Sweeter Without Sugar

Chapter 1 How Can Breaking Free from the Sugar Habit Help? Are you in the habit of looking for something sweet after dinner, after lunch, or all day long? Picture yourself eating or drinking that sweet something and hopping onto a roller coaster. The sugar stimulates your body, and your energy level goes up and hits a peak. All of a sudden, it drops down, and you crash. This keeps happening again and again, and you are left wondering when you get to go up again. If the blood sugar roller coaster is not your thing, perhaps you’d like to ride the Ferris wheel or merry-go-round. You hop into the seat, and it takes you around and around in the same habit loop. You can’t seem to get off, no matter how many times you try. It just keeps taking you around and around. You can’t stop it because you are not the one in the control center—or are you, but you just don’t know it yet? Would you like to get off these rides and see what life can be like on a different kind of ride? This ride is built by you and is one you can call your own. On this ride, you can get on and off when you want to and be proud of building it. In order to build a solid ride, you’ve got to build it one day at a time, one piece at a time. You must show up every day and own it. The ride is yours—only yours. Then, when you are ready to share the ride with other people in your life, you get to have fun with them too. What would make it strong so you don’t fall off? In order to create a foolproof ride, you must develop a sense of awareness of how things work and how things are interconnected. You must set up the conditions for inevitable success. Once awareness sets in, together with a greater understanding of why things do what they do, you can mindfully start putting the pieces together. After it’s assembled, you may enjoy keeping things the same for a while, or you might want to expand it and transform it into something even more amazing. Think possibilities. Think positivity. If you can think about possibilities and think positively, you can build a ride that will last you a lifetime. There will be moments when things get bumpy or scary, but you must think positively because your decisions will shape your actions. A positive mindset will lead to positive actions, and a negative mindset might cause you to take down the pieces unknowingly. Are you ready to build your very own ride the way you want to? If the answer is yes, keep on reading and building. If your answer is maybe, perhaps something in the book will spark something in you to build a state-of-the-art ride after all. If your answer is no, please keep reading anyway, and perhaps you will stumble upon a nugget of gold that will give you the power to build something. What that something is will be up to you. Why I Decided to Break My Sugar Habits I was once in the habit of looking for a sweet something after dinner every day. I thought eating an orange rather than something full of sugar would be a better choice, but eventually, my disgruntled stomach told me that it wasn’t such a great alternative after all. I felt like the orange was lodged in my stomach like a baseball on some nights and swirling around like a tornado on other nights. The fact that I was really bloated and looked like I was four months pregnant even though I wasn’t didn’t help either. But it was a habit to eat an orange, and it never occurred to me that eating it was making me feel ill. Then on one random day, I came upon an article about a woman who quit sugar for three years and how this changed her life. Sarah Wilson became my inspiration, and her online program started me on my journey to living a life free of cravings, insatiable hunger, and pain. She made me realize that I was drawn to sugar through fruit, which was mind-blowing because everyone says that fruit is one of the best things to eat—but I realized that fruit was hurting my body. I would eat fruit in the morning for breakfast, midmorning, with and after lunch, and after dinner. I was constantly wondering what fruit or snack I would eat next, and food was the only thing on my mind all the time. I accepted my body and the way it was before giving birth to two children. I gained fifty pounds with my first pregnancy and tried to lose as much of it as I could before the second pregnancy. But I wasn’t able to go back to my original weight. I tried not to gain too much weight with my second pregnancy, but I ended up gaining another fifty pounds and was close to two hundred pounds by the time my son was born. I had never been that heavy, and I felt miserable carrying all the extra baggage. I tried all sorts of weight-loss programs, lost some weight, and gained some back. Eventually, the diet mentality and the I-deserve-a-sweet-treat mentality led to the overindulgence in junk food beyond belief. I kept telling myself that I would start over on Monday, but week after week passed, and I just kept feeling more and more defeated. When I talked with other moms, wishing we could have our old bodies back always came up. But I learned that comparing my body to another mom’s body did not help me in any way because it just made me feel worse about myself. So, I decided to stop comparing myself to other people, and I now feel much better about who I am.