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This article is contributed to Evolving Wellness by Dr. Scott Olson. Dr. Olson is a naturopathic doctor and an expert in natural medicine, as well as the author of the book Sugarettes. More from Dr.Olson at www.olsonnd.com
Most people cannot make it through one day without sugar; much less make it a whole month.
Sugar has slowly crept into almost every food that we eat and while it has made our lives tastier, it has also made them shorter.
January 2010 marks the second annual 30 Sugar Free Days Challenge, a challenge based on the book Sugarettes.
The 30 day challenge is a way for you to discover how addictive sugar is and learn about health hazards of sugar.
But, a month without sugar, are you really up for the challenge?
Sugar Harm
But what is wrong with sugar? Isn’t it natural?
The answer to that question is: no.
Concentrated, pure, processed sugar is not a natural thing to put in your body. Our bodies are simply not meant to handle such a pure and addicting substance.
Take a look at what eating sugar does to you and your health:
- Sugar adds Weight: Added sugar means added weight. This happens because your body has to do something with the extra sugar that enters your blood stream. Maybe you know this, but your body is great at storing sugar as fat. This ability to store fat is unique to sugar and doesn’t happen with non-purified foods. Added weight means you are more likely to live a shorter life, get diabetes, heart disease, stroke and have certain cancers.
- Diabetes: Despite what most medical associations and your doctor might say, there is a connection between sugar and diabetes. Consistently high blood sugar develops into insulin insensitivity and eventually diabetes.
- Toxic: Sugar is toxic to blood vessels in a similar way that cigarette smoke is toxic to lungs. Sugar destroys blood vessels. The results of sugar damage are easy to see in diabetics (who have very high blood sugar) that have a much higher risk for heart disease, stroke, kidney disease, eye disease and other conditions.
Take the 30 Day Challenge
Kicking sugar means that you will not only lose weight (if you want to), but that you are taking the first big step toward living a longer and healthier life. When you kick sugar out of your life, you decrease the chance of getting diabetes, heart disease and even cancer.
Breaking the sugar habit is not easy; at every step you are going to run into your addiction. The effort to stop sugar, however, is well worth the results: you will live a longer, healthier life with sugar out of your diet.
Joining us for the 30 Sugar Free Days Challenge, 2010 is a great step towards your better health. The program is free and provides you with the support you need to succeed. So many weight loss programs are designed to help you shed pounds, but often do nothing to address your health.
Why not have both good health and weight loss?
Join us for the adventure!
*Photograph provided by ?ellie?
About The Guest Author
Dr. Scott Olson is a Naturopathic doctor, expert in alternative medicine, author and medical researcher. Spurred on by his patients’ struggles with sugar addiction, he was determined to discover just how addictive and harmful sugar can be and ways to overcome that addiction. The result of that study is his book Sugarettes, which describes the addictive qualities of sugar and the harm that sugar does to our bodies. Dr. Scott also maintains a blog (www.olsonnd.com) which highlights the latest in health and healthy living.
9 Comments to “30 Sugar Free Days: Are you up for the Challenge?”
Yahoo…This is so timely. I just did week one without any sugar. And I feel so great. This week I cut out all white and wheat flour and all sugars.
I cut my caffeine in take my half each day…and I feel so much more energized. Thanks for the challenge..I am in!
@ KATIE – Hi Katie, so glad to hear your excitement and I so second how you feel! It is really amazing when we take out the refined grains and sugars out of our lives, I think many people don’t realize how great they can feel!
It has been just over a year now for me without any refined sugar, after I read Dr.Olson’s book “Sugarettes” and I feel awesome.
I highly recommend this challenge to anyone who wants to kick off the new year with a healthy start!
[...] and I love Evita’s blog Evolving Wellness. One of my recent favorites was a guest post called 30 Sugar Free Days: Are you up for the Challenge? I don’t think I could not eat sugar for 30 days, but I’m thinking about giving it a [...]
I respectfully disagree with this program.
Sugar (especially refined sugar and all foods containing such sugar) is certainly no good, and sugar addiction is a crazy miserable thing. That, I totally agree. I even wrote my own eBook, “Stop Craving Sugar!”, that addressed this problem not only physically, but also on the mental, emotional, and spiritual level.
However, sugar addiction is fundamentally different from drug and alcohol addiction, in which totally withdrawal is a must. Sugar is a natural component of our healthy diet — we cannot even survive a minute without healthy level of blood sugar circulating our system. Therefore, nature has endowed sugar in various foods including fruits, vegs, grains. Even when we stay away from “sugar”, we keep eating these foods, which convert to glucose in our body.
So the problem is excessive intake of sugar. (And most people today take it excessively.)
Now funny thing happens when we try to cut off sugary foods altogether. I’ve tried this myself, many times, and my conclusion is this is a futile and counterproductive battle. Every time I try, I ended up having strong sugar cravings. The focus of NOT eating any sugar adds energy to the craving.
On the other hand, when I focus on eating well, possibly including some pleasurable experiences such as having a cookie now and then, my total intake of sugary foods were far less in the long term.
