Sugar Withdrawals – The Battle with Sugar

Battle with Sugar

During the first week of doing paleo, I was distraught. I had half a bag each of brown and white sugar at home which I didn’t know what to do with, not to mention the Socker packets I still have from IKEA. I was about to enter the first week of hell, away from sweets which quite honestly I was very fond of. I have consumed the last of my Market-O brownies, caramel almond candies, and Jeju Harubang chocolates, all from South Korea.

Korean Chocolates

I was very conflicted in throwing away the sugars I had stored in the house like an ant preparing to hibernate in winter or something. I just stashed them away from my prying eyes, cast into oblivion, or at least until my mom shows up and eats the stuff.

I decided to assign a cheat day once a month where I could eat all the carbohydrates I f&cking want. I scheduled it on the day my buddy Jae was going to treat me with some Chef Arnold’s New York pizza, which was also the day my other friend, Daryl would treat me with Rogue One: A Star Wars story – a very good film, but a filler nonetheless, and possibly another non-paleo meal. However, that day was a few weeks away, and I was craving sugar madly.

Chef Arnold's Pizza

There were moments when all I could think about was sniffing the empty Nutella jar and licking off what appeared to be dregs of toxic sugar at the bottom. Ugh, these were dark days, I tell ya. And I know it was mental, but in order for me to transition to a healthier lifestyle, this needed be done. I lamented my sugar intake.

I knew I could only consume 37 grams of sugar per day. That’s the optimum requirement for males. Women, however, can only consume 2/3rds of that around 25 grams. I looked into the Nescafe Café Latte sachet and observed the Nutrition Facts.

Nescafe

It said 13 grams of sugar. Not bad, I reckoned. Still plenty of room for more sugar. Then I took a gander at the Carbohydrates because who were we kidding? These carbohydrates became glucose, and they’re still sugar.

Nutrition Facts

It said 21 grams of Carbohydrates. What the F? This thing was loaded with sugar. Then I gloomily computed how much allowed sugar intake I had left. 37-21=16. 16 grams left. That’s like what, 4 teaspoons of sugar? I was petrified to look at the tomato sauce packet I had for a beef chili dip I was planning on making for dinner.

Sugar is an anti-nutrient. It binds into the other nutrients from the nutritious food that we eat and makes sure that our body doesn’t get them. It’s an evil, evil thing that must be stopped! It’s officially more addictive than cocaine, and the general populace has unlimited access to it anywhere – grocery stores, supermarkets, et cetera. It’s literally everywhere – in the form of candies, gum, lozenges, sauces, and any other delicious tasting stuff you can think of.

Sugar

It’s incredibly deceiving as well. It’s hidden everywhere under different names – corn syrup, rice syrup, gluten, fructose, dextrose, anything with the “–ose” suffix, malt, maltose, barley malt?, anything malt-y, and a whole myriad of chemical names designed to mislead the health-conscious consumer who reads the ingredients of the things they buy. It’s the only way to put more sugar in without the government or the consumer knowing how much sugar they’re actually consuming.

Krispy Kreme

Since the vilification of fat, low-fat shit tastes like, well,… like shit. Hence, in order to optimise the tastes of these products, guess what companies add to them? That’s right – sugar. In order for these products to be remotely edible, they are injected with high fructose corn syrup, which is the worst kind of sugar. It’s refined, it’s ready, and it’s deadly. It’s the reason you get fat. You see, we don’t need any additional glucose at all. We have a wonderful and overachieving liver that produces glucose already.

Liver

Then we add more in our system, and our liver is like, “What gives? I just made all this glucose. Where the heck am I going to put this now?” Then he tucks them in in your gut. And you can imagine the rest.

As I’m writing this, I have been doing paleo for 4 months now. It’s been very rewarding, I daresay. Bread, pasta, and sweets don’t really appeal to me like they used to. I only eat rice occasionally, and even then, I can’t eat lots of it because I get full easily. I don’t need to do intermittent fasting because since I’ve eating nutrient-dense foods, I only need to eat either once or twice a day. The only place I go when I visit a local supermarket is the produce section. It astounds me how aisles and aisles of processed foods and sugar are being consumed so ridiculously extremely by the average consumer. Then they wonder why they are getting humungous every day. I can only wish them good luck in their endeavours from afar.