Help-Sugar/caffenine addiction

[Scadder21]

I was wondering if anyone has successfully dealt with this issue. I drink about 4-32 oz foundtain drinks of Mountain Dew a day. I also usually have a donut for breakfast. I think alot of it has to do with my schedule though. Recently I've been drinking water with lemon in it and cutting back on the soda yet it always comes back somewhere else. An example, I cut out donuts for a month and I end up getting double fudge cookies for awhile. I cut those out and then find fudge brownies. Most if not all of this occurs when I'm out driving around as I don't know how to cook and won't go through making brownies on my own. Anyone have any advice or similar experiences and have a possible solution?

[Ryan T.]

Anyone have any advice or similar experiences and have a possible solution?

 

Your body is addicted to these substances currently. One of the more difficult ways to overcome this type of addiction, as you have found, is through complete abstinence. Allow yourself other sugars/caffeine in other forms and in lesser concentrations.

 

For sugar, try better forms of grain, if you must, such as oatmeal or other less processed cereals. Or fruits. Even better would be for you to start your day with more protein to get yourself off of the sugar roller-coaster that you are currently on. Sausages(organic meats or locally produced free-range meats) and steamed veggies will sustain you much better throughout the day.

 

For caffeine, start with black tea with honey. Then later remove the honey. Then switch to green tea. Ultimately go to your lemon-water thing, although one of the greatest pleasures in life is high-quality teas.

 

Also, dedicate yourself to a good exercise program. Your body is smarter than you. It will crave higher quality inputs such as clean fruits, veggies and meats(if your belief system allows) when you put it into a mode of higher efficiency. It will tend to reject junk in that mode as well.

 

I would also say that your schedule is your schedule. You own it! You will have to take a little more time to do some food prep instead of just stopping at the convenience store on the way to class or the job or whatever.

 

Good luck!

[Gerard]

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Edited September 21, 2010 by durkhrod chogori

[A.I.]

are you willing to change your diet and your lifestyle permanently in order to overcome your addictions?

[mike1234]

I swear that the addiction to the caffeine found in soda is as strong as being addicted to crack cocaine. I use to drink 6 cans of coke zero a day, and quiting has been difficult. One motivating factor in quitting is that my Doctor has said that I have a high amount of protein in my urine, which is often an early sign of kidney disease. I've gone on stretches of a month without soda only to return to drinking it again. Until today, I was soda free for about a week and a half. I'm slowly but surely weening myself off of that evil poison. I'm changing my diet to one that is 80% veggies and 20% fat/protein. I hope to be completely sofa free by the new year.

 

Good luck.

[LBDaoist]

Just stop. It sucks. You are going to feel like crap. You are going to get cravings and urges. You will have headaches for a little while.

 

In the end it comes down to whether or not you have the willpower to be in charge of yourself.

 

 

[SFJane]

I was wondering if anyone has successfully dealt with this issue. I drink about 4-32 oz foundtain drinks of Mountain Dew a day.....Anyone have any advice or similar experiences and have a possible solution?

 

I got reeaally addicted to caffeine and sugar in my late teens on account that I had major depression but I had to work fulltime to pay the bills. So, I guzzled down HFCS and refined sugars just to get up and stay moving all day. I drank about 8 to 10 cups a coffee with heaping teaspoons of sugar in the morning and after noon, I drank from a two-liter bottle of Pepsi that I always carried around with me (which I went through usually by nighttime).

 

At some point I realized that all that crap was making me toxic and churning up my insides and hurting my adrenals and so I quit cold turkey one weekend. I locked myself into my apartment. I had some choice nuggets to smoke for the worst of the DTs, I put on some peaceful music, took the phone off the hook and detoxed. It was frankly horrible. I had punishing wrap-around headaches, akathasia (feeling like you can't sit still and wanting to move all the time), hot and cold sweats. I stuck with it and by Monday I was a different person.

 

Within a month my skin looked better. I didn't realize until after I dumped that crap, that perpetually going from one sugar rush to the next was actually creating an underlying state of mania and anxiety. I was basically on low-quality speed all the time and it kept me going physically, but also mentally. The sugar keeps your mind going, not in a good way.

