How to Conquer Your Sugar Cravings For Good

metabolism sugar Jul 06, 2020

Sugar is being exposed for the metabolic toxin that it is and always has been. Sugar is behind most of our current weight and health woes that we've erroneously blamed on salt, saturated fat, and cholesterol.

Everyone is starting to agree that sugar is bad and many of us have started to try and eat less sugar.

While that may seem simple, it's not exactly easy.

If you've tried and failed to get sugar out of your diet, you know how hard it can be. 

If you've tried to go sugar-free and found it nearly impossible, take heart, your battling a broken metabolism, not just the cookie.

That's right, your sugar cravings are the perfect storm of metabolic damage and brain chemicals and can be hard to beat with willpower alone!

Let's unpack why we crave sugar and then of course, what to do about it so you can finally kick that nasty toxin to the curb.

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There are only two reasons we eat food.

We humans, eat either for nourishment or emotion management.

That's it. Every time you've been hungry or put something in your mouth, it falls under one of those two categories.

Even sugar.

Eating For Nourishment is Good.

When we eat for nourishment, we're eating because our liver and brain are signaling that energy and nutrients are needed. This is a healthy hunger.

A nourishing eating experience has 3 key components:

  1. You experience a feeling of physical hunger.
  2. You have a biological need for the nutrient or energy.
  3. Your biological need and physical hunger are met by the food.

A nourishing eating experience is a meal. Breakfast, lunch, or dinner and... that's it.  

When you eat a meal for nourishment it is very simple and straightforward. In fact, this type of hunger will quietly disappear if you ignore it.

Nourishment doesn't mean bland.  It just means it's a good meal of nutrients that taste amazing and feed your cells with energy.

Anything else is an emotional eating experience.

Eating for Emotion Management is Not So Good

If you feel driven to eat outside a meal, you are experiencing an unhealthy hunger. This type of hunger grows louder and more intense as time passes.  

This unhealthy hunger is anything but simple.

Your sugar cravings are unhealthy hunger.

Unhealthy hunger is driven by two main things.

First is metabolic damage. 

You are driven to eat to provide energy to your body because your metabolism is unable to burn fat for energy between meals. Your metabolic hormones, like insulin, are overstimulated and are "on" too long, therefore driving hunger up while trapping your stored fat in your fat cells instead of using them for energy. This is a horrible cycle.

Secondly, your brain is seeking to be soothed. 

When you eat, especially sugar, you're stimulating a feel-good, reward-seeking brain chemical known as dopamine. Dopamine is just one of the many neurotransmitters that drive our behavior and our general feelings of wellbeing.

Dopamine is released when your body recognizes something it likes for survival and it wants you to repeat that action.

Like ice cream.

Sugar and carbohydrates that eventually become sugar in our blood, stimulate large amounts of dopamine. In the days when our brains were forming, sugar was hard to find and if you found let's say honey, it was your dopamine that marked the map in your brain how to find it again and encourage you to eat it.

Dopamine feels good and is necessary for you to feel good and motivate you to do stuff. You want lots and lots of dopamine. But our environment has changed and there is just too much cheap, easy "honey" around.

Dopamine Relieves the Stress of Emotions

When you're feeling an emotion, sometimes you feel driven to eat. This can happen when we are bored and our brains want a boost of dopamine to break the boredom. This can also happen when we are happy, or sad. Dopamine can make us temporarily feel better when we have feelings.

If you lack the skills to deal with your emotions in a more healthy manner, you may use food to self-soothe. In other words, if you have trouble feeling your feelings at any given time, you may end up eating your feelings instead.

Remember how food stimulates dopamine? Food, particularly sugar, is a fast, cheap, easy, predictable way to produce dopamine. It can induce an exaggerated response in the reward region of the brain called the nucleus accumbens. The same region of the brain that lights up with addictive substances such as alcohol, cocaine, and nicotine.

Things get a little complicated when the food that you're driven to eat to soothe your emotion is sugar or carbohydrates.  

This is a double whammy because you are already seeking out sugar to provide energy because your metabolism is broken and sugar is your best hit of energy.  When you eat the sugar it produces a dopamine spike like a drug and you feel better.

You have simultaneously provided your body with quick sugar for a quick burst of dirty energy and a hit of dopamine to reinforce that that decision to eat the sugar was in fact, an amazing one and should be repeated!

The reason you crave the peanut M&Ms or Dr. Pepper or (fill in the blank) and struggle to say no to them is that you have high levels of insulin in your blood driving your hunger AND you have a brain addicted to the dopamine released when you eat the sugar.

No wonder we can't stop snacking on Hot Tamales, chocolate, cookies, cupcakes, soda pop, and sweet drinks!  

You Are Not Your Cravings

You need to know this vicious cycle because too many of us believe we can never conquer our cravings because our willpower is too weak.  We feel like we'll never be able to find lasting weight loss because we love sugar too much and just can't fight it.

We feel shame in the fact that we are unable to resist ice cream as other people can.

When our willpower finally taps out after weeks and months of white-knuckled restriction, our brains and bodies roar back with vengeance, and all the healthy habits that we tried so hard to develop are gone.

This is a heartbreaking cycle of low-energy, high insulin, sugar cravings that lead to addictive sugar cravings, which reinforce the low-energy, high insulin metabolic state.

And around and around we go.

You Need to Fight Sugar Cravings at the Root Cause

To break this cycle you need to get to the root cause:

1. Metabolic damage

2. Self-soothing with food

For a broken metabolism, you need a step-by-step procotol.

Fully repairing your metabolism to burn fat efficiently and sustainably between meals for energy is an intricate process that takes a step by step protocol. This is deep, lasting work.

This is what we do in the Freese Method. The first step you can take here is to try your best not to feed the "sugar monster." This is incredibly difficult when you have a broken metabolism, but the less you feed your sugar monster, over time, the less loud he/she screams.

For emotion management, you need to do four important things:

  1. Recognize that you are, in fact, using sugar and food for self-soothing of emotions and that it needs to be dealt with.
  2. Identify your feelings with words out loud when you feel them will help increase your emotional intelligence.
  3. Let yourself feel the feelings. Do not judge them, just let yourself feel the actual feelings. It may feel like it's gonna kill you, but it doesn't, I promise.
  4. Get your dopamine from things other than food! (Which is another thing we teach you in the Freese Method!)

Overall, getting your dopamine from things other than food may be the single most important change you can make. You can't deny your brain dopamine.  

Your brain will drive you to seek reward in one way or another to get the dopamine it wants.

If you have tools that give you regular and dependable dopamine hits to keep the bucket full and quick fixes when your feeling like you need a scone and caramel latte hit, then you can act from a place of power and control and not from a place of desperation and hunger.

If you feel like you struggle with cravings, especially cravings for sugar or carbohydrates, remember that you are dealing with something massive biologically.  

Ruthlessly eliminating sugar from your diet isn't easy when you have a broken metabolism.

Don't try to use willpower. It's a game you can't win.

To be truly free from sugar cravings and emotional eating, you need to repair your metabolism at the cellular level and learn how to leverage your dopamine. Only then you can find peace and develop a healthy relationship with food.

JOIN FREESE METHOD TODAY