How to Break Your Sugar Habit – Step 1: Have the Right Attitude

How to Break Your Sugar Habit – Step 1: Have the Right Attitude

We looked at our 5 step process to break your Sugar Habit a few weeks ago, now let’s break each of these steps down.  The first and most important step is to have the right attitude.

How you look at getting rid of sugar will determine how you successful you will be at it.  You can look at this process in one of two ways.

Method #1 – You are depriving yourself

If you see sugar as something wonderful that you are going to cut out of your life, this will not be an easy process.  If you are constantly thinking about all the wonderful sweets and soft drinks that will gone forever, you will be miserable.

Admittedly, some of this can’t be helped for the first few days.  The stronger your addiction, the more your body will crave something sweet for that first week or so.  I vividly remember thinking I was going to just about die if I didn’t have a root beer float stat!

Don’t fixate on what is being removed from your diet, keep your eyes on what you are gaining.  That brings us to the second method.

Method #2 – You are improving yourself

The single most important thing I did before I cut sugar out of my life was to educate myself on what exactly it does to your body.  Once I learned the facts, I couldn’t wait to stop eating it.  Here are just a few of the things sugar has been proven to do.

• Increases your waist size
• Increases your risk of Type II Diabetes
• Increases your risk of heart disease
• Increases your blood pressure (The amount my BP dropped after being of sugar for just a few weeks was mind-blowing!)
• Increases your risk of Alzheimer’s
• Increases your risk of certain types of cancer (Disease loves high blood sugar!)

To steal a phrase from Dr Lustig, sugar is a “Chronic, dose-dependent hepa-toxin”.  That is a fancy phrase for “sugar kills you slowly”.

Is all that worth a piece of chocolate? Or a Coke? Nope, not even close.  Once you really learn exactly what high doses of sugar will do, it starts to lose its appeal.  It’s like you’ve been eating rat poison your entire life and then you learned it was rat poison.  No matter how much you love rat poison, you don’t ever want to eat it again.

Here’s a few things I did that helped me get through those early stages.

I read books – If there was a book out there by a reputable person that dealt with sugar, I read it. I recommend books by David Gillespie, Dr Robert Lustig, and Eve Schaub’s book was helpful as well.

I listened to Podcasts – The 2 most helpful ones were Vinnie Tortorich and The Model Health Show.

I convinced my Wife to do it with me – Everything is easier with an accountability partner.

Please understand, I have tried different diets before and just never stuck with them and the reason was my attitude.  I was always focused on what I was losing and never on what I was gaining.  Now that I’ve seen the results first hand, I’ll never eat sugar again.

What do you think?  Are you cutting sugar out of your diet?  How is it going?  Leave a comment and let me know.