 Question is from Friens de Mamos. How would you go about curing a sugar addiction? Oh boy, oh boy. So there's two parts to this. One part is the physiological response that you have to sugar. And sugar is part of the sugar, salt, fat mix that creates hyper palatability. There's a lot of things that create hyper palatability. And that refers to just the hedonistic value of food to pleasure of eating food. And sugar is a part of that, right? So the physiological effects are you eat it, you enjoy it, makes you feel good, probably causes you to want more just like anything you enjoy. By the way, this applies to anything that you have a lot of enjoyment over. It could be sex, it could be gambling, it could be drugs and it could also be sugar. So there's the physiological effects. And when your body's used to something all the time physiologically when you remove it you may notice some withdrawal. Now sugar withdrawal, physiologically speaking, I'm gonna talk about the psychological piece too in a second, but physiologically speaking it's not like alcohol withdrawal or you know, other drug withdrawal where you get this pronounced, even caffeine withdrawals far worse physiologically speaking but you may notice that food just tastes more bland. That's the withdrawal physiologically. Your brain was used to sweetness. Now you eliminate it and now food just doesn't taste as good. That'll take you about a week to get rid of and that's not really the big problem though. That part right there is not that big of an issue. The bigger issue is the psychological piece. If you're using sugar as a way to make yourself feel better or to comfort yourself or as a way to distract yourself when you remove that you've lost your way of comforting yourself. You've lost your way of distracting yourself. Now you have to deal with whatever it was that you were trying to numb or whatever. And this is true for anything that you use. It wasn't the first part of that figuring out what those triggers are. Totally. Like when you feel the urge like what time it is during the day like what sparked that in terms of like what kind of feeling you have like if you've been depressed all day like is certain things like stressing you out like are you prone to then going and getting this sugar to kind of cope with that thing. But yeah, you have to find something else to replace that with and to be able to create a new healthier habit and then create barriers sort of around what your go-to is. So I like talking about this because this has been a lifelong struggle for myself. You're recovering. Yeah. A long time. So many mykenites. Recovering sugar addicts for sure. And this may or may not work for you but I'll give you some things that I've pieced together over decades of working on this myself and attempting and failing, attempting and failing and getting better and better and better at it. One thing I noticed for sure was once I started to avoid processed foods and this includes the healthy processed foods like protein bars. If it's got sugar alcohols and artificial sweeteners in it those are what is it? I think it's a hundred or a thousand times sweeter than regular sugar. That's still giving that perception of sweet. So it gives you that perception even more. Like this was even why it was so hard for me to get rid of like Diet Cokes was like that was like the kind of the last straw for me was like eliminating that because it still was giving me that feeling of like getting that much sugar even though I wasn't getting real sugar. So getting rid of all of that and I would say South Side a week it took me a little bit longer than a week. I'd say it took me about a solid month before like the taste of fruit came back. Like literally I could eat a strawberry, blueberries, a banana and they like tasted like nothing. Like they tasted bland for me for many, many years. I just I never even really cared for fruit because of that. And it wasn't until I eliminated all the processed sugars and artificial sweeteners out of the diet and consistently did that like really, really good for us at least a solid month. And then when I would start to have things like strawberries and bananas and blueberries I was so blown away by how amazing they tasted but they never tasted like that for me because of how much I was constantly eating sugar. So that was one thing that really helped. The second thing that helped a lot was actually doing like a ketogenic diet, a higher fat diet, lower carbohydrate. I noticed when and so, you know, keto would work probably well for this, carnivore would work really well for this. I've recommended like whole 30 to people before to get them going on this for a while, will help like with the whole foods. But a higher fat, lower carbohydrate intake seemed to kick some of the crazy cravings that I would get. What I would find if I had, let's say something that wasn't even like lots of sugar, just like a major car, a quick carb, like a oatmeal for breakfast. I'd have oatmeal and blueberries for breakfast. And man, two hours later, I would just be craving food more. And if I let that go longer than two or three hours, then the sweet and the bad would start to crave even harder. So switching to a breakfast like eggs and bacon and like maybe a fatty meat or, you know, butter in there, avocado, like having that for breakfast, I'd noticed not only satiated me but it also eliminated a lot of the cravings that I was having for the sweet. So those are just a couple of things and like anything else, I would wing myself off. I wouldn't go, if you're first evaluate how bad your sugar addiction is, are you eating 150 grams a day, 200, 300 grams a day? Like figure out where you're at and slowly start to scale out. And the way I would scale out is by first eliminating the processed foods, eliminating, because sugar fruit, not bad. And for me, that's what I'm always looking for. I'm looking for, you know, 90% or all of my sugar is coming from fruit now. And then the rest of it is not found in my foods or other bullshit. We've seen products be developed around this where they try to change the actual flavor of sweet and turn it into like a sour or bitter. Yeah, and so I was, it's interesting that I would love to see the success rate with that. But obviously, you know, that's something that you already have to agree to want to put in before then you grab your normal like snicker bar or whatever to kind of cope with. It's like, it eliminates the pleasure of it. Are you really gonna do that? Yeah, it requires you to stop, be aware enough to do something and then to then make the thing that is pleasurable to you not be pleasurable anymore. Which may work if it is, if it's a type of barrier. Yeah, if you're disciplined enough. Yeah, if it's a barrier for you and you take that extra step. You know, if you have to address both, if you have to address the physiological aspect of it, like we're talking about where, you know, food tastes bland. That one's not that hard to deal with when you take out the psychological piece. The psychological piece is the hard part. Why, what is it that this food is providing? Typically it's pleasure, it feels good. Okay, why am I seeking this pleasure? And perhaps you're addicted to good feelings, which is very, very common. All of us have dealt with this or most people have dealt with this. Or maybe you're just feeling bad about something and that's your way of distracting yourself. And so it does require a certain level of, you know, willingness to increase or improve that self-awareness. It's sometimes people try to fix a problem by still remaining unaware and just going on a strict diet of some type. And what that tends to lead to is you restrict binge type model, which just doesn't work. So that self-awareness piece is such an important part of working on any type of a, you know, I hate to use the word addiction because that's a clinical term, but anything that you feel has power over you that you wish didn't have that much power over you. Next.