Why Diets Fail (Because You're Addicted to Sugar) (23 page)

Other ideal snacks are nuts like almonds or cashews. These don’t have 0 sugar equivalencies, but they’re low enough to be considered an acceptable snack. And if you go to any health food store, you’ll see that they’re now selling sugar-free peanut butter (which you can eat with carrot or celery sticks).

Another type of snack food to be wary of is bars. People often think they are making a healthy choice by ditching their cookies and instead grabbing trail mix bars, energy bars, and fruit bars. They sound healthier, but when you read the nutrition labels, especially the carbohydrate and sugar content, you’ll see that they can be just as detrimental to your diet goals.

DESSERT

You may be wondering how dessert fits into this diet, but fear not. Not only is dessert possible on this diet, but it can also be delicious. You just need to reconceptualize what a dessert might look like. If you are accustomed to junk-food types of desserts, you can choose things like sugar-free Jell-O. Countless recipes can be found online for sugar-free desserts, including a recipe for sugar-free sugar cookies! However, you don’t want to fall into the habit of eating desserts often. Desserts should be special treats, not eaten after every meal. Desserts should not dominate your diet. Even though they can be made sugar-free, they are still almost all empty calories.

In this chapter and the last, we’ve introduced information to help you put this plan into practice. When you first begin to reduce or eliminate certain types of foods or drinks, however, you may encounter two problems: withdrawal and cravings. Without appropriate strategies to manage them, withdrawal and cravings can derail your best efforts to adopt a healthy, low-carbohydrate diet. In the next two chapters, we will discuss each of these in detail and offer several suggestions for dealing with them so that you can achieve your goals.

FOOD FOR THOUGHT

Think about what you commonly consume for each meal, snack, and beverage. If it contains a high amount of sugar, consider a possible replacement. It may be helpful to use the Sugar Equivalency Table (see
the appendix
) to determine (a) whether a food or drink needs to be replaced and (b) possible options that you may like
.

• What do you eat for breakfast? What are possible replacements?

• What do you eat for lunch? What are possible replacements?

• What do you eat for dinner? What are possible replacements?

• What beverages do you drink? What are possible replacements?

• What snacks do you eat? What are possible replacements?

STEP 6

Managing Your Withdrawal

“
I always think that I am one of the millions and millions of people that struggles with an addiction to food
.”

—
CARNIE WILSON, SINGER

As you’ve already learned, there is scientific support for the idea that certain parts of our brain react to drugs and some foods in the same ways.
¹
There is still some uncertainty about what that similarity actually means
²
in terms of understanding why we have a hard time controlling what we eat and keeping off unwanted, unhealthy, excess body weight, but that doesn’t mean that food dependence and abuse isn’t serious or valid. It’s true that people aren’t robbing liquor stores for money to buy Twinkies, nor are they getting fired for showing up to work with a box of doughnuts (in fact, those people are often well liked in the office). But people who have tried to quit overeating multiple times and failed because they can’t seem to stop
indulging in high-calorie, low-nutrition, palatable foods know how powerful this addiction can be.

The Power of Your Addiction

Food addiction is not socially taboo like most other types of addiction. You don’t have to hide it. There aren’t many social consequences to worry about. There is no need to steal money to fuel your addiction because junk food is cheap. Also, you don’t have to hide your rituals for “using”; you can do it in the office, at your desk, or at the playground. It is okay to bring junk food to all of these places; in fact, people often welcome and encourage it. Think about how many times you have been in an office and seen a bowl of candy sitting on the receptionist’s desk. Have you ever seen a bowl of those tiny liquor bottles that you are served on airplanes? Probably not.

Just because sugar addiction may not be recognized by society doesn’t mean that addiction to food cannot have a power over you like a drug. Remember that just fifty years ago many people laughed at the thought that cigarettes might be addictive. Cigarettes were advertised on television just as sugar-rich foods are today. Beautiful models smoked in TV advertisements just as models today sip sugary beverages.

Unless you have experienced the power of addiction firsthand, it can be difficult to comprehend what an addictive substance or behavior can truly do to a person. And if you don’t understand how powerful an addiction can be in controlling your behaviors and thought processes, it may be more difficult to stop. Addictions are as powerful as they are because they manage to interfere with the proper functioning of your thought and reasoning processes.
³

Anyone who has known an alcoholic can relate to this point. Many have tried hundreds of times to quit drinking alcohol but have been unsuccessful. Some have even had such bad experiences with alcohol that they swore they would never drink again, but a few days later, they are back to the bottle. What goes wrong?

