Damn you sugar!

If you know anything about me, you probably know that I have a wicked sweet tooth. I love to bake and love ice cream like nobody's business. One of the hardest things for me in eating healthy is avoiding sugar. It's totally addictive and and when I have a little, it just makes me want more. With that said, it's a hard habit to kick.

A NY Times op-ed piece on Mayor Bloomberg's effort to ban soft drinks in the city said, 

"Simply put, humans evolved to crave sugar, store it and then use it. For millions of years, our cravings and digestive systems were exquisitely balanced because sugar was rare. Apart from honey, most of the foods our hunter-gatherer ancestors ate were no sweeter than a carrot. The invention of farming made starchy foods more abundant, but it wasn’t until very recently that technology made pure sugar bountiful.

The food industry has made a fortune because we retain Stone Age bodies that crave sugar but live in a Space Age world in which sugar is cheap and plentiful. Sip by sip and nibble by nibble, more of us gain weight because we can’t control normal, deeply rooted urges for a valuable, tasty and once limited resource."

I see people all around me struggling daily with sugar. Some give in to the temptation here and there. Others go cold turkey and one friend took it further and went to a hypnotist to help her break her addiction to sugar. (As a quick side note, it worked! She's been sugar-free for nearly 2 months now and feels AMAZING, has lost weight and most importantly, no longer craves or really even wants it.) What this has shown me is not that I too need a good hypnotist, although don't get me wrong, I did think about it, but rather that I need to keep fighting the good fight to not give in to my cravings. I KNOW that when I have sugar, I want more sugar. 

I foolishly bought a bag of candy corn a few weeks ago "for the kids" and you can guess who ate 90% of the bag...not so little ole me. A week later, when I came across white chocolate M&M candy corns, I snatched it up and polished off the bag at work. Yup, sugar's massively addictive. I KNOW when I'm eating it that the enjoyment won't last. Yet I find myself eating it anyway knowing the crummy feeling I'll have just a few minutes after. 

Things got really bad about 2 weeks ago when I realized that after kicking the habit over the summer, I'd let it sneak back up on me. It doesn't bode well for me if I go into the holiday season sugar addicted. NOTHING good will come of that other than a house full of baked goods, bad skin and too tight jeans. 

So I decided, again, that I needed to break my addiction to sugar. What does that mean for me? 

• Less baking - or at least different kind of baking and more healthy experimenting in the kitchen. 

• Being more mindful about not putting myself in tempting situations. 

• Planning ahead better so that I'm full or have a healthy but appealing option that does not involve sugar.

• What also helped, and honestly completely surprised me, was that my daily Shakeology has been the biggest help. 

I've been drinking Shakeology for a little over a year now and love my shakes in the morning. What I never realized was that they could seriously help me kick my sugar addiction. I'd heard testimonials from people who said they could do that but it had never been my experience. I mean I was drinking a shake every day AND also binging on those stupid M&Ms without thought. What changed? Honestly, Beachbody messed up my order and sent me chocolate Shakeology rather than vanilla. I figured I might as well give it a try so I started messing around with different flavor combos for chocolate. Enter my new favorite meal: peanut butter & chocolate. Since stumbling on this 2 weeks ago, I've had one (sometimes 2) a day, I have pretty much completely kicked my dependance on and cravings for sugar. I've now gone from drinking Shakeology for the health benefits (I mean there's no other way I'm going to get the nutritional value of eating 5 salads in a day in any other form), to drinking it to stifle my sugar cravings. 

While I do still appreciate the occasional cookie (and those 2 warm, homemade chocolate chip cookies I happily downed at a colleague's birthday celebration at work this week were SOOO worth it), I don't NEED that cookie, which for me is a huge victory.

Maybe you've heard of Shakeology or seen me or others drinking it and are curious about what it could do for you. Maybe you're wondering if the convenience of a shake would help you remember to eat breakfast when you typically don't and find yourself shoveling 4 granola bars down your throat at work at 10am. Maybe you're a busy stay-at-home mom who needs that extra nutrition in a cup that is easy to grab and go or to sip when you're attached to an always nursing child. Whatever your reason, it's worth giving it a try. Beachbody has a bottom of the bag guarantee so you honestly have nothing to lose. If you're still not sure and want to give it a try without having to commit to a whole bag, message me and I can get you a week's worth of samples to try out.