The Sugar Detox

My mind is not crazy or rigid any more, which means I often have the inclination, often on a whim, to try a bunch of crazy experiments. The latest one in this series is the sugar detox diet. I got a flyer on Thursday last week which talked about doing the sugar detox, which basically entails going cold turkey on sugar, and I thought I would give it a try over the weekend.

The premise of the diet is to reset the way your body reacts to sugar. You go off sugar completely for three days - and completely means no carbs (which break down into sugar in the body), no dairy or fruit (which contain natural sugars) and no alcohol (which also break down into sugar). After the three days are up, and all existing sugar has left your body, kicking and screaming, and your body has forgotten the taste of sugar, you will re-introduce sugar into your system, albeit only the natural types of sugar, and over time. Starting with an apple per day (which keeps the doctor away).

But the diet itself does strange things to you. All of this serves to show you how dangerous the sugar addiction can be. Here's what happened to me.

I started craving food, to the point where I was almost hallucinating about it. Weird things started going through my mind: daydreaming about stealing my beloved's Coca Cola, remembering the taste of some of my mother's homemade sweets, and arguing with myself about which foods contain starch and sugar and which don't.

I started feeling hungry. All the time. All the time. All the effing time. I mean, for the second day, I made myself a vegetable mixture of cabbage and carrots with oil and spices, and I made a full wok's worth of it. A full cabbage and eight long carrots. I ate the entire thing throughout the day. And invariably, each time, after eating a full plate's worth of it - I was still hungry.

The hunger led to headache and weakness by the third day. My legs were physically tired, moving was painful, and the headache did nothing to help my resolve to get through this stupid diet. Of course, this was expected and the article had warned about this; but I myself was amazed at how I felt. I had zero energy, even though I was eating eggs and vegetables nearly all the time - I ate nine eggs in two days. I could deal with starvation much better as a kid - but then, kids should never have to starve or experiment with starving. My adult body did not take kindly to the carbohydrate deprivation.

Even my poop looked different - after the second day, I saw whole pieces of carrot come out, as though they had not been processed at all. What a horror I felt to see that - my body was just processing all the plain sugar I was consuming from candy, cake and Coke, and using that for my energy supply, and meanwhile all the good stuff was just passing through my body almost untouched.

I finally gave in on the third day in the afternoon. I went to a Thai restaurant, and had a small amount of rice with my curry. But another learning was in store for me - how different the food tasted. The flavor with this particular restaurant is always good, but this time the flavors were beautifully intense. My tongue had not tasted sugar in three days, so I could appreciate the food better, in a way. Interesting theory.

This diet was torture, and since I had done this as an experiment, I had learned the lesson. While not as bad as some other people I know, my body is definitely addicted to sugar, and it is not healthy. Going off it was good as an experiment, though probably not one I want to repeat in a long time. I had originally thought to do it first myself, then force my beloved to do it, but I don't think I have the heart to do that. 

Instead, we will do the bean diet. Hopefully that will be more fun than the sugar detox; I have had good feedback about it.