Sugar sugar…

Observation number 1: When you wake up constantly throughout the night, until you get to morning and your eyes feel like chunks of lead… something’s wrong

Observation number 2: When you start to despise the food that’s in front of you… something’s wrong

Observation number 3: When you are sitting on your floor, at 11:45pm eating celery and peanut butter after coming home from a show and you ask yourself would choosing the yoghurt have been less fattening?… something’s wrong.

Now, I’m not a super sleuth, and perhaps it should not have taken all three light-bulb moments to do something, but like many things in life, it did.

So I quit sugar.

I know, I know. Sounds big, eh? It also is, annoyingly coming into trend. It’s something I read about four years ago and didn’t follow it through. It wasn’t that I wasn’t interested, my excuses at the time:

1. Sugar seemed to be in virtually everything. How was I to cut that out?! And I didn’t feel like I had the time (perhaps just the inclination) do to the hunting

2. I love to bake. And what?! I couldn’t bake?!!!

3. There were beautiful, tempting treats in the cupboard. Of course. Like that chocolate…

Ultimately, I just wasn’t ready. There are some things you really have to decide on your own to have the conviction to follow through with, and this is definitely one of them. The first light-bulb moment was a lengthy one… I was feeling constantly ill, my stomach was unsettled, I wasn’t sleeping properly and I had no energy to get through the day. I was having more and more sweet stuff to pull myself through and still I was falling asleep on the trains and struggling to keep my eyes open in my lunch breaks. Yes, I’m crazy busy, but this seemed a little extreme.

So I pulled out the book I’d been thinking about sporadically for a few months: Sweet Poison by David Gillespie. I’d read it for the first time four years ago…it didn’t stick then, but maybe now? I was compelled to try enough that I’d brought it with me to England from Australia.

Now, I haven’t re-read all of it, and he explains it in much more depth than I will here, but in a nutshell: fructose, half of the duo that make up sugar is not recognised by the body, still, it undergoes the same process converting to fat that fats and carbohydrates do. In a healthy, functioning body, fats and carbohydrate consumption is regulated because our body knows when we’ve had enough. In fact, we’re all really supposed to be healthy, slender people. Fructose is the thing that’s heating up the obesity epidemic. Now these are large sweeping statements, and I promise to go into a little bit more detail further down the road, but for now let’s just say it’s a good thing to eat healthy fats (in moderation of course) that fill you up than sugary emptiness fat-inducing fructose. Did I convince you?

Now, if I can tell you a little bit about what I’ve been thinking…

Dancers are always conscious of their body. The more you dance, the more in tune you become until you’re a well-oiled machine of internal consciousness. Movement-wise we respect, use and grow with this function that allows us to becomes better movers. The fat and muscle on our body – our body’s actual composition – doesn’t get this same royal treatment. Weight is a thing that fluctuates… and it should in small doses because the body is a living, breathing, functioning thing. Instead of getting scared at measurements, it would do us well to listen to out bodies and act accordingly. If this is true and fructose is actually impossible for me to correlate with what my body’s doing, then why am I having it?

These arguments in my head take me back to my childhood when mum used to stop me adding the whole amount of sugar in a recipe to things (thanks mum!), or stopped me having the overly sugared cereal… (she knew what she was doing…)…

This is not going to become a foodie’s blog, there’s enough of those out there, and many far better than mine would ever be. This is just me conveying a little about what I’m up to and (though I hate to admit it) something small to make me accountable. It’s also a shout out to dancers (and non dancers alike). There is so much misconstrued information out there, I want to share in my findings.

I’ve been off sugar two days so far, and even in that time I can say that I’ve finally slept through my first full night in weeks and woke up without having to pry my eyes open. I did not fall asleep in public transport and felt strong enough to say no to sugary substances at work I was not-too-long-ago loathe to part with.

Hmm… It’s a new adventure. Hopefully it’ll help. Let’s see, shall we?

Have you heard of this no sugar idea?

Have you tried it yourself?

Did it work?

Related Posts: Let’s Talk About…Eating