 

So, it had to go and I never looked back and to this day I never drink soda. If I do have coffee or tea, I do not add any sugar. I quit through sheer will. If you don't have the will, don't even try, you'll just frustrate yourself and feel bad for failing. Good luck. Detoxing once you are good and addicted is not pleasant.

Edited November 12, 2010 by SFJane

[island]

I cut out sugar about 2 years ago and that includes most natural sugars. I'm on an 70% Veg (no roots) 30% fat/protein organic diet.

No wheat,gluten,soya,dairy or yeast and i drink only water.

 

My efforts have been rewarded with better health....IME it's was a life saver.

 

Took a little while to get there but one step at a time, and the first few weeks are the toughest.

 

Can you quit? It depends how much you want to?

 

Oh and learn to cook! It's a worthwhile investment. I never had time or the inclination to cook before but now i enjoy spending time preparing meals in the kitchen, it's all about conditioning . Best of Luck.

Edited November 12, 2010 by island

[thelerner]

4-32 oz mountain dews, whoah thats a lot. If you took someone who never drank soda and had them drink that much, I think it would put them in the hospital.

 

Its good you realize you have to change. IMHO the best tool for change is pen and paper. Write down what you want, why you want it, have a one week course of action. Sign the paper that you'll keep to it for one week. Read it morning and night. Follow through and at the end of week congratulate yourself and create a new sheet with hopefully the same plan or a better one from what you've learned about yourself.

 

Maybe the plan is to go cold turkey, maybe its to have 3 cans a day, but make a short term plan and keep to it, or at least learn from it and make a better plan. Don't stop until you have found and committed to a way that will get you off. That much Dew is dangerous. You're not Doing the Dew, its doing you; up until diabetes and adrenal failure set in.

 

If you go cold turkey you will likely have physical symptoms, namely headaches. Sugar is a treacherous bitch too (but I love her).

 

Good luck. My wife has recently switched from 20 oz of coffee a day to green tea in the morning. She's sleeping much better (particularly from a washroom visit viewpoint). I've been working on not having a nightcap and having lime seltzer instead.

 

Once you get past the addiction you'll be healthier, wealthier and regain some personal power. Good luck, make your plan and don't dew it.

 

Michael

[Gettodachopper69]

How is everyone doing with this addiction that was struggling?

[Rara]

How is everyone doing with this addiction that was struggling?

 

Caffeine was a nightmare when I was 16/17...I used to drink lots of coffee with two sugars each time. I saw myself getting cranky when I needed a fix, and somehow, I managed to just kick it by going cold turkey. I convinced myself through affirmations that water was MY thing. Then I just began a water addiction. But at least it wasn't as bad. Fortunately, I never quite got into things like Red Bull as I grew up in a time when high caffeine drinks were just coming to the market. I enjoy the odd Monster but only when I've had an unexpected lack of sleep and have a lot of work to do the next day.

 

As for sugar, I've never kicked it. I love it too much. However, I am very active though so I find all sorts of ways of justifying it to myself. I eat very healthy anyway...I cook all my meals from scratch and get fresh meat from the butchers and eat lots of greens So if I'm running about all over the place, and exercising a lot then I just see it as replenishment.

 

But I do go a bit overboard from time to time. The other week, I had 4 beers, 6 lemon cakes, 9 dark chocolate biscuits and 3 hobnobs in the space of a night. I was s***ing everywhere the next day!

 

So yeah, try replace the caffeine and if you do eat a of donuts/brownies/cookies or whatever, well first, try and make it something not AS bas as donuts and then use that sugar as fuel perhaps? Just an alternative for one that doesn't want to fight the addiction...there are other ways imo

[cheya]

Supplementing chromium and the amino acid glutamine can help reduce sugar (and alcohol) cravings. Some Five Element practitioners recommend eating millet for sugar cravings. Eating sweet potatoes really helps me not want the cake/donut/cookie genre...

 

Juice fasting for two weeks got me completely off sugar, caffeine and chocolate for a couple weeks, but then it slowly came back. Getting off that stuff is rough. I used to say I wanted to be reincarnated in a world where expresso coffee and vanilla ice cream were considered a food group!

