Day 6: Caffeine vs. Sugar Withdrawal
Thursday, September 12, 2013
9:15 am
Withdrawing from sugar is much easier than withdrawing from caffeine. I discuss why I am concentrating on cutting sugar alone, rather than carbohydrates in general.
Video Summary:
This bottle now has 12 1/2 tsp of sugar or 50 grams of sugar. The drink is still very sweet, and I’m looking forward to drinking it in the morning. I’ve found that, compared to the caffeine withdrawal program that I did in the spring, this sugar withdrawal program has been much easier. I’ve had cravings for sugar, but nowhere near the cravings I had for caffeine.
Yesterday went OK with no real problems. One thing that is coming up is that I’m sometimes eating pasta. One of the concerns is that many refined carbohydrates – such as pasta – have a high glycemic index, which means that the carbohydrate is converted rapidly into glucose. So these carbohydrates can convert into glucose even faster than table sugar or high fructose corn syrup.
So in this program I should probably be cutting out these carbohydrates as well, but the way I’m going to do it is to generally minimize these breads and pastas, but not cut them out entirely, and try to eat the whole grain varieties.
As I mentioned a few days ago, there are at least two theories on the dangers of sugar. One is that they tend to spike your blood sugar which is unhealthy over time in terms of obesity, diabetes and metabolic syndrome. The other, newer theory is that the main problem is fructose. Sucrose and high fructose corn syrup contained fructose which is considered by some to be toxic.
In this program I’m going to give this second theory the benefit of the doubt and assume that the main danger is in sugar (fructose) and not so much the blood sugar spikes caused by high glycemic breads and pastas. The bottom line is that over the next thirty days I’m going to be cutting out sugar and not worrying so much about breads and pastas.
I’m still on the program and everything seems to be going well.