sugar cravings

13 Ways to Fight Sugar Cravings

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Does that morning Danish pastry leave you craving another treat 2 hours later? Do you grab a candy bar to cope with your afternoon slump — and then reach for a cola to get out of your post-slump slump?

If you’ve found that munching sugary snacks just makes you crave more of them, you’re not alone. Eating lots of simple carbohydrates — without the backup of proteins or fats — can quickly satisfy hunger and give your body a short-term energy boost. But they almost as quickly leave you famished again and wanting more.

How can you stop sugar cravings once and for all? Here’s expert advice.

Why Do We Crave Sugar?

There are many reasons why we go for sweet things.

That appetite may be hardwired. “Sweet is the first taste humans prefer from birth,” says Christine Gerbstadt, MD. Carbohydrates stimulate the release of the feel-good brain chemical serotonin. Sugar is a carbohydrate, but carbohydrates come in other forms, too, such as whole grains, fruits, and vegetables, which have fiber and nutrients your body needs.

The taste of sugar also releases endorphins that calm and relax us, and offer a natural “high,” says Susan Moores, a registered dietitian and nutrition consultant in St. Paul, MN.

Sweets just taste good, too. And that preference gets reinforced when you reward yourself with sweet treats, which can make you crave it even more. With all that going for it, why wouldn’t we crave sugar?

The problem comes not when we indulge in a sweet treat now and then, but when we overdo it. That’s easy to do when sugar is added to many processed foods, including breads, yogurt, juices, and sauces. And Americans do overeat it, averaging 17 teaspoons of added sugars per day, according to the American Heart Association, which recommends limiting added sugars to about 6 teaspoons per day for women and 9 for men.

How to Stop Sugar Cravings: 8 Tips to Use Right Now

If you’re craving sugar, here are some ways to tame those cravings.

  • Give in a little. Eat a bit of what you’re craving, maybe a small cookie or a fun-size candy bar, suggests Kerry Neville, a registered dietitian. Enjoying a little of what you love can help you steer clear of feeling denied. Try to stick to a 150-calorie threshold, Neville says. If you can’t find a small serving size, split your treat with a friend or friends. 
  • Combine foods. If the idea of stopping at a cookie or a baby candy bar seems impossible, you can still fill yourself up and satisfy a sugar craving, too. “I like combining the craving food with a healthful one,” Neville says. “I love chocolate, for example, so sometimes I’ll dip a banana in chocolate sauce and that gives me what I’m craving, or I mix some almonds with chocolate chips.” You’ll soothe your craving and get healthy nutrients from those good-for-you foods.
  • Go cold turkey. Cutting out all simple sugars works for some people. But it’s not easy. “The initial 48 to 72 hours are tough,” Gerbstadt says. Some people find that going cold turkey helps curb their cravings after a few days. Others find they may still crave sugar but over time are able to train their taste buds to be satisfied with less.
  • Grab some gum. If you want to avoid giving in to a sugar craving completely, try chewing a stick of gum, says registered dietitian  Dave Grotto. “Research has shown that chewing gum can reduce food cravings,” Grotto says.
  • Reach for fruit. Keep fruit handy for when sugar cravings hit. You’ll get fiber and nutrients along with some sweetness. And stock up on foods like nuts, seeds, and dried fruits, says certified addiction specialist Judy Chambers. “Have them handy so you reach for them instead of reaching for the old [sugary] something.”
  • Get up and go. When a sugar craving hits, walk away. “Take a walk around the block or [do] something to change the scenery,” to take your mind off the food you’re craving, Neville suggests.
  • Choose quality over quantity. “If you need a sugar splurge, pick a wonderful, decadent sugary food,” Moores says. But keep it small. For example, choose a small dark chocolate truffle instead of a king-sized candy bar, then “savor every bite — slowly,” Moores says. Grotto agrees. “Don’t swear off favorites — you’ll only come back for greater portions. Learn to incorporate small amounts in the diet but concentrate on filling your stomach with less sugary and [healthier] options.”
  •  Eat regularly. Waiting too long between meals may set you up to choose sugary, fatty foods that cut your hunger, Moores says. Instead, eating every 3 to 5 hours can help keep blood sugar stable and help you “avoid irrational eating behavior,” Grotto says. Your best bets? “Choose protein, fiber-rich foods like whole grains and produce,” Moores says.

