I Cut Out Sugar for Two Weeks — Here’s What Happened (And What Didn’t)

2016-06-28

My goal here was to eliminate the processed, unnatural stuff, and I mostly succeeded, with a few tiny, unthinking slip-ups.

Ah, sugar. The thing that makes literally anything taste good. It’s in everything you love and, most importantly, in everything you might make an effort to avoid.

The worst of the sugars is sucrose, the artificial, bad-for-you stuff that’s added into foods and sweets to make them taste delicious. Not only is there a correlation between excessive sugar intake and health issues like diabetes and obesity, it is also purported that sugar is linked to bad skin, bad moods and low energy. The commonly believed reason for the latter two is that, once the addictive sugar high weans off, your energy and mood dips. Like with caffeine, but tastier and less obvious.

I decided to take the plunge so you don’t have to: cut out sugar for two whole weeks and see what kind of difference — if any — it would make. Even though I was eating quite a bit of sugary nonsense at the time, I went in pretty optimistic, thinking I could definitely tackle this.

When I started out, my skin was misbehaving quite a bit, with little pimples appearing mainly in my hairline. I wondered whether my no-sugar diet would eliminate this. I also generally have issues with maintaining a steady level of energy throughout the day, so I thought that maybe cutting sugar out might leave my energy levels more even.

For the first couple of days, I was sort of OK. It was a little bit challenging, but not, like, the worst. The easiest thing to cut out was sugary drinks, because I became wise to that whole 500-spoons-of-sugar-in-one-glass-of-soda thing ages ago, so I mainly drink water or diet drinks (I know, I know — those aspartame-containing drinks aren’t much healthier) and I never take sugar in my coffee or tea, anyway.

After a few days, though, it was apparent that sugar is in everything, especially in things that are low-fat. It’s in, like, every packaged food ever. I was having a bit of trouble avoiding sugar entirely and, sometimes, I’d already be eating something only to gander at the ingredients and realise I might as well have been drinking a Coke.

The only way to really avoid sugar, it seemed, was to eat only stuff at home, so I tried that.

I didn’t cut out natural sugars, like fructose, which is found in fruit. My goal here was to eliminate the processed, unnatural stuff, and I mostly succeeded, with a few tiny, unthinking slip-ups, mostly thanks to deceiving hidden sugars. Like, why is there sugar in a pasta salad? My bad.

So, here I am, two weeks out and, to be completely honest, I’d love to say that I’m a transformed person and my entire life has turned around, but it didn’t make that much of a difference. Maybe I wasn’t eating as much sugar as I thought I was?

The main benefit, I think, is that I somehow feel healthier. Like, on any given day, I don’t feel bad about myself and what I’ve eaten, which sugary foods have the ability to make me feel. My stomach isn’t bloated, mostly because I haven’t been adding extra, sweet treats throughout the day.

As for my energy levels, I honestly feel almost exactly the same. I still experience fluctuations in energy throughout the day, with most of my energy uselessly coming to me at night. I’ve just always been this way; I don’t think cutting out one type of food is going to change that, I guess.

My skin did improve a slight, slight bit, but really nothing that anybody else might notice. I think if I did this for long enough, though, I might see a noticeable difference. Plus, I’d probably need to cut out a whole lot of other foods, too, but baby steps, am I right?

All in all, I’d probably recommend trying this just to show yourself that you can, and the feeling of accomplishing something is pretty worth-it. It’s also a useful first step to better eating; I like cutting one thing out at a time so that I’m not suddenly deprived of 65 different food options on any given day, making me less likely to have cravings and subsequently stop eating healthfully.

Sugar is really addictive and delicious, and it’s somehow comforting to know that if I want to not eat it, I can.

• Have you ever tried to stop eating sugar? Did you notice any differences?
• What’s your favourite sugary treat?

How To Be a Basically Healthy Person

Even if we have the best of intentions, the goals we set to get healthy (after this last slice of pizza, of course) sometimes fall by the wayside. It can be hard to stay motivated, or even properly informed, since the recommendations for what to eat and how long to exercise can be confusing and conflicting. (Fat, for example, was off the menu for years under official guidance that eating fat makes you fat, and now that advice is getting kicked to the curb.) As a result, truly healthy behaviors can have a hard time cutting through the noise. Despite everything we know about the health benefits of exercise, a recent studyfound that 43% of employed adults do not exercise often.

Yet getting healthier is still a worthy goal, and many experts in the fields of exercise, health and nutrition have clear ideas about how to get there. Here are some low-stress, bare-minimum ways to become a healthier person, even for those of us who love to eat and hit snooze.

How to eat

Eating healthy shouldn’t be a nutrient numbers game. And no: you don’t have to go veganor adopt a Paleo diet. Just make sure your plate contains more than two different colors, says Simin Nikbin Meydani, director of the Jean Mayer USDA Human Nutrition Research Center on Aging at Tufts University. “If it’s not, it’s boring, and you won’t meet your nutrient requirements,” she says. “If it’s green and red and brown, you can.”

After coloring your plate, make sure to consume it—and enjoy it—with someone else. “Sharing a meal with friends and family impacts our health and how we age and fare as we get older,” Meydani says.

Some countries, like Brazil, follow just that advice. Their government recommends eating whole foods, avoiding processed ones and dining with other people.

How to exercise

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) recommends that American adults do two hours and 30 minutes of moderate-intensity aerobic activity each week, plus some muscle-strengthening on the side.

Many people don’t do any of that. A 2015 study published in the The BMJ argued that older adults, especially, find it hard to meet that government advice. “Getting inactive people to do a little bit of physical activity, even if they don’t meet the recommendations, might provide greater population health gains,” wrote study author Philipe de Souto Barreto, a researcher at University Hospital of Toulouse, in the paper.

Yet new evidence suggests they don’t need to. Barreto points out that a study of more than 250,000 older adults found that getting less than an hour of moderate physical activity each week was linked to a 15% drop in death, which means that people do benefit from even a small amount of exercise. Studies have also shown significant health benefits fromsimple exercises like walking.

Some researchers are seeing how low people can go when it comes to time spent working out. Enter the one-minute workout, where you work out as hard as possible for 60 seconds, with some warm-up and cool-down exercises thrown in, too. Even though the time spent exercising is minimal, it’s meant to be hard, and is shown to improve health and fitness. “There might be time-efficient ways to get fit,” says Martin Gibala, chair of kinesiology at McMaster University in Canada. “The notion of meeting people in the middle is positive—but there’s no free lunch.”

The takeaway

Stressing out over meeting government numbers—whether for nutrient values of the number of exercise minutes—may not be worth the headache. Getting some exercise every week and eating colorful meals with friends can be an enjoyable way to live a healthier life. Doing something, it seems, is what’s important.