I want to clear something up. Is sugar addiction real? Can we ever eat intuitively and be free from the jail of always craving sugar?

There’s a lot of chat about “intuitive eating”, which, as a concept, I think is amazing.

By this point you know me. You know how much I hate calorie counting and that I’d never recommend it.

If you don’t, let me give you a brief run down. For me, calorie counting completely disregards the real reason for eating, which is to give you life and to connect with the earth. When you calorie count, food merely becomes numbers, or even worse, it becomes a negative source of stress for not hitting the right numbers.

When really food is magic. It’s literally magic that the earth has given us these presents to nourish us and to allow us to fulfil our purpose – to be amazing people, to achieve, to look after others and to bring joy to the lives of everyone we come into contact with, and at the base of it all… To live! I mean that really is our most basic purpose.

Random story: I used to hate my name “Liv”, and then one day I realised how lucky I am to have a name that literally has my purpose embedded in it. I am (we all) are here to LIVE, whatever that means to you.

Back to food. Eating is an energy exchange, literally, it provides us energy not just in the form of calories but it also provides us fibre, minerals and vitamins which are used in our bodies to allow us to thrive. The food we eat forms the basis of our hormones, tissues and neurotransmitters which affect all aspects of our health and therefore our lives.

How is this an exchange? I really do think that the energy we bring to the eating experience affects what that food brings to us. If you are constantly stressed or have negative thoughts towards food (thinking it’ll make you fat or it’s naughty), you’ll never have a good experience with food, no matter what you are eating.

I do think we as a human race have forgotten how to eat intuitively. And it IS something we should all be able to do.

BUT (there’s always a but)…

We cannot deny that some parts of intuitive eating and the food choices we make are out of our control.

What I mean is that the concept of intuitive eating places all of the onus on you. Which isn’t fair. Yes your own choices are a huge part of your diet, but I know for sure that there are parts of our environment that make it impossible to eat well, yes, impossible.

If you can’t stop at one Tim Tam, or you eat dessert past the point of fullness, or you cave to the ice cream in your freezer after a tough Tuesday at work despite the fact that you “started a diet” on Monday – IT IS NOT ALL YOUR FAULT.

Junk food companies are seasoned professionals at manufacturing food to make it irresistible, which is a great business decision for them because it means they make more sales. But unfortunately the fact that they manufacture these sugary foods to be so far away from the food Mother Nature gives us means that we aren’t equipped to handle it.

Our physiology “fails us” and we become addicted to the sugar. We can’t stop at one, and even though we tell ourselves over and over again that “this week we won’t cave”, we may last only a few days by sheer willpower, but the second we have a stressful day, that willpower goes out the window and there we are standing in the kitchen half way through a bag of Maltesers before we’ve even finished putting the groceries away. We’ve all been there.

So if calorie counters try to convince you that 100 calories of cucumbers is the same as 100 calories of M&M’s, well it’s just not true. No one is addicted to cucumbers. No one “can’t stop at one cucumber”. Junk food, on the other hand, is incredibly hard to say no to.

That is, only if you are addicted to sugar.

But we don’t have to live our lives like this! One of the most common questions I get asked is how to stop eating sugar!

The answer really should be simple. Don’t eat sugar. But we all know it’s not that simple is it?

The only way to free yourself from sugar is to not want it in the first place. But how do you do that?

I’m currently putting together the exact method I used to be free myself from sugars nasty hold. And you can too.

My course The Sweetness Beyond Sugar is helping people everywhere say goodbye to sugar forever.

And what I really want for you is to experience the freedom I’ve been lucky enough to achieve (through plenty of trial and error).

sbs