But won’t eating more often mean overeating? Not if you follow Neville’s advice to break up your meals. For instance, have part of your breakfast — a slice of toast with peanut butter, perhaps — and save some yogurt for a mid-morning snack. “Break up lunch the same way to help avoid a mid-afternoon slump,” Neville says.

Also, you may need to rethink your drinks. They can be a major source of sugar, whether it’s a soda, a latte, or juice. Try a sparkling water or plain water instead.

How to Stop Sugar Cravings: 5 Tips for the Long Term

One of the best ways to manage sugar cravings is to stop them before they start. To help you do that:

  • Skip artificial sweeteners. They don’t necessarily lessen cravings for sugar. And they “haven’t demonstrated a positive effect on our obesity epidemic,” says Grotto, author of 101 Foods That Could Save Your Life.
  • Reward yourself for successfully managing sugar cravings. Your reward could be large or small. Remember why you’re working on it and then reward yourself for each successful step.
  • Slow down. For 1 week, focus on your sugar cravings and think about what you’re eating, suggests Chambers. Diet mayhem often results from lack of planning. So slow down, plan, “and eat what you intend to eat, instead of eating when you’re desperate,” Chambers says.
  • Get support. Many people turn to sweet foods when they’re stressed, depressed, or angry. But food doesn’t solve emotional issues. Consider whether emotions are involved in your sugar cravings and whether you need help to find other solutions to those emotional problems.
  • Mix it up. You may need more than one strategy to thwart sugar cravings. One week you may find success with one tactic, and another week calls for an alternative approach. What’s important is to “have a ‘bag of tricks’ to try,” Gerbstadt says. To tame sugar cravings, you really need to “figure out what works for you,” Neville says.

Lastly, go easy on yourself. It may take time to get a handle on your sugar cravings. “It’s difficult to shift any system — whether it’s the world economy or your eating,” Chambers says.

Stop Sugar Cravings With 2015 Transformation Challenge

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sugar challenge
When you join the Transformation Challenge, you can also pick up Sugar Smart Express: The 21-Day Quick Start Plan to Stop Cravings, Lose Weight, and Still Enjoy the Sweets You Love!, by Anne Alexander and Julia Van Tine. (New to the Challenge? Learn all about how it can change your life—and your body—here!). It contains all the recipes here, as well as the full program that gave these women impressive results.

Over the course of the Challenge, you’ll also follow the Sugar Smart Express program to wean yourself off sugar and artificial sweeteners in only 21 days.
table
That’s what these four women did, and not only did they live to tell about it, they will happily talk, over a delicious low-sugar lunch of feta-mushroom crab cakes, tuna tacos, and vanilla pudding, about how much smoother it went than they’d imagined.

We get it: You think it would be easier to give up sex for 6 months than sweets. Heck, giving up cigarettes might be easier. The truth is, no matter how many health problems researchers link to sugar—chronic inflammation! heart disease! diabetes!—most of us truly are addicted and overeating the sweet stuff.

“My taste buds have completely changed. Foods that I had craved didn’t live up to the expectations when I had them again.”—Joelle Junior, 45, lost 5 pounds

It’s not our fault. An inborn attraction to sweets is part of our biological hardware. It doesn’t help that sugar is in nearly every packaged and prepared food, including stuff never meant to be sweet. Completely give up sugar and chemical sweeteners, and most of us will crawl back to the cookie jar within days.

orange spice vanilla pudding

You can eat dessert on the Challenge, like this orange-spice-vanilla pudding that’s big on taste but low in sugar.

