Back in 2013, there was research that showed that sugar was more addictive than cocaine. This was shocking news at the time and dismissed by many as just a joke. But for many people it is not a joke. They are living with this addiction every day.
This is why so many people who seem to have their life together are struggling to lose weight. This is not lack of will power.
Maybe you are one of those people. I certainly am. Sugar and refined carbohydrates are just like a drug to me, and once I have just one, I struggle to stop. Just ask my children. If I see some chocolate in the fridge I will beg to have some, but then I can’t stop, and I have been known to eat their whole packet of Maltesers and then have to go and buy them another packet to replace the one I ate. It is not a good-looking trait. (It is hard to admit that I steal from my children, I would rather you all think that I am perfect, but there you go, I’m not)
The fact is that some of us are more susceptible to the additive pull of refined food than others. And the more susceptible we are the harder it is to eat healthy, and the more we have struggled to lose weight.
One cause is a hormone that you have heard of called insulin. Insulin is vital for the well being of our body as any type 1 diabetic will tell you.
But it can also be our enemy.
When we eat our meal, the amount of sugar in our blood increases and a message is sent to the pancreas and insulin is released to help take the sugar out of our bloodstream and into our liver and muscles where it is used for energy.
This all sounds really good.
The problem comes when there is too much sugar in the blood. In some people, they develop a thing called insulin resistance. Eating carbs too often (especially simple ones like sugars) can make us less sensitive to insulin. When that happens, we need to produce more insulin to keep the blood sugar levels stable. Excess insulin causes us to have trouble digesting carbs, and absorbing nutrients and we gain weight. Insulin runs around finding all the excess sugar and must store it somewhere so after putting as much as it can in the liver it stores it in the fat cells for later use.
Insulin resistance increases our chances of developing type 2 diabetes, thyroid problems and several kinds of cancers AND it makes it very hard to control body fat.
So excess insulin actually makes us fat.
Well, that sounds easy – cut out sugar and simple carbs and insulin levels will be back to normal. Right?
If it really was that simple, we would have done that.
Eating sugar has this addictive component and is seen as a reward by the brain.
It is 3pm and you can feel your energy flagging. You reach for your favorite quick fix. The simple carbohydrate is turned into glucose in your blood stream. Your blood sugar levels spike. Insulin arrives and delivers the sugar to the liver, muscles, brain and fat cell. But it over does it. Too much insulin arrived and the blood sugar levels drops, you now feel wiped out and go searching for more sweets to regain that ‘sugar’ high.
It is not just food made of sugar that has this affect, but starchy food that the body breaks down into simple sugars. So this reaction can happen with bread, chips or french fries, rice, crackers and pasta.
This is the physical reaction that causes us to crave sugar and simple carbs, but there is another process that is happening too.
In research into the addictive nature of sugar, rats were given the choice between sugar water and cocaine and 94% of the rats chose the sugar. Even the rats that were addicted to cocaine preferred the sugar.
The theory is that the sweetness stimulates the reward signals in our brain and has the potential to override our will power, our normal ability to have self-control (hence stealing the children’s chocolate).
Sugar and simple carbs that easily turn to sugars in the body are highly addictive.
Luckily we have the tool that can be enormously helpful in kicking the sugar and carbohydrates habit.
EFT tapping works on the subconscious brain.
The subconscious brain is where we store our emotions, our beliefs, our feeling and our addictions.
There is another really important part to this story.
When we were young and became upset or hurt, it was quite common for our mother or caregiver to patch us up and then gives us a treat to make us feel better. It worked.
When we went to grandma’s house she had special treats waiting for us. One of my grandma’s was Boston bun. This is a fairly plain sweet bread roll with the most amazing icing on it. I loved it. The soft sweet bread with sultanas in it, plus this yummy coconut icing.
The taste is good, but the memory is very special. Grandma loved me. She gave me lots of cuddles and I could feel her love, and the sweet treat was part of the whole package.
If I want to feel loved, cuddled and cared about after a fight with someone, or a hard day, then going a getting a similar treat to grandmas will bring back all those feelings.
We all have childhood memories that relate sweets and treats to being loved and cared about, and we have a physiological response in the body that dips our energy levels so low that we crave anything that will give us more energy and we have an addictive part to our brain that prefers sugar to any other drug.
No wonder we have a problem.
We have a society that craves sugar in all its forms. Simple sugars to carbohydrates. And these foods are everywhere, some even advertised as healthy, and some just hiding the fact that they have sugar in them.
What foods do you crave?
Is there a childhood memory that goes with the food?
Do you feel that your energy levels swing up and down during the day?
You can change all of these. Thank goodness for the power of tapping.
I am running a webinar on the 27th January. Bring along the food that you are most addicted to and you want to stop eating and we will do a live tapping session that reduces cravings. This is going to be fun, and it is amazingly easy to change the cravings with tapping.