Tips for beating sugar cravings…

Eating sweets, sugary and starchy foods (even complex carbohydrates and some whole foods) raises your blood sugar which triggers a rush of insulin which normally overshoots the amount of sugar and leads to a corresponding reduced amount of sugar in the bloodstream which we feel as hunger. This can set off the need for more sugary foods – the sugar addiction cycle.

1. Try to cut down your sugar intake gradually over a period of a couple of weeks and aim to be sucrose-free to start with. Cut out the fruit sugars lastly as these can also raise blood sugar levels and start the blood-sugar see-saw again.

2. Even using sweeteners (and there are many unhealthy ones, the safest to use are Stevia and Xylitol), can fool the body into expecting sugar which then triggers the insulin reaction again, and this time it can lead to huge drops in blood sugar, making you even hungrier.

3. Get a reliable chart or book which helps you to learn the GI (Glycemic Index) of foods which indicates how fast they raise blood sugar; try to choose foods from below a GI of 40 or less. Glucose is 100, so that gives you an idea of its power on this scale.

4. Sugar cravings can be a sign of yeast overgrowth, so see a natural health professional who will help you source a proper laboratory test for intestinal yeast overgrowth and help with remedies if positive.

5. Set some strategies for emergencies. If you are out and about and miss a meal or working too hard and skip food, you can become vulnerable to sugar cravings. Have packs of nuts, things like beef jerky, good quality snacks like pork scratchings (Awfully POSH make is very additive-free), pumpkin and sunflower seeds and seek out natural health bars with no added sugar – even the raw chocolate bars with no added sugars can be delicious and not send you into the sugar craving see-saw.

After all, sugar is a drug and in tests with laboratory mice, is found to be more addictive than cocaine, so it must affect humans similarly. Remember the more you have, the more will want, so try to cut it out of your everyday diet.

There are many books written on the subject of sugar and in particular, author David Gillespie in his book “Sweet Poison” explains the whole sugar scene in easy-to-understand language. His subsequent books are cook books and shopping guides to make sugar management more practical.