But going cold turkey or going it alone doesn’t beat this addiction. This year’s Challenge will give you freedom from sugar, thanks to the only things that work: good food, a proven program, and the help of others.
sugar challenge women
“We were basically the guinea pigs,” says Michelle Davies, whose petite frame expanded quickly when she moved back to the United States after spending 8 years in Prague. Suddenly, foods like Oreos and Frosted Mini Wheats were readily available again—and her weight was on a steady upswing. “I could feel my belly hanging over my pants, and I was exhausted by the afternoon,” she recalls. “I knew I needed to get serious about losing weight.”

“I knew I needed to get serious about losing weight, but I didn’t think I ate that much sugar. I was shocked when I realized that just about everything I was eating—PB&J sandwiches, granola bars, iced coffee—was full of it.”—Michelle Davies, 45, lost 11 pounds

 

davies
For 21 days, Davies joined a group of women to do the Sugar Smart Express plan, which guides how you’ll eat during the Challenge. They temporarily gave up all sources of added sugar and starchy carbs—no breakfast cereal, no bread, no pasta, and no artificial sweeteners. Once their bodies and taste buds adjusted to low-sugar eating, the women slowly added reasonable amounts of starch and sugar back into their diets. And they did it all together and lost weight.

feta mushroom crab cakes

Learn to cook easy meals like these feta-mushroom crab cakes over buckwheat, which fill you up with flavor, not calories.

“I was addicted,” says Linda Kempf, 47, a busy working mom who dreaded her first time eating out—restaurants are where nutrition labels go to die. She decided to share the menu with the online community, asking, “What should I order?” Advice and go, girl!s poured in, and Kempf went on to enjoy every bite of her quinoa burger, minus the bun and the guilt.

“It seemed intimidating in the beginning; the recipes sort of scared me. But the few extra minutes I spend in the kitchen are totally worth it. Home cooking tastes so much better than anything out of a box or packet.”—Linda Kempf, 47, lost 15 pounds (eventually 45)

Ready? Starting May 1, Here’s How You’ll Ditch Sugar
REDUCE, THEN RECLAIM.
You’ll start your escape from Sugar-ville by learning to read labels for added sugar and chemical sweeteners, and then swap out foods for healthier alternatives (say, changing your cereal brand to one that’s whole grain with less sugar or swapping your honey mustard for vinaigrette). After a bit, when your taste buds have adapted to detect natural sweetness again, you’ll learn the right way to reintroduce sugar.

 

CRUSH CRAVINGS.
Protein slows digestion, is more filling than carbs or fat, and makes it difficult for sugar cravings to take hold later on. So by getting more protein in the AM, you can look at that ice cream later and say no.

NEVER SKIP A MEAL.
food prep
If you’re hoping to flatten your belly, the starvation response is the last thing you need. Skipping meals fires up sugar cravings, lowers blood sugar levels, and can cause you to overeat to make up for missed calories. You’ll find out how many hours you should go between meals.

TRICK YOUR BRAIN.
You’ll discover that when you crave sugar, you can do something pleasurable instead to curb the craving—like watch junky TV, do a little yoga, or peruse a pretty catalog.

FLAVOR-BOMB YOUR TASTE BUDS.
flavor
As delightful as it is, sugar tastes basically the same, with variations on yum, that’s sweet and yikes, that’s sweet! But flavor? That’s a different thing. If you’ve ever dropped fresh rosemary into a bottle of extra virgin olive oil, you know how much flavor fresh herbs and spices can add to everyday fare.

“My headaches are gone, I feel 10 years younger—and I can fit my butt into skinny jeans. Nothing tastes better than that.”—Alison Ackerman, 44, lost 10 pounds (eventually 35)

FEEL BEFORE YOU EAT.
Get a split second of clarity as you close in on your coworker’s candy dish and ask yourself, Why am I reaching for this? If the answer is anything other than I’m starving, you’ll find another way to give yourself what you need and eat less.