[三江源]

the amino acid glutamine can help reduce sugar (and alcohol) cravings. !

that's interesting.

 

Maybe it is nutritional deficiency that makes us crave things that dont do us any good.

[dogson]

I've gone through intense food revolutions in my life, but sugar and dairy were the hardest.

When I learned that dairy, especially cheese literally has opiate effects in the brain - exactly like heroin - and the body goes through physical withdrawals, that's when I really became determined to get off it. Though I've experimented with many substances, for the purpose of exploring consciousness, I swore to myself I'd never do any physically addictive drugs. When I found out there are plenty of those in our food supply, that changed my world quite a bit.

 

Ditto with refined sugar, known to calcify the pineal gland. I literally had to start asking myself the question, "I do I want to do cocaine today? Do I want to blind my third eye?" Using very strong language with myself shocked me into being willing to go through the discomfort of the withdrawal.

 

On the few times that I relapsed, I intentionally made myself ill so I'd associate extremely negative effects to eating sugary stuff. I'd eat an entire box of cookies in one sitting. I'd let myself feel in my body what that does. I realized that just having a few here and there would only draw out addictive patterns in my physiology - I wanted to burn out the neural circuit that craves it by just blasting it. It's worked extremely well. When I think of sugary stuff now, I think of that sick feeling in my stomach, and I have absolutely no desire to go there.

[Gettodachopper69]

I've gone through intense food revolutions in my life, but sugar and dairy were the hardest.

When I learned that dairy, especially cheese literally has opiate effects in the brain - exactly like heroin - and the body goes through physical withdrawals, that's when I really became determined to get off it. Though I've experimented with many substances, for the purpose of exploring consciousness, I swore to myself I'd never do any physically addictive drugs. When I found out there are plenty of those in our food supply, that changed my world quite a bit.

 

Ditto with refined sugar, known to calcify the pineal gland. I literally had to start asking myself the question, "I do I want to do cocaine today? Do I want to blind my third eye?" Using very strong language with myself shocked me into being willing to go through the discomfort of the withdrawal.

 

On the few times that I relapsed, I intentionally made myself ill so I'd associate extremely negative effects to eating sugary stuff. I'd eat an entire box of cookies in one sitting. I'd let myself feel in my body what that does. I realized that just having a few here and there would only draw out addictive patterns in my physiology - I wanted to burn out the neural circuit that craves it by just blasting it. It's worked extremely well. When I think of sugary stuff now, I think of that sick feeling in my stomach, and I have absolutely no desire to go there.

 

I have been trying to quit caffeine/sugar for quite some time. I successfully quit alcohol and am ~20 months sober and I am able to control my cravings. Part of this is that I go to AA every week. If I could find a reliable 12 step program for sugar and caffeine addiction I would go and I know it would help me quit. But I am not sure if these things exist, I haven't heard of any locally. The longest I have gone over the past 10 years without sugar/caffeine is probably 3 months. I thought that after 60 days my body would be strong enough and not crave it anymore but since it is always around at work and at social events I can't seem to quit. I would also like to quit gluten, dairy, soy etc and eat 70% fruits/vegetables and 30% fats and protein but I have found this to be a monumentally difficult undertaking.

 

I have thought about the approach of over-indulging in the caffeine/sugar until the point of getting sick. I think I may try this approach because I know it worked when I used to drink alcohol and now the smell of liquor just makes me feel like throwing up.

 

Thanks for sharing your success story with this!!

[cheya]

that's interesting.

 

Maybe it is nutritional deficiency that makes us crave things that dont do us any good.

Hi Cat,

 

Dr. Joel Wallach of "Dead Doctors Don't Lie" fame, says that we crave sweet and salty taste because of nutritional deficiency, and that if we get enough minerals in our diets, we won't have these cravings. He calls it "cribbing", which is what livestock do when they don't get enough minerals--they start chewing on their corrals! (Wallach was an internationally renowned veterinarian before he had to become a Naturopath. Read his story!)

