HOTGLUE page by Domenica Muilwijk

EVENT




PATTERNS OF BEHAVIOUR




STRUCTURES OF THE SYSTEM



MENTAL MODELS

I realised I eat too much sugar.




Almost everyone has been eating too much sugar for the past decades.



Companies put sugar in a lot of products and make people believe that it's a healty product. (Less fat etc.).

People are not aware of the toxic they put inside of their bodies and still think that fat is worse for you than sugar.

Essay – New Earth
Domenica Muilwijk 0977500
03-06-2020

When we first started the project I was excited. I liked the idea of making a project about food or salt or water and how we could change those for the better. I started doing research and found more and more interesting subjects that could fit into the five categories. Eventually I decided to go for the ‘food’ category, because that spoke to me the most and I thought about two different subjects that I could use for the project. The first one was food spillage, this has always bothered me a lot, and I feel terrible seeing good food go to waste while millions of people and animals around the world are dying because there isn’t enough food for them. The other subject was sugar.

I chose the second one, because it has been keeping me busy for the past few years.
Sugar is something that is terribly bad for you, even though a lot of people don’t know this. Everyone knows that you shouldn’t eat too much candy or drink too much sugar containing soda. But what they don’t know that almost every product in the supermarket contains (too much) sugar and that an extreme percentage of people is addicted to it.
In the sixties people thought fat was the worst thing you could eat. It made you fat and it was unhealthy. So companies started to make sugar free products. “60% less fat!’’ it says on the package, so you buy it because you thing its good for you. But what those companies did, was add sugar, to give it a good taste even though there was less fat in it. That’s when it all started.

Nowadays sugar is in almost every product in the supermarket even the products that we consider healthy. Companies keep putting sugar in products and we keep buying it, because we don’t know that it’s so unhealthy. That’s how we feed the addiction.

Children think that sugar is a treat, they eat it whenever they can.
For this project I wanted to find out for myself what sugar does to my body and how much I actually know about it.

I stopped eating sugar for one week. The changes that I noticed weren’t small. The first day I noticed that I was addicted. I wanted to eat sugar even though I wasn’t even hungry. On the third day I already started losing weight and mostly my belly fat. I had more energy and I slept better. But on the sixth day of the experiment I caved.

Not eating sugar makes you feel great in a lot of ways. As I found out about how bad sugar actually is for your body and your mind, I also realised that I love sugar. I love to eat and I’m an emotional eater. I enjoy eating sugar and carbs thoroughly and I can also safely say that I need to eat some chocolate every now and then.
Now that I have learned about sugar, I can make educated decisions when it comes to eating sugar. I know what I eat and that it is better to calm down on the sweet stuff every once in a while.
I want people to be as educated as I am, so everyone can eat consciously.

If this project was longer than three weeks, I'd make something that would really educate people on sugar. I'd share my experiences with the world in the shape of illustrations.