you must assess your relationship with sugar

Have you ever reached for a nice and chewy chocolate chip cookie for a quick late afternoon snack, only to “accidentally” end up eating the entire bag? Or maybe you prefer your morning cereal or cup of joe to be loaded with sugary treats? If yes, then it’s a sign that you might be having a problematic relationship with sugar. 

In her book Breaking Up With Sugar, Molly Carmel talks about how her sugar addiction began at a young age when she lost her father. Since comfort was not always readily available, in order to cope with the grief, she started relying on sugar more and more for emotional support. Due to this, her weight began increasing and by the time she started graduate school, she weighed 325 pounds and her physical and mental health were getting severely impacted.

Like Molly, there’s a good chance that your dependence on sugar might be influenced by certain emotional challenges as well and would have developed and strengthened over the past years. Molly blamed factors such as fat, genetics, or leptin for her excess weight, however when the medical community first started discussing sugar addiction and its negative consequences, that’s when she realized that this was the exact thing that she had been struggling with her entire life. She decided to take charge and ended her complicated relationship with sugar for good. 

Truth be told, in the contemporary world, it’s not only Molly and a certain subset of the population who fall in this sugar trap. We all have problematic relationships with sugar right from our childhood years. We all celebrate birthdays, weddings, graduation and other life events with sugar-loaded treats. And of course, chocolates, candies, soda, energy drinks, and ice-creams have become a regular part of our daily existence. So, there’s a good chance that a good portion of us would be sugar addicts and not even know it. 

Now is a good time to take a step back and assess your relationship with sugar. Although it may seem harmless, sugar can have negative consequences on your health. It’s basically a drug and can impact your brain as alcohol, cocaine and opiates do. The key culprit again is the feel-good chemical dopamine, which drives your repetitive consumption.

If you have an unhealthy dependence on sugar, becoming aware and facing difficult truths is the first step to recovery. It might not be a cakewalk to get out of this relationship, but it’ll be definitely worth it in the long run.

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