How to Cut Down on Sugar Intake, With Dr. Yoni Friedhoff
Trying to lower your sugar intake? This week we will learn how to do it with the help of two experts. First, Kathleen DesMysons, an addictive nutritional guru and author of Potatoes, Not Prozac: Simple Solutions for Sugar Addiction , talks about her practical and effective approach to phasing out sugar from her diet. We’ll then talk to Dr. Yoni Friedhoff, author of Fixing the Diet: Why Diets Don’t Work and How to Make Ourself Work , about why we should avoid diet fads and what habits we should focus on instead.
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Highlights from this week’s series
From an interview with Kathleen Desmason
How she began to develop her seven steps to get rid of her sugar addiction:
I started out as the director of a rehab center and was looking for solutions that would improve what we were doing. As a rule, alcohol and drug rehabilitation is not very successful. And so I wanted to find something that would help people get better for a longer period. I started talking to everyone and realized that almost all the people we worked with stopped using alcohol and drugs, and then they started using a lot, a lot, a lot of sugar, and that all their behavior related to this was very similar to drug behavior. And that really intrigued me. I had an intern at the time, I sent her to the library and said, “See if you can find anything about sugar.” There weren’t many, but there was one article in a very little-known magazine that talked about the relationship between alcohol and sugar … And so we started looking for ways to basically improve what [the patients] ate and also took. from sugar. And what happened is that people who could never sober up began to sober up and remain sober. And I thought it was interesting.
On the effects she noticed in people who successfully cut back on sugar:
The most important thing is the change in self-esteem, which really was the most remarkable for me. At first I just thought you weren’t crazy. [But] your mood levels out, your depression goes away, your anxiety goes away, your reactivity goes away. And you just feel calm and relaxed. But what actually caught me off guard, and what seems to be the most profound change, is that my deepest sense of self-esteem is skyrocketing. So instead of feeling like impostors, their self-worth matches who they are.
From an interview with Dr. Yoni Friedhoff
Why there are no clear guidelines on how much sugar we should consume:
When it comes to sugar, the purpose of any meal is the minimum amount of sugar a person needs to be satisfied. And the question is, what is the smallest amount? This question depends partly on physiology, partly on dietary patterns, partly on our social life. So this is a very individual question: what is too much and what is too little? And I don’t think that any person, doctor or anyone else can determine a specific amount for a person.
On why extreme diets and cleansing are not the best way to change your eating habits:
I really feel like this is about the least amount of these foods we need to enjoy our lives, and trying to eliminate them altogether for many people ends up giving up their efforts altogether. I mean, food isn’t just fuel. It provides comfort by altering the level of stress hormones. It is the root of many holidays, if not all of our holidays. It is the oldest social network in the world. And when people stop allowing themselves to enjoy food, celebrate with food, or socialize with food, I worry that these efforts, no matter how well-intentioned, may eventually fail.
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