“Create healthy habits, not restrictions.”

– Unknown

Well, many of us love sugary foods like candy, cake, soft drinks, chocolate. I personally didn’t feel anything wrong about consuming sugar until half year ago during the journey of doing workout coached by my personal trainer. By that time, getting rid of the belly fat was the most challenge task for me even though I did work so hard, like 2 hours at gym, 6 days a week. The love handler and belly fat never leave. Following advice from my PT, some adjustments were made to my daily diet — avoid consuming the sugary foods especially the added sugar. Well, believe it or not, the progress was huge in a relatively short period of time. And more interestingly, I totally get over of the obsession with sugar. No big fan of candy bar anymore. Because of the life changes in my personal experience, I find it valuable to write a post about the ‘sugary food’ in people’s life. Why many of us are addicted to sugar? Are we totally aware of its harm on our body? If we are aware of its bad to us, why we’re still consuming a lot of them? Sugary food generate happiness?

Alright, a majority are aware of the fact that too much sugar are bad for our body, leading to body health weight gain, obesity, etc., and also affecting our creative thinking process. Well, some people who prefer a ‘healthier’ alternative — zero sugar soda drinks, to the regular one. However, those so-called ‘zero sugar’ tend contains the artificial sweeteners which are even worse to human health than the normal added sugar. An important question: why do we carve sugar?

• Evolution

In prehistoric times, sugary foods were scarce in comparison but they are excellent source of energy . Therefore, our primitive ancestors who consumed the most calories were the ones best able to win the battle of evolution and pass on their genes. On an evolutionary basis, we are evolved to find sugary foods particular pleasurable. Now comes to our modern age, with the advancement of technology, it has made so easy for us to consume far more sweet foods than our body can handle. Even though our sugar rich foods are abundant in our modern environments, our brain is still functioning like our ancestors — wanting sugar so much. The mechanism is dopamine “hits” from eating sugar.

• Dopamine “hits” from eating sugar

Sugar can rewire our brain. Dopamine “hits” from eating sugar cause you to consume more and more sugar, no stop. The rewarding system is repeatedly activated. Thus, we become ‘addicted’ to sugary foods.

Training ourselves to ‘dislike’ sugary food

Since the great of potential of ‘addiction’ to sugar, it must take concerted efforts and linear amount of time to rebuild a habit — avoiding or cutting down sugar in our diet. We need to train ourselves to get used to this new lifestyle. Sugar can rewire our brain. We also can train our body, emotion, and feeling to dislike sugary foods. It’s easy to find tons of articles or videos talking about removing sugar from diet. But not really hit the point that how to change people’s emotion and feeling towards the sugar. If we only understand why too much sugar is bad for body, so we need to cut down sugar. But the thing is we are still strongly desired for sugar, at least, preferably finding sugar very pleasure. Can’t we rewire our brain to ‘dislike’ sugary food? Without any change of such ‘addiction’, the newly-built habit of avoiding too much sugary foods might not last very long.

My strategy to ‘forget’ the obsession with sugary foods

Step 1: Make clarification of life purpose

Who you want to be? What kind of life do you pursue to live?

Step 2: Integrate healthy habits into your life

Once you make a clarification about your life intention, then it’s followed by the daily habits and activities you’re engaged with in your life.

Align life with purpose: healthy, happy, valuable

If you find it not as automatic as it sounds, you might want to try doing workout as I did. As workout itself is not easy for everyone especially at the beginning. Many people give up even before seeing its benefits. So, if you could

Seriously, if workout become integrated into your daily life, you will find it very easy to fall in love with healthy foods. Doing workout and the daily progress on your physical body help you connect your self-clarification with your daily habits as they reflect who you are.

Don’t worry about missing the happiness from consuming sugary foods

‘Sweet’ buy the ‘happiness’ according to many people’s experiences which are also the reason to fall in love with the sugar. Even thought it does provides us ‘happy’ moment, but very short. Is there someway to constantly making us happy in a healthy way? Yes, of course. …..

Happiness could be obtained in many other healthy ways: reading a favourite book, watching a favourite movie, hiking on the favourite mountain. Just do anything you love will generate ‘happiness’ as well. You see, we already have tons of options to generate the ‘dopamine’, why stick to one ‘unhealthy’ option to make us ‘happy’ at that moment.

Start a new lifestyle and enjoy a better life!