No one can have escaped this year’s shocking sugar headlines: more addictive than tobacco, more dangerous than alcohol, more fattening than fat.
Countless column inches have been devoted to telling us exactly why — and how — we should be cutting back on sugar, hidden in almost everything we eat.
Binning the sweet stuff: Nicole has turned her life around
But if you’ve ever been on a diet, decided to get fit or tried to give up smoking you’ll know it’s not starting the change that’s difficult, it’s sticking to it.
So what you probably haven’t heard is what it’s really like to give sugar up. To ride out the cravings and physical withdrawal symptoms; to fill the emotional void left by removing sweet treats from your life; to change the nature of relationships bound by sugar-coated ties — and to come out the other side slimmer, healthier and happier than before.
And, believe me, had anyone said, two years ago, that the person telling you all this would be me, I would have laughed in their face.
I can’t stress enough how unlikely a pin-up I am for a sugar-free lifestyle. Two years ago, I was the girl with six bottles of champagne in her fridge, ten beers, 20 bottles of expensive nail polish (tip: this helps slow down colour fading). And not much else.
I had a great social life, a good — if stressful — job, a flat in London, and ate out a lot. In my early 30s, I thought I was having the time of my life. Yet there was something badly wrong; something I couldn’t quite put my finger on.
Most nights, I was sleeping poorly, waking up in the early hours, then struggling to get back to sleep. In fact, I’d become so alarmed at my constant tiredness that I’d recently bought a carbon monoxide detector to see if I was being secretly poisoned in my flat (I wasn’t).
Meanwhile, despite taking pricey vitamins by the handful, I’d had ten bad bouts of tonsillitis in two-and-a-bit years. Plus, I suffered from painful, irregular periods.
No amount of expensive skincare made any difference to the fast-growing crop of fine lines on my face, or my recent outbreaks of acne.
And why, when I’d been going to the gym, seeing a personal trainer, eating low-fat foods and cycling six miles to work, was I still overweight?
Not hugely — at 5 ft 10 in, I was a size 14-16 and just over 13st — but I could never seem to shift the couple of stone that clung to my belly and back.
Increasingly, too, I was snappy, and dogged by mood swings that could make me the life and soul of the party one minute, then grumpy, angry and tearful the next.
On top of that, a two-month relationship had just ended with the dreaded ‘Shall we just be friends’ line — which everyone knows really means ‘I just don’t fancy you very much’.
DID YOU KNOW?
Each year, 180,000 deaths worldwide can be attributed to the consumption of sugary drinks
A week after the break-up, I got on my bike and cycled into the newspaper office where I worked. It was a warm, sunny Monday — June 25, 2012 — and I was determined to shake off my sluggishness.
As always, because I was doing something virtuous, I focused on giving myself a treat when I arrived. And I knew exactly what it would be: a healthy Granola Parfait from Le Pain Quotidien, a chain of posh Belgian cafés.
Now, a Granola Parfait is a large-sized plastic beaker filled with one-third low-fat plain yogurt, one-third granola (baked muesli sweetened with honey) and one-third fruit salad. Tasty and healthy, I thought.
But as I stood at the counter that morning, I felt the penny drop. With all that fruit and sweetened muesli, my healthy breakfast contained an awful lot of sugar.
Sugar wasn’t so much of a talking-point in 2012. But as a lifestyle journalist, I knew more about the subject of diet than most. Could this be why I was feeling so terrible?
I considered my lunch plans. Sushi — favourite food of the supermodels — had to be good for you, didn’t it?
At my desk, a quick check on the internet revealed that while fish might be fine, the white rice — a refined carbohydrate that turns to sugar in the body — is often marinated in sugar and a sweet rice wine sauce to make it sticky and flavoursome.
The rest of my diet followed the same pattern. Although I’d never contemplate a burger for lunch (too fattening), I’d happily have a chocolate bar a few hours later, between grazing on tangerines or grapes. Forget ‘five a day’. I was getting about ten, and almost all from fruit. All packed with sugar.
Dinner? A ‘healthy’ stir-fry with sweet chilli sauce and white rice, or pasta of some kind, before collapsing on to the sofa with a glass of red wine.
Far from eating a balanced diet with a few treats thrown in, as I’d assumed I was, I realised that almost everything I put into my mouth contained sugar.
Sugar addiction: From her childhood Nicole (aged 15) craved sweet foods
So, why is that so bad for you? First, refined sugars have no nutritional benefit at all. Second, they make you fat. Third, too much sugar can make your body resistant to the hormone insulin, which not only leads to obesity, but — according to recent research — makes you more susceptible to cancer.
It can also affect the pumping mechanism of your heart, cause similar damage to the liver to that done by heavy drinking, prematurely age the skin, lead to diabetes and disrupt your sleep patterns.