 

Before refined sugar and refined (white) salt were available, sweet and salty taste meant the food had minerals! Brix is a measurement of the minerals in plants. You can test the brix of produce by squeezing some juice onto a brix refractometer. High brix means high mineral content. Insects attack the plants that are low brix, low in mineral content. Their job is to recycle the unfit plants, and that's what tastes good to them!

 

The minerals in our agricultural soils were already exhausted back in the 1940s, and it's much worse now, as most minerals are not replaced, so the plants don't contain them either. Eating well-raised organic produce and nutritional supplements should reduce or even end craving for sweets. But just getting organic doesn't cut it. I saw some of the worst-looking, worm-eaten "organic" beets in the supermarket this week, I could hardly believe it. They may have been "organic" but they sure would have flunked the brix test! Back when organic first came in, most farmers didn't understand yet they had to feed minerals and organic material to the soil to get healthy plants (high enough brix that the bugs weren't interested), and so their produce looked awful!

 

One of Wallach's solutions (besides buying his very good but very expensive supplements) involves putting wood ashes on your garden, which most rural people used to do, back when they heated with wood and raised their own food.

 

If you're interested in this subject, and you like good stories, I HIGHLY recommend Wallach's book, "Dead Doctors Don't Lie". It is utterly WAY fun, and explains in detail his life story and how he came to his conclusions, and why he went to multi level marketing for his supplement line, totally understandable considering his history. This story about an audacious modern-day nutritional cowboy detective was one of the most interesting autobiographies I've read, and Joel Wallach is one of my heros.

 

(Working my way slowly back around toward the OP) Another Wallach book, Hell's Kitchen, addresses the obesity epidemic. We keep eating and eating because our bodies know they haven't got what they need yet. The minerals we need are just not in the food. And that's also why we're sick. Different bugs and disease are trying their best to recycle us! He's pretty convincing.

[silent thunder]

General question. When you say you are going cold turkey on sugar, do you include natural fruit sugars during that step, or just refined and cane sugars? I don't do much refined sugar any more and no caffeine, but still get a lot of fruit sugars.

[dogson]

I hit fresh squeezed orange juice, and I find that pretty much takes care of it.

 

The #1 thing you can do to implement any habit is get around new people. For me, going 80/10/10 raw vegan for a while was easy because I was living with a raw vegan, who was my personal raw food chef in exchange for free rent. This is an ideal situation, of course, and I indeed felt that I "manifested it" because I had an intense need (not a desire - a need) to evolve my relationship to food dramatically.

 

You can find raw food potlucks in a lot of places, or at least online. Even if you just want to quit sugar or dairy, hanging with these people helps a lot. Certainly, lots of them are crazy, just as people passionate about anything tend to look crazy to people not obsessed with that thing. But when your diet renders 10 times as much energy...what people don't realize is that we eat to take our energy levels DOWN. Because the emotional issues we have, we don't actually want to deal with. We want to suppress it. So we watch TV or eat cake or something, and go unconscious again.

 

When you're eating a clean, high energy diet, your emotional problems have that much more energy. So what you see in raw food communities, and with martial artists as well, is you can see stuff blown way up because the energy is now massive. This is a really important point I think everyone in this community should understand - all the habits we have, they exist for a reason. They are serving some purpose, it isn't just random. We as a society have come up with ways to manage our emotions because the structure of our society is based on this phrase "hard work" which usually means spending the majority of our time doing something we don't particularly enjoy - let alone love. That's hard indeed. Where do we put the suffering and loneliness and frustration? Well, the best of us channel it and use it, and that's where you find movie stars and billionaires and super-athletes. These people also have a reputation for being arrogant and emotional maniacs in one way or another. Why? Because instead of repressing it by eating cakes or whatever, they use it to make themselves burn even more and go higher.

 

tl;dr - diet has an emotional component. I would go so far as to say that we, as chi gong practitioners, don't even need to eat at all. Why are so many chi gong masters fat? Not because they want to "take it easy" and be as relaxed as possible. Chi masters are often fat because chi IS food. It is life force energy itself. If you cultivate pure energy and then keep eating on top of that, you have a lot of excess. The taoists have a tradition called Bi Gu, which says, if your chi is cultivated highly enough, you don't need to eat anymore.

