what you eat makes you feel both physically, and emotionally.
In Billy’s comment, notice that she wrote about how great she feels after getting off of sugar, and that she lost weight. The biggest benefit that I gain from eliminating the sugar is how I feel: I can think with a clear head, and I have a tremendous amount of energy. When I’ve been eating sugar, I get a drowsy, drunk feeling, and my body hurts. I feel sluggish and tired.
Additionally, Billy said absolutely nothing about dieting, but she still lost weight. While my motivation for getting off of sugar was also for health, I also experienced weight loss as a benefit. You could approach it as a way to lose weight, however I would caution you about thinking of getting off sugar as a diet, because to most people, dieting = short term: just something do it to get the weight off until you return to your previous ways of eating.
Billy’s story is wonderful, and I hope that you gain some motivation from reading it today. You see, it’s not like I’m doing some super human tricks here by getting off of sugar, you can do it, too! 🙂 I’m not saying that it’s necessarily easy in the beginning, because your body will be detoxing from the stuff, and you will more than likely still want to eat sugared foods; but once you get past the first 3 – 7 days, you should really notice a difference.
