Reducing sugar

Conclusions

I want to start with my conclusions to save you some reading:

• Changes like this should be made gradually. This is by far the most important thing that I learned by doing this.
• This was a success (according to my own goals)
  • I stuck to my sugar schedule (see below).
  • I've changed my relationship with sugar.
  • I reduced my overall sugar intake.

Motivation and goals

My motivation came from two sources:

• In 2021, my wife started going to a nutritionist. The nutritionist expressed surprise that my wife wasn't prediabetic. I felt like my diet was worse than my wife's, so it gave me enough of a scare to want to do something about it.
• I read a comment on reddit (which I can no longer find) about someone gradually reducing their sugar intake over two years. I'd never even considered that kind of plan before!

My goal was to reduce my sugar consumption over the course of 2022 and explore what kinds of effects it would have on me.

The experiment

The idea is simple: sugar is allowed only after a particular time of day. Over the course of the year, this time becomes more and more restrictive. Here's the sugar schedule I laid out:

• January: allowed after 12 PM
• February: allowed after 2 PM
• March: allowed after 4 PM
• April: allowed every other day
• May: allowed every other day after 12 PM
• June: allowed every other day after 4 PM
• July: allowed every third day
• August: allowed every third day after 12 PM
• September: allowed every third day after 4 PM
• October: allowed two days per week (I usually chose Wednesday and Saturday, but I mixed it up sometimes)
• November: allowed two days per week after 12 PM
• December: allowed two days per week after 4 PM

Caveats

• Sugar was loosely defined as "anything I might exploit or binge on". The definition was intentionally vague since I have an intuitive sense of what would be abusing this rule for me, e.g.: cookies, candy, cake, brownies, cereal, ice cream, syrups, peanut butter, honey, gum, etc.
  • I didn't monitor traditional meals for their sugar content since I never tended to exploit those foods to begin with. I.e. I never felt the craving for sugar and then ate a meal to satisfy that craving.
  • I allowed myself a meal-replacement drink for breakfast since I would otherwise not be eating breakfast.
  • Sugar did not include fruits since I didn't have a problem eating too many fruits. The one exception was smoothies, which I felt would have been cheating.
• Any food/drink that became a problem would have to be regulated. My consumption of apples went way up after starting this program, so I limited myself to two per day pretty early on.
• I wrote a rule that traveling would exempt me from this entire plan for the duration of a trip. The rationale was that traveling is infrequent and usually involves celebrations. I made use of this exemption exactly once—in March—for a particularly important family celebration where I was encouraged to eat cake.
• This wasn't done scientifically. If you want to regulate your weight, eating sugar at 8 PM is probably not going to help! Similarly, you may find yourself compensating by eating other unhealthy foods (e.g. fats and oils). However, my goals were just to reduce my sugar intake, and this schedule allowed me to do that.
• I personally know that I can follow black-and-white rules very well, whereas moderation doesn't tend to work for me. If you want to try something like this, consider your own goals and what's worked for you in the past.

The experience

I wrote a brief journal each month about how the experiment felt. Here it is:

• January: easy peasy. It's like there was no restriction at all, and yet it still made me change my habits since I still wanted to snack in the morning, so I ended up getting snacks that I could have at any time of the day (carrots and hummus, nuts, etc.). I think that my sugar consumption went down as a result. I realized how much I had been consuming sugar as easy calories.
• February: harder without being hard. Many times, I felt like I was waiting for 2 PM to hit. I think this is because I would seek out sugar when hungry, not necessarily because I was craving sugar. If that's true, then it means that I just need to keep exploring healthy alternatives so that I'm not hungry all the time.
• March: I felt like I was seeing health benefits, but it was hard to say. My mood was generally better, but it could have been any number of things (weather, new job, etc.). However, eating sugar at 4 PM was bad because of what I learned in February: I have sugar because it's easy, so having it at 4 PM would screw up dinner.
• April: it actually wasn't terrible to skip every other day as long as I had my two apples per day! I feel like sugar consumption on the even days increased to compensate for a whole day off though.
• May: changing from 12 PM to 2 PM isn't too bad.
• June: 4 PM is just annoying. I may want pancakes or a muffin in the morning rather than having a dessert after dinner. It makes me feel more like I have to get my sugar in for that day. Other than that, June wasn't too bad. The logistics of baking, buying sweets, etc. are getting harder since you have to account for eating after 4 PM, but only every other day.
• July: it's the first month of only having sugar every third day, but there's no time restriction, and having a muffin on the morning of July 3rd was wonderful!
• August: I definitely miss July now. I don't mind the every-three-days part, but I really don't like having to wait until 12 PM in case I want a sweet breakfast. 🙁 I know it's going to get harder once it's at 2 PM and at 4 PM, but I want to see the year out that way. Plus, I'm going super overboard when it comes to sugar days now. Cutting back by two hours should put a big dent in that behavior.
• September: very challenging. The 4-PM thing is just tough, but cutting it back to every 3rd day also makes it difficult.
• October: a breath of fresh air since there was no longer a time restriction for the final month of the year!
• November: easy peasy.
• December: honestly, mostly fine. I did the longest no-sugar stint between two sugar days on the 11th and 17th. I was looking forward to sugar when the 17th was close, but then most of what I had tasted so sweet.

Moving forward

Based on my experience, I'm modifying the plan in such a way that I can hopefully maintain this for the rest of my life:

• Revert to the October schedule (two sugar days per week, but no time restrictions on those days).
• Aim for less total consumption on sugar days.
• 6 cheat days per year just to ease up on myself a bit.

Learnings

The two biggest learnings:

• I would never have been able to do this if I hadn't set out to do it gradually.
• I was eating sugar mostly out of laziness. Sugary foods are the easiest calories for me to obtain since they're typically prepackaged and require no preparation. Also, you don't really get bored of sugar if you're always consuming it.

Some other learnings:

• I stopped buying as much sugary stuff. It used to be that if I bought a pack of muffins, I would try to eat them all before they went bad. Now, I freeze them all immediately and thaw one on a sugar day. This makes my sugary purchases last longer.
• Everything with sugar is now obviously sugary. Before starting this, "too sweet" didn't exist for me. That's no longer the case.
• Satisfying a craving doesn't provide the same joy that it used to. I still crave sugar, but it somehow feels more hollow when I finally get to eat it.
• In July, I got blood work done. Every reading was within the standard range except for my white-blood-cell count, which was slightly low. Unfortunately, I don't have any prior results to compare against, so I can't see how these changed in 2022. My glucose was at 96 mg/dL.
• I absolutely love apples! 🍎
  • They take long enough to eat by hand where you can savor/enjoy them.
  • They're generally free of packaging and the cores are compostable.
  • They've got other health benefits like vitamin C and fiber.

I'm happy with how this experiment went and look forward to seeing how 2023 feels!