 

Why are spiritual masters always seen fasting? Yes, to renounce food immediately means you will have to face yourself fully - it is very spiritual to fast. But it works the opposite way as well. If you have a high level of spiritual attainment, your emotional reasons to eat go away also.

 

See also: Man's Higher Consciousness by Hilton Hotema, Jasmuheen's work, the "Supreme Master Television" youtube video series on Breatharians, the work of Jericho Sunfire, the sungazing documentary "Eat The Sun," the inedia documentary "In the beginning was light" (which discusses Bi Gu some), and so forth.

[Gettodachopper69]

I hit fresh squeezed orange juice, and I find that pretty much takes care of it.

 

The #1 thing you can do to implement any habit is get around new people. For me, going 80/10/10 raw vegan for a while was easy because I was living with a raw vegan, who was my personal raw food chef in exchange for free rent. This is an ideal situation, of course, and I indeed felt that I "manifested it" because I had an intense need (not a desire - a need) to evolve my relationship to food dramatically.

 

You can find raw food potlucks in a lot of places, or at least online. Even if you just want to quit sugar or dairy, hanging with these people helps a lot. Certainly, lots of them are crazy, just as people passionate about anything tend to look crazy to people not obsessed with that thing. But when your diet renders 10 times as much energy...what people don't realize is that we eat to take our energy levels DOWN. Because the emotional issues we have, we don't actually want to deal with. We want to suppress it. So we watch TV or eat cake or something, and go unconscious again.

 

When you're eating a clean, high energy diet, your emotional problems have that much more energy. So what you see in raw food communities, and with martial artists as well, is you can see stuff blown way up because the energy is now massive. This is a really important point I think everyone in this community should understand - all the habits we have, they exist for a reason. They are serving some purpose, it isn't just random. We as a society have come up with ways to manage our emotions because the structure of our society is based on this phrase "hard work" which usually means spending the majority of our time doing something we don't particularly enjoy - let alone love. That's hard indeed. Where do we put the suffering and loneliness and frustration? Well, the best of us channel it and use it, and that's where you find movie stars and billionaires and super-athletes. These people also have a reputation for being arrogant and emotional maniacs in one way or another. Why? Because instead of repressing it by eating cakes or whatever, they use it to make themselves burn even more and go higher.

 

tl;dr - diet has an emotional component. I would go so far as to say that we, as chi gong practitioners, don't even need to eat at all. Why are so many chi gong masters fat? Not because they want to "take it easy" and be as relaxed as possible. Chi masters are often fat because chi IS food. It is life force energy itself. If you cultivate pure energy and then keep eating on top of that, you have a lot of excess. The taoists have a tradition called Bi Gu, which says, if your chi is cultivated highly enough, you don't need to eat anymore.

 

Why are spiritual masters always seen fasting? Yes, to renounce food immediately means you will have to face yourself fully - it is very spiritual to fast. But it works the opposite way as well. If you have a high level of spiritual attainment, your emotional reasons to eat go away also.

 

See also: Man's Higher Consciousness by Hilton Hotema, Jasmuheen's work, the "Supreme Master Television" youtube video series on Breatharians, the work of Jericho Sunfire, the sungazing documentary "Eat The Sun," the inedia documentary "In the beginning was light" (which discusses Bi Gu some), and so forth.

 

This is a great post, very profound, thank you very much for sharing!

[Rara]

General question. When you say you are going cold turkey on sugar, do you include natural fruit sugars during that step, or just refined and cane sugars? I don't do much refined sugar any more and no caffeine, but still get a lot of fruit sugars.

 

Am wondering how bad this is actually. I eat a lot of fruit during the day but also stuff like pancakes and chocolate. Yum! surely all these sugars combine to equal danger?

 

I only do this because I run out of things to eat. I cook fresh meat and veg daily and make my own savory lunches but breakfast cereal is sweet. Then there's all the fruit and chocolate snacks because I'm still freakin' hungry and I don't have any more time to cook in my day!

 

Also, fruit is bad for the teeth too because of acids. Where do I draw the line? Or shall I just carry on munching? It all feels right anyway, no health problems yet