I have gained an unprecedented amount of weight and I have to do something to get my body back to a healthy weight. In the past year and a half, I have gone from 190 to 240.
I have found intermittent fasting intriguing and done quite a bit of research, including talking to my doctor, who originally recommended this diet type to me due to my autoimmune disease. I think this would be the best way for me to control my overeating and level out my blood sugars.
The problem? I truly….truly….believe I am addicted to sugar. I have SUCH a hard time going without and it’s literally ruining my health.
Help.
I hope someone here has a more specific answer, but for me… It was simply a matter of switching to a fat burning metabolism. Which, unfortunately, means that I simply gave up on almost all carbs for three or four weeks. It was not easy. The only thing that got me through it was being aware of why I wanted to eat; I realized pretty quickly that my craving wasn’t physical.
Now on the other hand, you seem to have a more acute situation. I honestly don’t know if there’s a way to “taper off“ sugar or if you have to kill it cold turkey. While I did not have as severe situation as you are describing, I can tell you that it doesn’t take all that long to break the cycle!
Just taking a guess here, when you say you’ve got a sugar problem are we talking about things like candy, ice cream, stuff like that? If so you may want to try avoiding all of that stuff and trying more natural foods like fruit. That is not what I did by the way… I started tracking all carbohydrates, and I was happiest when I was at 20 g or less. 50 g would be considered a fairly bad day, and anything over that I considered to be a failure on my part. I don’t do that anymore, but the initial part of the process was tough for me so I decided to treat it very seriously.
Addictions can be broken.
Like the other commenter said: “It was simply a matter of switching to a fat burning metabolism.”
In my experience with sugar its basicly this.
Do salt-water fasting for 2-3 days minimum and stay in keto after, at start avoid any carbs like plague because they will only risk making you binge. Make sure to get enough salts. Lock yourself in a dark room if you have to in order to get past the acute withdrawals.
Once your body has adapted to burning fat for energy the physical cravings for sugar will disappear. Only boredom will surface them so keep your mind busy.
Remember, carbs = make you want to eat more carbs. Trying to restrict yourself to a small amount will only make you miserable, its easier to fully abstain.
You might want to look into fat fasting. For me personally. I go for bacon and eggs. You can eat a such as you want, whenever you want (of this one food) during this strategy.
What’s happening “behind the scenes” is two-fold. You start fat adapting your body with a keto friendly food that you enjoy. This helps with the mental aspect early on. After a few days you should find fasting easier as you get tired of the monotony + are fat adapted.