assignment

My interest in sugar started a few years ago, in the summer of 2017 if I’m correct. My uncle and my mother stared to do a carb-free diet to lose weight. I thought it would be nice to join them, because I was struggling with my weight and tried some different diets, but none of them really worked. This diet worked, absolutely, but it was rather hard to maintain. Since then I stop eating sugar for a few weeks or months, multiple times a year. This helps me to feel healthier and to lose some weight.

However, I never really looked into what it does with my body.

For this project, I stopped eating sugar again for a week and per day I wrote down everything I saw and everything I felt. I kept a record of all the changes and the things that stood out in my everyday life without the sweet stuff.

In this week I wanted to find out as much about sugar as possible, including how my body reacts to it in comparison to a non sugar diet. Is sugar really that bad for you? And why is it that it is in almost every product available in the supermarket?

On this page you can read the Diary I kept in the past week:

DAY ONE

I went to shop for carb free food at the local supermarket. I forgot how much products contain sugar, even the things that you would consider healthy. All processed food, like soups and juices are full of it. Most fruit contains sugar and a lot of vegetables too. I am aware that these are 'good' sugars, but if you want to cut out all the suger of your life, you have to cut out ALL of them, even the 'good' ones.
Eventually I came home with some different tipes of cheese, tomatoes, cucumber, meat and sausages and Turkish yoghurt.

In the afternoon I was hungry so I went to the kitchen for a snack. I craved something sweet, so I made myself some yoghurt with stevia (sugar free sweetner) and cinnamon. But I really felt like that wasn't enough! I wanted more sweet taste, candy, chocolate, coockies, icecream. I discovered that I was addicted to sugar! I wasn't hungry, but I craved it.

Beginning of the evening I ate my dinner consisting of meat and vegetables and I felt tired an hungry. It was quite hard to stop eating sugar all of a sudden. I had a headache ,I'm not sure if that was coincidence or not, but I was quite sure I had withdrawal symptoms.

DAY TWO

I woke up feeling rested and quite fresh. I wanted to have breakfast, but nothing I felt like eating was sugarfree.
I ate nothing untill half past 12 in the afternoon, when I felt really hungry and I made myself eggs with a sausage.

When I was doing research online I read that humans have a natural craving for sugar and try to eat as much as possible to have as much energy as needed. When you eat fruit and vegetables, you get that natural sugar, together with protein, fiber vitamins. So if you eat a lot of those natural sugar packages, it's really healthy. But in these times everything has added sugar, which isn't as healthy. But we still feel like we need a lot of it.

Most of the times when I feel like having a snack, I actually want sugar, but I'm not really hungry.

DAY THREE

This was the first day that I didn't wake up thinking about chocolate. I felt like I had peace with the fact that it was going to be eggs and cheese for me today. Later I found out that I already had lost some weight.
I went to visit my friend, we met up outside, because we were too afraid to go to eachothers houses in times of the corona virus. I told her about my diet and what I was trying to learn from it.
She told me that she was worried about me. She told me that it wasn't good to eat no sugar at all, and that I should eat all fruits and vegetalbles, because the suger in it was'good'sugar. I told her I understood her concern, but that in my beliefs it was better to eat no sugar at all, than to eat as much as the avarage person does these days.
I found out that my friend was one among many that thought that suger was something that you needed and that it was a better idea to stop eating fats and calories. With the information that I found during my research I truly think that that is a misconception and that people underestimate the danger of sugar.

DAY FOUR

This day I woke up feeling really rested. My stomach was flat and I started my day with a lot of energy. I wasn’t hungry until somewhere around 1 in the afternoon. I had my salad with mozzarella and I felt that I actually got energy out of my meal, like it was fuel and I was a car. I never really noticed this before and it felt great. Was this how you are actually supposed to feel and do we ruin our energetic and positive mood with loads of sugar. I was so happy that my sugar rehab was working. I went to work later that day and talked to my colleague about what I was doing. Once again another person that thought that what I was doing was wrong. She told me that I shouldn’t have skipped breakfast as it was in her opinion the most important meal of the day. Once again I disagreed. I hadn’t felt so energetic in a very long time and I think that eating less sugar or no sugar at all is the best way to stay healthy.

DAY FIVE

I was so happy that my experiment was going so well. Maybe I jinxed it, because on the fifth day I got my period and that's when a lot of things changed for me.
Whenever I feel bad, mostly when I am menstruating, I comfort myself with food. Sweets, chocolate, pasta, chrisps, coockies.
I feel like should treat myself and that I deserve the food that I crave. This is something that I have learned since that I was a kid and I am completely positive that I am not the only one.
When I was little and I behaved myself and I did something well, I got rewarded with a sweety and when I had an accident or I fell or something like that, I also got a little sweet treat, so that I wouldn't feel the pain as much.
When I got to think about this I realised that this is actually wrong. Knowing that sugar is bad for you, that it makes you fat, tired and addicted, we shouldn't teach kids to eat sweets as a reward.

DAY SIX

This was actually my last day of the 'one week' experiment. It got really hard to maintain this sugarfree diet, I didn't feel like I needed it, but I sure did want it. When you see other people eating everything they want and eating and laughing together, it makes me jealous and weak. I caved. I ate a magnum (probably the worst thing you could do when you try not to eat sugar)

BUT I didn't fail my experiment, because I learned a lot.
Here is a list of the things that stood out to me the most this week:

-Sugar makes you fat, especially your belly.

-Sugar gives you a bad skin, puffy and with pimples.

-Sugar gives you the feeling of energy, but that fades and you actually get more and more tired.

-You get addicted very easily.

-There aren't many things in the supermarket that do not contain any sugar.

-If you want to get a snack on the way or in a restaurant it's even worse. In a lot of places you can't get anything without sugar.

-People don't understand the dangers and are not informed about what sugar does to a human being.

-Children are trained to love sugar, what makes you want it more when you thing you deserve it.

This made me realise that I want to inform people about sugar. Grown ups can watch documentairies like 'that sugar film', but children most likely have no idea of the dangers and effects. If I had more time for this project I would illustrate a book for children and maybe change the view on sugar for the next generation.