I was so shocked at what I read, I made up my mind there and then. I was going to go cold turkey and stop eating sugar.
At the very least, I hoped I’d lose a few pounds.
While I’m no fan of fad diets, restricting your sugar intake involves no points systems, no calorie-counting. You simply learn which foods contain too much sugar, and avoid them.
Easier said than done, but the first step is to remove temptation. That means all processed food — and all alcohol. So the next morning, before work, I threw out anything that looked remotely sugary.
The tally included: four different varieties of honey; my favourite cordials — elderflower, ginger and lemongrass; a few large cartons of fruit smoothies; all my stir-in sauces, dips and ketchups; cereals; pasta; rice; bars of dark chocolate; biscuits; three tubs of Ben & Jerry ice-creams; wine, beer and spirits.
Actually, I didn’t remove all the food containing sugar. That would be almost impossible. Sugar is present, to varying degrees, in unprocessed nutritious foods, such as dairy products and vegetables, including spinach, kale and cabbage. It’s even present in whole grains (brown rice, spelt, quinoa) and nuts.
Taken in moderation, though, sugar is not a poison or a toxin. A bit now and then won’t kill you. But consuming it in huge quantities, as most of us do, is a different matter.
DID YOU KNOW?
Animals who just drink water have been shown to live longer than those given a sugar and water solutions
The NHS says added sugars can safely make up 10 per cent of our daily calorie intake — which amounts to 50g or 12½ teaspoons a day for women, and 70g or 17½ teaspoons per day for men.
Many researchers claim these figures should be much lower — about six teaspoons a day for women and eight teaspoons for men.
And guess what? On average, we’re eating 700 g of sugar a week. That’s 175 teaspoons. And precisely double the ‘safe’ NHS limit.
So I won’t soft-soap you. Changing the way I eat was far from easy. I spent days thinking about the lovely, sugary foods I was trying not to eat.
Fortunately, this feeling, although bizarre, was short-lived. What took far longer was overcoming my physical reaction to being deprived of sugar.
Most experts maintain that eating excess sugar — while very bad for you — does not qualify as an addiction. That said, sugar withdrawal is a serious business. If you’ve previously had a very high sugar intake, as I did, giving it up can be painful and debilitating.
My first day passed surprisingly uneventfully. I didn’t feel as deprived as I’d expected.
Not hungry: Unlike her sister Natalie (right), Nicole (left) would seek solace in sugar even when she wasn't hungry
Breakfast was eggs with grilled mushrooms; lunch a hearty dressing-free salad; for snacks, I had a couple of oatcakes with hummus. Dinner was grilled chicken with an avocado salad, followed by a full-fat Greek yogurt with a toasted flaked almonds and cinnamon.
Day two, however, was anything but a breeze. Moving my head produced such acute pain I was almost sick. My limbs ached, as if I were coming down with the flu. All day, I endlessly fantasised about a can of full-sugar Coca-Cola and a tube of Smarties. So, when I got home, I cracked and reached for my drug of choice. Or rather, I rummaged in the bin to dig out the bottle of lemongrass and ginger cordial I’d dumped the day before.
There was just a trickle left, but I glugged it down. And, within minutes, my headache had gone. I felt energised, happy — and horror-struck. Withdrawing from sugar was clearly going to be a lot worse than I’d imagined.
Sure enough, the headache was soon back. My body was in the midst of a huge chemical, behavioural and physical transformation. It was a week before I felt well again.
Now, I realise that if you’re trying to give up sugar, or perhaps considering it, my withdrawal symptoms may be causing you to have a rethink. Yours, however, are unlikely to be as bad. In fact, for most people they last only three days.
The secret, I found, to getting through the first week was to change the focus of my ‘rewards’ from the short-term to the long. Rather than reward myself with a biscuit, I concentrated on the reward of soon being at least a dress size smaller.
I also tried to focus on the fact that, within days, I’d be feeling better than I had in months.
Then I went shopping to replenish my larder and fridge. My non-sugary haul included nuts, seeds, cinnamon, organic whole yogurt, rice milk, herbal teas, brown rice, spelt pasta, eggs, hummus, pulses, organic oak-smoked salmon, mackerel, avocados, almond nut butter, olive and coconut oil, sweet potatoes and lots of vegetables.
Bizarrely women were more bothered by my decision than men. I began to worry that sugar might be the glue that held some of my relationships together
The first positive change was that, after years of insomnia, I was sleeping through the night. Then the worst of the spots on my face disappeared. A colleague even remarked that the whites of my eyes looked brighter.
Two weeks in, my clothes had become looser and my stomach flatter, which was probably down to the fact that my normally sluggish digestion had ramped up several gears. Around week three, I started to feel less moody. There were no more mid-morning and teatime slumps when I ‘needed’ a biscuit.
