How To Stop Eating Sugar

The "how to stop eating sugar" dilemma is something that a lot of people struggle with. Giving up sugar seems like something you should commit to, right, since after all you want to be healthy and fit — or even ripped. Both speaking from my own experience and so many people who I've talked to that struggle with this dilemma, it seems like when you try to tell yourself that you can't have sugar or sweets at all, that creates this weird binge-avoid-binge-avoid cycle. So, when people ask me for suggestions on how to stop cravings for sugar, here's what I tell them works best from what I've learned.

1) Stop telling yourself that you can't have it and instead tell yourself that you can have it, you just choose to have it on Saturdays and Sundays, for example. "Stop telling yourself that you can’t have sugar. You can have it, you just choose not to." - Click to tweet

2) When you do eat sugar, don't make a big deal of it in your head. Eat it, enjoy it, and move on. The biggest culprit behind "not being able to stop from eating sugar" is being super hard on yourself and stressing out about eating it and how bad it is for you. A little bit of sugar isn't bad for you. It's when you beat yourself up about a little bit of sugar, that leads to a lot of sugar (binge), which is the problem. By the way, when I say binge, I don't necessarily mean eating a whole family size package of Oreos, I just mean the slippery slope of continuing to eat more sugar because you think you've already screwed yourself by eating some sugar.

3) Just take it one step at a time and don't think that you have to totally remove sugar from your life forever. Just do a little better than you did last week, then next week do a little better than this week, and pretty soon your cravings for sugar will be less, and you will not eat it nearly as much as you used to, and you also won't even think about eating it as much as you used to, because slowly it became less a part of your life and your habits/thoughts/cravings are different.

4) This totally goes against what a lot of the media and researchers will tell you, but... just stop reading all of the studies and research and articles about how bad sugar and is for you. It's really not that helpful! You know what you should eat (whole foods, lots of veggies), and reading that stuff just makes you feel worse, not to mention what is right/wrong and bad/good seems to change every week so they have something new to write about... Just eat lots of veggies, feel good about the healthy stuff and when you eat the piece(s) of chocolate, let it go and know that tomorrow is a new day and in the grand scheme of things, if your goal is to be healthy for the long-term and feel awesome, then feeling guilty and getting down on yourself isn't going to help.

So, those are my thoughts. Do you have anything to add? Tweet, Facebook, email this blog post to a friend that you think might need to hear this too. image by stevendepolo

For more on this topic, check out ROCK Your Dream Body.

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