6 Ways to Bring Sugar into Balance in Your Diet
Is sugar getting in the way of your having a balanced, easy relationship with food?
By far, the most frequent complaint I get from people who desire a healthier, more peaceful relationship with food is that sugar is problematic: “I’m too attached,” “I have a sweet tooth,” “I struggle with cravings,” “I can’t stop myself.”
Many folks who struggle to include sugar in their diet in a balanced way have experimented with cutting it out completely…only for it to come roaring back into their lives like a saccharin snowstorm.
Restricting sugary foods isn’t an effective long-term solution (unless you can realistically see yourself never eating them again and also don’t struggle psychologically when you cut them out).
But what if you could find a way to achieve moderation—to truly know that no food is off-limits—but also to trust yourself to not go overboard when it’s around.
A balanced, moderate relationship with sweets is absolutely possible.
Here’s what you should know if you want to make that happen:
Don’t Pretend an Apple Hits Your Ice Cream Spot
Some nutrition professionals will recommend going for a lightly sweet alternative when you have a sugar craving, like fruit. I’m not one of them.
Why? Because this technique rarely works. What I most often see is this: if an individual has a craving for, say, ice cream, and they have a piece of fruit instead…they still crave ice cream, so they have that too. Have we really solved the problem here?
I’ll say this: if having a piece of fruit or similar food really hits the spot for you when you want something sweet, go for it. This is an option that can work when you feel less controlled by food. But for those of you for whom sugar cravings aren’t satisfied so easily, we need to go deeper.
Disarm Your Trigger Foods
If there’s any food that you feel like you can’t control yourself around, you need to rid it of its power. And the only way to do that is to remove the restriction. The food can no longer be off-limits.
To begin, eat it as frequently as you’d like until it starts to lose its power. And don’t limit how much you can eat in one sitting (e.g. I can have a cookie after my meal but only one).
Does this sound backwards to you? That’s understandable, but the only way to disarm your trigger foods is to completely eradicate any feeling of restriction you’ve created around it. See this article for a more detailed explanation.
Decide What Balance Looks Like to You
Although many Food Body Self community members can tell me that they want to eat less sugar, not all of them can tell me how much they DO want to eat—they have no vision for what a balanced inclusion of sugary foods in their diet would be.
How can you make your ideal relationship with food a reality unless you know what that looks like?
This may take some experimentation to uncover what works for you in practice. For example, many individuals find that the more sugar they have, the more they crave. For this reason, you may want to eventually include it minimally in your diet.
However, if you feel too restricted, you’ll risk heading right back to where you started in the binge-restrict cycle. If it takes you some time to find a balance that feels sustainable, that’s totally okay.
Practice Sitting With Cravings
Do NOT move onto this step until you have eliminated your sense of restriction in the “Disarm Your Trigger Foods” section above. Sitting with your cravings will be impossible as a long-term solution if you’re rebounding from physical or mental restriction.
That being said, once the feeling of restriction is no longer there, you can practice what is known by some therapists and mindfulness practitioners as “urge surfing.”
Urge surfing is about recognizing your physical, mental, and emotional cues that accompany an urge or craving to eat—and, most importantly, to observe them without judgment. It’s about acknowledging the fact that you’re experiencing an urge or a craving—that you really want to eat—and “riding the wave” rather than swimming or fighting against it.
The reason I suggest this is because so many of the students I’ve worked with have felt powerless against their cravings. They had never successfully sat through one, because once a craving starts, it feels like it will just get stronger and stronger until you give in to it.
The truth is, cravings have a definite lifespan, and even if you don’t give in to them, they’ll go away on their own—often in less time than you think.
Again, the exception to this rule is if you find yourself in a binge-restrict cycle. Urge surfing will not be an effective way of coping with cravings that are the result of chronic or severe restriction.
Cope With Your Feelings
A major driver of overeating is using food as an emotional coping mechanism. And for emotional eaters, a popular choice is sweets of all kinds.
Therefore, as I’m sure you’re well aware, you’ll need to find alternative coping mechanisms to deal with big emotions.
There are many techniques for self-soothing, but before even getting to that, I like to start my students off with mindfulness: paying attention, nonjudgmentally, to whatever you’re feeling. This means observing the patterns that arise in your body, the thoughts that run through your mind. Letting everything come and go, without pushing it away, identifying with your thoughts, or getting attached.
This isn’t a matter of ability but rather of practice.
Change Your Mindset
You probably knew this one was coming. If you want to change the role that sugar plays in your diet, you’re going to need to change your thoughts about it.
For example, if you have beliefs like, “sugar is bad,” or “sweets are rubbish,” you may be increasing your sense of restriction, which will only serve to increase your cravings.
Start by seeing if you recognize any unhelpful thoughts you’re having that increase your desire to overeat. I’m being intentionally vague here because your thoughts may be about your behavior, personality, feelings, food, circumstances, interactions, and so on.
Sugar may feel addictive, or like it has control over you, but it’s not truly a bad guy. Eating sugar is inherently pleasurable, and that’s exactly what your body and mind have evolved to seek out.
Craving sugar therefore doesn’t make you weak; it makes you human.
And getting rid of those cravings doesn’t mean you need to engage in battle. Fighting with yourself doesn’t make for a balanced nor a peaceful relationship with sugar.
Rather, if you can get to the root of your cravings, you’ll not only be better equipped to sit through them, those desires will be less likely to arise in the first place.