Another problem of this program is that this doctor doesn’t seem to offer any real support on controlling sugar cravings. Basically, all he says is, “It’s just a craving, suck it up.” Oh, if only things were that simple!! People who has had issues with sweets KNOW this doesn’t work. (And this is why my eBook had to cover everything including the spirituality of eating.)
Conscious eating that tames the overall intake of sugar is good, but prohibitive program like this backfires sooner or later, I think. If anyone has any questions about my view, I’d be happy to address.
Akemi Gaines
@ AKEMI – Hi Akemi and thank you for adding your thoughts.
Based on your comment however, I am wondering if perhaps there was a bit of a misunderstanding in how you perceived the sugar challenge compared to what it is supposed to be all about.
The idea behind it is to exclude refined sugar out of our diets. Millions of people in North America eat this substance every day, in many products and do not realize just how harmful it is. Thus Dr.Olson puts together a month to kick off the New Year to look at those products in our lives and remove them from our diet as they are really unhealthy.
It does not include fruits – the main focus is on the typical white sugar or sucrose (and its derivatives high-fructose corn syrup, etc). Naturally even broccoli will break down into sugar in the body, but these are different sugars we are talking about. It is really a look at processed food in a different light.
And Dr.Olson is only doing an introduction of the program here in this article. If you visit the official site of the program http://olsonnd.com/30-sugar-free-days/30-sugar-free-days-2010/
there you will notice that Dr.Olson offers various forms of support to all the people who sign up for the entire month. It is to help people break the habit, as the typical “sugar” has actual affects on our brain like a serious drug.
I can attest to his excellent care and knowledge from personal experience, as he has dedicated himself to specializing in this area as a naturopathic doctor and I was pretty impressed with his book that I read “Sugarettes” last year. It was part of the main reason why I decided to cut out all refined sugar out of my diet, and in general consider myself sugar free for over a year now.
This does not mean that I don’t eat fruits, or whole (real) grains – just no things like chocolate, ice-cream, processed baked goods, sodas, processed juices, etc.
And I know everyone’s journey is different and I completely empathize with your own challenges where sugar is concerned, but that is just the thing, it is super addictive, and for some people it days, where as for others it can take weeks, to really get the brain re-wired off of this stuff. It greatly impacts our brain biochemistry and I am sure some cravings are not easy to deal with, but like I said, throughout the challenge Dr.Olson offers various forms of support. I know I used to have cravings in the past almost after most meals to finish them off with a “sugary snack” – but in all honesty since I cleaned out my system from “sugar”, I have none of these anymore. I don’t even blink or think twice about chocolate or cakes. And I really credit what I learned in his book a lot because in the simplest steps he broke down what sugar really does in our body, on every level – and that taught me to understand the substance for what it really is and the harm it does. For example, ingesting a typical sugary snack immobilizes the person’s immune system for hours!
I will be the first to disagree with any restrictive or extreme program, but the main focus of this is to take out something that is actually very unnatural to our diet – typical white sugar (and all the places that it hides its head in), and not carbohydrates in general like Dr.Atkins tried to do…now that was extreme and unhealthy.
I hope this explanation helps to better clarify what this challenge is all about.
I do understand this program is not about cutting off fruits, vegs, etc. (Gee, that would be a crazy program!) And I agree sugar is harmful. But my point is, trying to completely jump to “sugar free” for X number of days can be emotionally counterproductive. How many of the last year’s participants complete it? And are you sure they didn’t have even worse sugar cravings during or right after the 30 days?
I would rather cut, say, 80% of sugar first while increasing the % of raw fruits and vegs. Then go 95% sugar free. By this time, there would be days who I go 100% sugar free. So then I’d increase those sugar free days, eventually leading to 100% sugar free.
“30 sugar free days” means if you ever eat, say, a cookie in January, you are a failure. It’s prohibitive and competitive.
Sorry if this sounds strong, but to me, this is pretty clear. But of course, I didn’t participate last year and I don’t know this doctor, so if there are factors I’m unaware of, I apologize.
I might add that, even though I don’t know him, I did go read his website. It sounded like he understands sugar problem on the intellectual level only, as a “doctor”.
Added sugar certainly can be completely avoided without any withdrawal symptoms. Carbohydrates and fruits do provide sufficient natural sugar required.
If you are completely on your own home cooked food intakes then you can easily maintain 100% “added sugar” free regime.
It is all in the mind. Get your mind accept it first and then do it with discipline and pleasure. You wont miss added sugar.
@ HAROLD – Hi Harold and thank you so much for stopping by and for your very valuable comment. It is always wonderful to hear all sorts of perspectives that people have about any topic.
I have to say your comment really resonated with me and my line of thinking. It is very much I would say how I transitioned from eating any added sugar to no added sugar. I went from having mild cravings when I used to eat refined sweets, to no cravings after I switched to all natural foods. I know everyone’s journey is different, I definitely enjoyed mine to a life with no refined sugar.