People often (falsely) presume that alcoholics or smokers or even people who are overweight have no willpower, but that isn’t the case. They can have tremendous amounts of willpower when you look at other aspects of their lives. However, this willpower seems to weaken when they try to resist the substance they are addicted to.

Something else appears to be going on. You can’t tell alcoholics that the reason they continued to drink, even after realizing it was bad for their health and career, was because it tasted good or made them feel good. Similarly, this isn’t an adequate explanation for why some people continue to eat sugary foods after they gain weight, simply because the sugar tastes sweet and it’s pleasurable to eat. No, for some people, there’s something else driving this behavior.

After a certain point, what leads people to continue to consume the substance is not necessarily the pleasure derived from using it, but rather they may be using the substance to avoid the nasty side effects of quitting: withdrawal.

As you learned in Step 3, addiction is a cycle (see
this page
). Let’s use the potato chip phenomenon as an example. You might crave a potato chip, eat a handful, and move on with your day. Over time, however, you may find that it takes larger amounts of potato chips to satisfy an increasing tolerance to them. Additionally, many people who have been eating a diet that is rich in carbohydrates experience fairly profound withdrawal symptoms (such as headaches and irritability) when they go without carbohydrates for some time. Powerful cravings for junk foods, sometimes made worse by withdrawal-like symptoms, may lead us to want to eat more and more of the food, which can then lead to breaking a diet and overeating.

Most people who are addicted to things like alcohol generally need to cut them out of their lives in order to function properly. Most rehabilitation facilities and programs recommend that an alcoholic quit drinking alcohol permanently. One drink, or even cues associated with drinking, can activate the brain in an extremely powerful way, leading people to seek out more alcohol. However, this isn’t possible with food. As discussed in the previous chapters, food cannot be abstained from or avoided completely, as we need it to survive. Our goal here isn’t necessarily to eliminate all sugar from your diet, as this may prove impossible and unnecessary for most people. Instead, the goal is to reduce the major sources of sugar in your diet (for example, sugary items like soda, candy bars, and so on) and to try to keep your sugar intake at a low level, instead of the excessive amounts that may be more typically consumed.

During this process, you will likely encounter two problems: withdrawal and cravings. This chapter includes a discussion of what to expect during withdrawal and how to cope with withdrawal symptoms. These symptoms, if not approached proactively and with the right mind-set, may weaken your resolve to avoid eating certain foods. As mentioned earlier, identifying, acknowledging, and addressing the symptoms associated with withdrawal from sugars and other carbohydrates are important parts of the process of changing your diet.

What to Expect During Withdrawal

You are probably already familiar with the concept of withdrawal as it relates to drug addiction. During withdrawal from drugs or alcohol, unpleasant symptoms can emerge, ranging from muscle aches and irritability to tremors.
⁴
The discomfort that can come along
with the withdrawal process may lead some people to take the drug again just to avoid or stop these effects from occurring. In fact, the current
Diagnostic and Statistical Manual
criteria for substance dependence defines withdrawal as either (1) the presence of withdrawal symptoms that are typical for the drug or (2) suppressing or preventing such effects by using the drug or a similar substance. So, withdrawal is not only characterized by the symptoms that emerge after quitting but also by efforts to prevent these potential symptoms from occurring.

This process, where someone might take a drug just to avoid the unpleasant effects of
not
taking it, is sometimes thought of within the context of what is called the opponent-process theory. According to this theory, drug addiction is the result of a pairing of pleasure and withdrawal symptoms. When a person first starts to use a drug or substance, there are high levels of pleasure and low levels of withdrawal symptoms. Over time, however, this balance changes; as the levels of pleasure from using the drug decrease, the levels of withdrawal symptoms increase. Because of this process, a person might be motivated to keep using the drug despite a lack of pleasure from it; instead, they use the drug or substance to avoid feeling lousy from
not
using it.

Symptoms of withdrawal have not only been observed during abstinence following drug use but also during abstinence from some types of palatable foods. Withdrawal symptoms from food addiction can be both physical and psychological in nature. Researchers reviewing the literature regarding humans addicted to refined foods, such as sugar-rich, processed foods, report evidence of withdrawal when people stop eating such foods. For example, participants reported eating sugary foods to combat negative emotional states, such as when they felt anxious, depressed, or tired.
⁵
Also, as mentioned in Step 3, controlled studies show that laboratory animals with a history of overeating sugar show both behavioral and neurochemical symptoms of withdrawal when sugar is no longer made available to them for a period of time. Tremors, teeth chattering, and higher levels of anxiety have all been observed in these animals, suggesting a state of withdrawal.
⁶

THE OPPONENT-PROCESS THEORY OF ADDICTION