By the end of the program, Kempf had lost 15 pounds. Everything became smaller: her face, her belly, her thighs. What really surprised her was how little she missed the white stuff.

Her Sugar Smart friends have transformed, too. “People keep asking me what I’m doing,” says Alison Acker-man, a nurse and mom of four who’s dropped 35 pounds total. “Now I can honestly say, ‘Nothing.’ It’s become a lifestyle I can happily live with.”

Go to prevention.com/21daychallenge to join them in saying the sweetest words ever spoken, overheard from Davies: “I stopped wanting it.”

Sugar is more addictive than cocaine and a serious epidemic

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Sugar damage: Consumption of excess and added sugar is an epidemic.

It’s difficult to stave off sugar cravings once you’ve gotten started. For some, a box of chocolates or a pint of Ben and Jerry’s means that the whole box or pint will be downed in one sitting. For others, two to three Starbucks runs per day probably won’t seem too strange, despite the loads of sugar that are pumped into most of the beverages on the menu.

We think that of course, in moderation, our sugar intake is for the most part harmless. Maybe we have one mocha a day instead of three. Maybe that box of chocolates lasts a week or more. But for many, sugar cravings are signifiers of a very serious and hard to reverse addiction that is similar to a drug and quite possibly just as destructive, reported Burlington County Times, Jan. 4.

According to Burlington, the average person consumes 285 calories worth (20 teaspoons) of sugar per day (one 12 oz. soda contains 8-10 teaspoons of sugar on its own. That’s just under half a cup of sugar and something like 14 teaspoons too many. For those who are addicted, sugar cravings can be so great that “you can’t stop eating it, you lose control eating it and you gain excessive weight from it,” said Dr. Fred Bonanni, director of Abington Health’s Institute for Metabolic and Bariatric Surgery in Pennsylvania. It’s an epidemic that sees Americans eating 156 pounds per year, often times without their knowledge. This is a scary and dangerous fact. According to the New York Daily News, sugar “is eight times more addictive than cocaine.”

Much of the sugar that is consumed in America comes from processed foods and sweetened drinks. Burlington notes that even things like ketchup and spaghetti sauce have sugar added. It’s not just the Coca Cola or cookies that you have to watch out for. Look at the labels of your trusted “healthy” cereal, or your teriyaki sauce, for instance.

Here’s the kicker. The body does need sugar in the form of glucose in order to function properly. In the case of added sugars, which offer no nutritional value aside from energy, caution should be heeded. According to the World Health Organization, added sugar should not exceed 10% of anyone’s daily intake of foods. The American Heart Association recommends sugar intake to take up 7% or less of our daily caloric intake. That means a cut back is in order of bagels and other breads, chips, canned and packaged fruits, yogurt, and many other grocery items high in added sugar content which may shock you.

One of the reasons sugar is so addictive is that when it is processed in the body, it literally “activates the brain’s reward center, where a neurotransmitter called dopamine, or DRD2, triggers sensations of pleasure.” And often, sugar consumption causes a “sugar high” that is also followed by a low. Even those who are really good at eating sugar in moderation have probably experienced this. Many try to get back to the high. “You get this rush, your blood sugar drops and you feel crappy and tired and worn out. You put more sugar in to get the same response, and it becomes this vicious cycle,” said Bonanni. In no time at all, you’re back up to three mochas a day and a box of chocolates. Beyond that, there could be more sugar added to your day, as the more sugar consumed causes a higher level of sugar intake needed in order to reach that sugar high.

It takes a lot of discipline to wean yourself from consuming excess sugar. It is, however, pertinent to wean yourself. Consumption of excess sugar causes things like diabetes, excess fat, depression, migraines, poor eyesight, arthritis (and other autoimmune diseases), gout and osteoporosis. The best bet would be to wean yourself completely from excess and added sugars. But don’t go cold-turkey. If you make changes over time, there will be less chance of relapse into the vicious cycle of sugar highs and lows.