My taste buds also went into overdrive. Things that hadn’t tasted sweet before — milk and almonds, for instance — took on a new flavour.
Better still, in the first month I lost more than half-a-stone without ever feeling hungry or deprived.
But giving up sugar required me to change in ways I simply didn’t imagine when I started, challenging previously strong friendships.
But giving up sugar required me to change in ways I simply didn’t imagine when I started, challenging previously strong friendships.
New lease of life: Since giving up sugar Nicole feels slimmer, healthier and happier
Although most of my friends were hugely supportive, bizarrely women were more bothered by my decision to quit unhealthy foods and boozing than men. I began to worry that sugar might be the glue that held some of my relationships together — and whether they would come unstuck without it.
My lowest point came at a wedding reception, where a friend kept pressuring me to eat and drink to excess because she didn’t want to do so alone. My male friends, on the other hand, didn’t give a damn about my low sugar kick. If I had water while they had a beer, they never drew attention to the fact.
Why did some of my friends behave in this way? Psychologist Amanda Hills, who specialises in addictions and behaviour change, told me: ‘What you’re describing is effectively an attempt at sabotage. Often people do it because there’s something they want to change about themselves, but can’t quite bring themselves to.
‘You’re forcing your friends to look at their behaviour and their choices, which is uncomfortable.’
I also wondered if I’d filled a role in people’s lives. Before, I was the slightly chubby, funny friend who didn’t give a damn whether she was eating or drinking too much.
And now? To be honest, overhauling your diet goes hand-in-hand with a lifestyle change, and part of that was changing how I see my friends socially.
For instance, my friend Jane and I play tennis rather than sitting in the pub. Or, instead of tearing around London as we used to, Maya and I go out to dinner and the cinema.
Two years on, I’m the living proof that cutting out sugar is one of the keys to a happier and healthier life
I still go to parties and bars — but I’m no longer the go-to partner in crime for anyone who wants a big night out.
And the trade-off has been well worth it. Two years on, I’m the living proof that cutting out sugar is one of the keys to a happier and healthier life.
I’m fitter. My skin’s clear. I sleep like a baby. My periods have regulated themselves. I’m free from cravings and no longer tired all the time.
My weight has dropped so I’m now a size 10-12 and a lot less wobbly. I don’t get tonsillitis any more. I’m less moody — so a much nicer person to be around.
But above all, for the first time in years, I feel in control of my life.
And if I can do it — me, the girl who was once caught eating apple crumble out of a bin — anyone can.
So hooked, I ate apple crumble out of the kitchen bin
Like many people, I’d long been getting a lot of my emotional validation from sweet food.
In fact, when I was 11, at home in Worthing, Sussex, I was caught in the act of eating an apple crumble out of the kitchen bin.
Having eaten a full dinner plus two helpings of dessert, I wasn’t hungry. In fact, I remember feeling uncomfortably full. Yet I still wanted more. Mum had thrown the crumble in the kitchen bin, assuming that I wouldn’t carry on picking from it if it wasn’t in the fridge. She was wrong.
Emotional eater: Nicole at six (left) with sister Natalie (second right) and family friends
Why, despite an idyllic upbringing, did I eat food when I wasn’t hungry? Why did I take such solace in sugar while my sister Natalie — raised in a similar way — did not?
The answer, I know now, is simply that I’m an emotional eater and she isn’t. I’d get cravings for sugar whenever I was bored, or anxious, under pressure or nervous. There’s a good reason why people like me end up eating vast quantities of sugary foods. We want to feel better.
To put ourselves in a good mood, we need to produce the hormone serotonin. And what’s one quick way to produce more serotonin?
Eating carbohydrates, especially sugar-rich ones.
According to Professor Robert Lustig, a paediatric endocrinologist: ‘Over time, more sugar is needed for the same effect — driving a vicious cycle of consumption to generate a meagre pleasure in the face of persistent unhappiness.’
This certainly made sense of my uneven moods.
I turned to it when I had a bad day, for example, or when someone had let me down — so jettisoning sugar initially left me feeling as if I had an emotional void in my life.
It takes willpower to pass this stage — but it’s worth it.
- Adapted by Corinna Honan from Sweet Nothing by Nicole Mowbray © Nicole Mowbray 2014, published by Orion Books at £7.99 in paperback and £3.99 in ebook. To order a copy for £7.49 (p&p free) call 0844 472 4157
Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-2658488/The-hell-giving-sugar-worth-agony-end-Were-endlessly-told-sugar-new-nicotine-Now-witty-revealing-new-memoir-describes-hard-quit.html#ixzz34lk9jUvD
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