Breaking Your Sugar Habit

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Related Episodes:

• Food Craving vs. True Hunger
• Sugar Cravings and Your Brain
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Full Episode Transcript:

Breaking Your Sugar Habit

Hi there, welcome to the podcast. I wanted to do this episode because I know you want to break your sugar habit and probably feel like it’s so hard, maybe impossible. It may be that you feel like you have gained weight because of the sugar. It may be that sugar makes you feel sluggish and you want to increase your energy so that is your motivation to break your sugar habit.

Or your motivation to break your sugar habit might be because of a diagnosis such as diabetes and trying to manage that better with lifestyle modifications. And there are lots of other reasons to break a sugar habit, so regardless of the reason behind it, this episode is for you.

But first, just a quick story. And before I jump into that story, be sure to listen to this entire short episode, because at the end I’m going to tell you about something brand new that is free that you are going to want to take advantage of.

So, this past weekend I was watching my husband Paul play in his beach volleyball tournament. I was sitting and talking with my friend and one of our friends came over after playing a few of her games and mentioned that she needed to go back over to where her stuff was so that she could eat some sugar before her next game. Then she laughed and said, “Oh I probably shouldn’t be saying that in front of Kate.”

She knows that I’m an Eating Habit Coach and said it to jokingly, but it made me think that maybe some people think that just to have good eating habits or healthy eating habits you can’t have any sugar at all. I don’t believe this is the case at all.

What I do believe though is that if you feel like you eat sugar often and that it’s causing something negative for you, such as negatively impacting your physical health or even your mental or emotional health, then that is not a good thing period that is something that you might want to address by breaking your sugar habit.

And just to be clear, if you have sugar every once in a while, that is different than a sugar habit.

A sugar habit is something that will feel out of control for you. You’re eating sugar frequently, and this may be due to having a sugar craving and then acting upon that craving and feeling out of control that way.

It may be that you just don’t know how to shift from eating sugary foods to eating healthier foods and so this keeps you feeling stuck and keeps you eating the sugary foods. It may be an array of reasons For that feeling of not having the control.

Habits are something that are very automatic.

So, if you feel like you just automatically reach for the sugar frequently, you probably have a sugar habit. If you feel that you’re in control and more deliberate about when you’re picking and choosing when to have a dessert for example, then it’s probably not truly a sugar habit.

So, the goal is to get you out of that automaticity, that habit, and into a feeling of control and being very deliberate or intentional about when you are eating the sugar, or the sweet thing. And I’m talking about refined sugars here. I’m not talking about sugars found naturally in things like fruits, even some vegetables, whole grains.

Those are more natural sugars that are inside of nutritious foods that also contain lots of other wonderful nutrients.

I’m talking about sugars that are found in things like candy, baked goods, soda, packaged foods like Ding dongs and granola bars and Twinkies. Do they even make Twinkies anymore, I don’t know. I know they made those when I was a kid back in the late ‘80s and ‘90s, same thing with Ding dong’s. Such funny names for sweet snacks, by the way.

And there are lots of different reasons why you don’t want to be eating lots of these foods, lots of these refined sugary foods. But, think of them kind of like chemicals. You wouldn’t want chemicals wreaking havoc on your body constantly.

Of course a lot of the foods we ingest Can have some nasty things in them, but refined sugars, such as those found in candy and desserts and soda and certainly lots of other things, really lead to a lot of negative effects and preventable diseases, including heart disease. So, let’s break that sugar habit, shall we?

Alright, so if you’ve been a podcast listener, you’ve probably heard me talk about the habit cycle. So there’s this cycle of events that occurs and has to occur frequently in order for a behavior to become a habit. Within this habit cycle, there is a behavior sequence. So a sequence of events that leads to a behavior. So if this behavior sequence occurs over and over and over again, that’s the habit cycle, and that’s how a habit is formed.

There’s always going to be some sort of a trigger, meaning something that cues you or prompts you or triggers you to eat the sugar. This of course, is always going to happen before the behavior itself. So if you have a trigger, and if the behavior itself is easy to do, or easy enough to do, oftentimes your brain will do it, as long as there is some sort of a reward for doing it. Or what your brain perceives as a reward. That will oftentimes be pleasure or lessening of pain or discomfort. Think of emotional eating.

So in the most basic terms, to decrease the likelihood of a behavior from occurring, you would need to make the behavior more difficult to do, and try to remove or decrease the trigger as much as possible. You can also try to make the reward less rewarding, but that can be a little bit more difficult to do than the other two things.

Now, in between the trigger and the behavior itself a couple of things occur. Let’s just say that you see a donut shop while you’re walking downtown. That doughnut shop maybe the visual trigger. If you can smell the freshly made doughnuts, that would also be a trigger as well. That would be an olfactory trigger. Meaning it’s triggering you because of how the doughnuts smell. Delicious, right?

For you to walk into the donut shop, buy a donut and eat the donut, it has to be easy enough to do. Meaning that the donut shop has to be open, you have to have some money, and you have to be physically able to actually eat a donut. There also has to be some sort of reward.

So, if you’ve eaten a doughnut before and thought that it was delicious, your brain is going to know that that pleasure from eating the doughnut is the reward that you should be able to anticipate.

