Why Quitting Sugar is About as Much Fun As Playing Paintball Naked
Full disclosure: I've only ever played paintball in thick clothes with long-sleeves and a mask on, but I have quit sugar.
Welcome back to your favorite Substack. If you are new around here then pull up a chair because today I am going to share my best tips for developing the Everyday Superpowers of willpower and becoming “fat adapted.”
Facing The Sad Truth
I have decided to confront the depressing reality that I have crossed the line that separates a sugar-enthusiast from a sugar-addict, and so I have set a goal for myself to give up sugar, flour, and starches for 365 days. I am currently on day 35 and so far I have learned that quitting sugar is about as much fun as playing paintball naked - especially at first.
For most other addictions friends, family members, and nice little old ladies from church don’t walk up to you and say, “You look like you have a smoking problem, would you mind finishing off my last few cigarettes? I’d hate to let them go to waste.” They don’t approach you after your kid’s soccer game and say, “Hey we brought too many shots of tequila for the treats, and you look like you know how to enjoy your tequila.”
If you are trying to break a sugar addiction then this type of well meaning behavior is pretty common…if you replace the cigarettes and tequila with doughnuts and cookies.
Baked-good slinging gray haired churchgoers aside, there is something else that makes kicking a nasty sugar habit especially difficult. To better understand what that is we need to know more about willpower and how it works.
Willpower and How It Works
The concept of willpower goes back to the industrial revolution. Piggybacking off of the popularity of the latest technologies of steam power and electric power, the word willpower was created as a hip new way for Victorian England to talk about the strength to resist sin and slothfulness.
In the 20th century the idea of using “power” or “energy” to resist temptation was seen as a quaint metaphor with no real life application among psychologists.
Just last week I listened to a hugely popular best selling self-help author argue that knowledge, not willpower, drives all of our choices, and so all that is needed is to quit sugar is a better understanding of its harmful effects.
That idea makes perfect sense to me at the start of a new day, when I am brimming with confidence and optimism, but when I am surrounded by people enjoying ice cream for dessert after a long day of work, I realize it is possibly the dumbest idea I have ever heard.
Fortunately the traditional idea of willpower is going through a renaissance, thanks in large part to the insightful (and deviant) research of psychologist Roy Baumiester.
Baumeister developed a sick kind of sadistic torture/scientific-experiment that involved feeding radishes to hungry college students as they sat in front of a plate of freshly baked cookies (the humanity!), and if that wasn’t bad enough he even had the smell of cookies pumped into the room. Then to top it all off he gave his subjects/victims a geometry problem too work on, but neglected to mention that the problem was unsolvable.
On average the control groups, who were allowed to eat the cookies or who just went straight to work on the problem, lasted about 20 minutes before giving up. The radish eaters gave up after just 8 minutes.
Baumeister’s masochism had paid off. He had proven that willpower does exist, and that it is used up when we control our impulses. He named the loss of willpower “ego-depletion”, and over the next few years he documented that those in a state of depleted willpower experience stronger emotions along with a decreased ability to control them.
It turns out that quitting any bad habit does a double whammy on your willpower, but that doesn’t explain why it’s even worse if you’re quitting sugar.
Why It’s Even Worse If You’re Quitting Sugar
In what was initially thought to be a failed experiment one of Baumeister’s pupils stumbled upon a discovery, proving what a Snickers ad campaign already knew, “You aren’t you when you are hungry.”
When you get hungry you may not act like Aretha Franklin or play football like Betty White, but as your blood sugar dips so does your willpower; you become ego depleted. Your emotions and cravings become stronger and you become less able to control your impulses. As it turns out sugar is the fuel that runs your willpower, or at least your blood sugar is anyway.
This is why trying to eliminate sugar, cut your calories, and start a brand new exercise routine all at the same time is the perfect recipe for failure. It’s like running your willpower machine at full throttle while simultaneously siphoning the gas out of the tank.
For myself, I had repeated that gas siphoning experiment so many times that I started to doubt that I was capable of maintaining a healthy diet. I could manage it in short bursts, but the amount of effort it required to change my diet always felt unsustainable.
Why Changing Your Diet Feels Unsustainable
The modern American fast-food carb-rich diet causes us to become “sugar-adapted”, as opposed to becoming “fat-adapted” where our bodies actually use the ready supply of fat-stores for energy. When we are sugar-adapted our bodies get used to only using glucose for energy and storing any excess or slow burning calories as fat to be used sometime in the future when quick-energy carbohydrates are not so readily available.
This type of diet causes our blood sugar to shoot up above healthy levels and then drop quickly below them. The result is we get hungry between meals, and since our bodies are unaccustomed to using stored fat for energy - and we have just burned all of our willpower fuel - we go grab a snack rather than tough it out.
To break this cycle we need to switch from high-glycemic foods that cause our blood sugar to follow the red line in the graph below to low-glycemic foods that track the blue line.
Unfortunately, you could cut out all refined sugar from your diet without seeing any improvement. Our bodies convert flour and starches to glucose (aka “blood-sugar”) so quickly that there wouldn't be much of a difference. The reality is quitting sugar means much more than just laying off of the sweets.
Fortunately, there is some good news here. As it turns out, the slow-burning low-glycemic food we need to break a sugar addiction also happens to be the best fuel for your willpower.
The Best Foods For Kicking A Sugar Addiction
Here are the foods to eat, in no particular order, to break your sugar addiction, refuel your willpower, and to become “fat-adapted” running your body primarily on stored fat rather than glucose.
Low Fat Meats
Poultry
Fish
Beef (Ideally Grass-fed)
Eggs
Dairy (No Non-Fat Or Low-Fat)
Plain Yogurt
Milk
Cheese
Non-Starchy Vegetables (No Potatoes or Corn)
Healthy Fats
Avocados
Olive Oil
Butter
Canola Oil
Coconut Oil
Nuts & Seeds
Low Glycemic Fruits
Berries
Apricots
Peaches
Apples
Grapefruit
Cherries
Beans & Legumes
These foods will keep your willpower fueled, but that doesn’t mean quitting sugar is going to be easy. Forming a new habit around food is difficult. There are so many social cues regarding when and what we eat that it is impossible to avoid them all. There are holidays, birthdays, road trips, and weddings to navigate. Even the simpler versions of a diet habit that you can fall back on are still pretty limiting, so you need to figure out how to preserve your willpower.
How To Preserve Your Willpower
The best way to preserve your willpower is to take it one goal at a time. That is why for the first 30 days without sugar you should give yourself, as I've given myself, permission to skip workouts, to eat as much approved food as you want whenever you want, and to spend more time watching mind numbing trick-shot videos and Netflix shows. There will be time to kick those habits later.
Conclusion
Physical Fitness is a marathon, and if it takes 6 months to get all the right habits in place then so be it. The long-term result will be much better than continual failed attempts of diet and fitness sprints followed by delicious ice cream drenched relapses.
Thanks for making it to the end. If you liked what you read then please consider subscribing and sharing. If you didn’t like what you read then why are you still reading this?