Now, you could of course tell yourself that you’re never going to walk by a donut shop and therefore you’ll never be triggered by donuts, but that may be difficult. There are certainly some things where you can absolutely remove the visual trigger, but some things that you might not be able to. Anything that will help is good though.

Therefore, if you have a situation where you can decrease or remove the trigger, then we do that. If we can make the behavior more difficult to do, then we do that as well. So those are some of the things that I help you with as an eating habit coach.

There’s even more though, because there are more things that occur in between the trigger and the behavior. When there is a trigger, you will have a thought about the trigger. That thought will then lead to a feeling in your body. That feeling in your body will then drive your actions, the behavior.

Sometimes the behavior is inaction for certain things. For example, if you’re feeling tired, you might not exercise even though you told yourself you would exercise that day. So your feelings or your emotions drive your behaviors.

If you want to break your sugar habit, you also need to be aware of your thoughts and know how to manage those so that they create feelings that will not leave you feeling out of control and driving your actions. You’ll be able to have a thought about the trigger that will cause a feeling within you that will help you to not eat the doughnuts when you’re trying to break a sugar habit.

Now again, I want to be clear that of course you can still have donuts right, but if you’re trying to break a sugar habit and you’re really trying to get control, then you want to learn these skills so that you can be in control when those triggers come up. That way, you’re not impulsively buying and eating Donuts just because you’re walking by a donut shop.

Unless of course you feel like you have gotten very good control of your eating habits when you’re not worried that you’ll slip back. Because that’s what it’s all about. It’s not about omitting certain behaviors forever. It’s about feeling in control and being deliberate about your choices. And feeling comfortable that if you do go into the donut shop, buy donuts and eat a doughnut or two, you’re not going to slip back into old habits. That really is the objective.

So just to bring it back to the sequence of events. You have a trigger, that causes a thought to occur in your mind, which then causes a feeling, which can just be a craving or desire, that feeling then drives the behavior. In the case of a sugar habit, that behavior would be eating of the sugar. Or doing the thing so that you can eat the sugar.

Then, you get the reward of pleasure. Because of this reward, your brain wants to repeat this cycle of events. And that’s how a habit ends up forming. You do this frequently enough and you now have a sugar habit.

 But like I said, to break your sugar habit, this whole cycle needs to be broken up. And each of the components within that cycle needs to be addressed. Otherwise, it’s going to be so much harder to break the habit. And that’s why I can help you. I help you with all of those components within that cycle.

There are a lot of people out there that say, “oh just don’t do the thing.” That’s so hard though for most humans and that’s because of your thoughts and your feelings. And because of the automaticity of the habit itself, you actually have to break up that sequence of events that occurs. That’s the behavioral science side of it. But it’s very doable.

Just as you can form a habit, you can also break a habit. And that includes emotional eating. So if you feel like your sugar habit is from emotional eating, we find the emotions or the feelings that are driving the behaviors and we still work on that same cycle of events. We find all of it and we address all of it.

Alright, that’s what I have for you on breaking your sugar habit. I do want to talk about a fun new thing that I am offering at least for the summer, so you’ll want to listen up.

This is only being offered to the people on my e-mail list, so get on my e-mail list if you want this. I’m offering free written coaching, so you can submit something that you need help with, and that can be eating habits, mindset, motivation, anything related to eating habits including weight loss. I will then provide some written coaching back to you.

This is so valuable because, hey it’s free coaching, but also oftentimes we need to rehear or reread something in order for it to really sink in. In order for it to really have an impact and really help you.

So, with written coaching you have it right in front of you so you can reread it however many times you want. I will also ask you questions within it to get you thinking about your situation and maybe how you’re thinking and feeling about certain things, so that you can discover more about why you may be stuck in a certain eating habit (that you probably didn’t think about before) and better be able to start to get out of that eating habit.

Like I said, you have to be on my e-mail list, because this is not going to be something that you can access just from my website or my social media. I will be sending out an e-mail when I’m opening up the written coaching, inviting you to submit what you need coaching on, what you need help with.

Here’s the catch, I don’t know how many written coaching requests I am going to get, so I’m limiting it to five. The first five people.

So when I send an e-mail out opening up the written coaching, the first five people to submit their thing that they want coaching on, those will be the ones that i will respond back to. But don’t worry, because you can just save your submission.

Pro Tip: I recommend before you press the submit button you screenshot or even better, you copy and paste and save it somewhere else. That way when I open it up again a couple of weeks later, you can quickly copy and paste and submit your question and more likely be one of the first 5 to get free written coaching.

I cannot wait to help you out. So get on my e-mail list, in any way possible, if you aren’t already. You can do that right on the episode page if you’re listening to this episode from my website. So if you sign up for the weekly tips or the free class, you will be on the e-mail list, so you’ll be all set and you’ll be notified when written coaching is opening.

Or, if you’re currently listening to this episode on a podcast app, just click on the episode description, and you’ll see a link there to get on the e-mail list for weekly tips. Like I said, as long as you’re on, you will get that invitation each time it opens up. So fun, I’m so excited for you. I would’ve loved if any of my coaches did this for free.

Alright, thanks so much for listening, take care and I’ll talk with you soon.