I quit sugar for 30 days

Last year I had developed a bad habit of snacking. I had lost all self-control in the face of a free donut or plate of cookies, and I made justifications for my actions. Excuses like, Well, I did go to the gym today. Overall, I eat pretty healthy. It's not like I do this every day. Until I started to do it every day. I knew something had to change when, even though I exercise often, I noticed I was developing early-onset dad gut. So I decided to quit sugar for 30 days. Now most of us know that too much sugar is a bad thing. It's something that we've been taught ever since we were kids. And apart from simply putting a little bit of weight on your gut, there's a lot more serious problems that can come with eating too much sugar. It can damage your metabolism, cause type 2 diabetes, increase the likelihood that you'll get liver or kidney damage, causes inflammation of the skin, joint pain, tooth decay, and even problems maintaining an erection. So yeah, there's even that as well. So that's probably the main reason. No, it's not the main reason. Get that out of your head. So on top of all that, on top of all of these bad things that it does to your body, it's also very addictive. So I know the first thing that I want to do right now is go through my entire apartment and find all of the things that have added sugar and get them out of my apartment. So let's do that now. I knew I was consuming a decent amount of sugar, but without reading the labels and digging into weekly snacks and meals, I wouldn't know for sure. There were, of course, some no-brainers. Ice cream is loaded. Chocolate snacks are packed. My once a month energy drink. But I was also surprised to find a lot of sugar in my protein bars. My breakfast cereal is basically a dessert. Even the bread I was buying had five grams a slice. If you're like me and you have very little self-control, the only thing you can do to regain control is to completely change your environment. It's impossible to eat snacks that you refuse to purchase and bring into your home in the first place. So all this stuff needs to go. The cravings were the worst for the first couple days, but even a week in, I was struggling late at night. All right, so I'm seven days into this no sugar challenge, and this is probably the toughest night so far. About 45 minutes ago, I had a bit of a sugar craving and instinctively I went to my snack cabinet and I'll show you guys what I found. That's it. Organic rice cake. Nothing, nothing sweet there. Before I started this challenge, I did a little bit of research, but I still had a lot of questions about sugar. What kind of sugar should we be avoiding? And how much is too much? So I asked my friend Becca Shearn to help clear some things up for me. She's a registered dietician and founder of Minimal Wellness. I'm hoping you can help me kind of break down when people decide to get sugar out of the diet, what does that usually look like? What kind of sugars are people usually trying to cut out? Most people, when they're trying to cut out sugar, they're talking about added sugar. So sugar that gets added to a processed food, a cooked food. That's like table sugar or honey or high fructose corn syrup. My king, this corn syrup was just delivered. Generally, it's recommended that you're somewhere but under ideally 5% of your calories from added sugar. So for a 2000 calorie diet, that's 25 grams of added sugar. And it turns out that added sugar can add up quick. I noticed the high levels in some of my daily snacks and the occasional foods I might get served on an airplane. While my old instinct was to throw food in my mouth, my new instinct was to check the back of the package and then throw my food at Natalie. You're not aiming for 25 grams of sugar every day. It's over the course of a week, over the course of a month. Some days are really low, some days are quite high. So that is where you can get the flexibility to have dessert on a special occasion. And I think that that's where as a culture we've really got off track is we no longer have sugar relegated to desserts. Or special occasions, right? It's like in everything because we eat so much processed food. Yeah, and it was surprising even for me. I had watched Fed Up and these documentaries and I read a lot of blog posts about how much sugar is in everything. I knew it, but then I was still surprised by certain things. Like my granola bar was like 30 grams of sugar. And I'm like, that's why it tastes so good. And it's hard. I think it takes really looking at everything you're purchasing and really understanding that if it tastes too good to be true, it's probably. Yeah, yeah. I mean, there's a reason why food manufacturers put a lot of added sugar in things. It tastes good, it makes you want to buy it again. It's really straightforward. The problem is it's terrible for us. Becca thought my 30-day no sugar challenge was a good step to understanding how my body personally responds to sugar, but also stress the importance of maintaining a healthy and balanced diet. If I'm being honest, my diet isn't always balanced and it can sometimes look a bit primitive. All right, so tonight's dinner can really only be described as a bowl of food. Here, let me show you guys what we're working with here. We've got your rice, your chicken, and your daily recommended bacon. I should be eating more veggies. I just realized that right now. I'm going to start doing that soon, but first, bacon. I must not have had a terrible sugar addiction because I didn't experience any headaches or major discomfort outside of nightly cravings. To combat these cravings, I made some tea as a replacement. This really helped to keep my mind distracted. My biggest fear and motivation to go on this 30-day challenge is because I know how small changes make a big difference. Now, normally when I talk about small changes, it relates to positive change, but it also works in the opposite direction. Small bad habits like snacking on junk food can build up and compound to something much worse. What are you looking at? Your dog. You make those early excuses and justifications, but eventually you don't need to make them anymore because the bad habit sticks and you're running on autopilot. So I'm thankful that I got out in front of it before things got any worse. In the past, I had relied on smoothies to get most of my vitamins, but as a part of this challenge, I also wanted to cut back on fruit. While they do include vitamins, nutrients, and fibers that are good for you, I wanted to force myself to eat more greens. After the first 10 days, I started to prepare and eat healthier meals. For dinner, I'd have fish with brown rice and sautéed kale. Salads became my go-to meal because they were convenient and easy to prepare. We have curry cod with some brown rice and sautéed kale. In the kale, I actually sautéed it with some chicken broth, which I'm also going to be drinking here. Natalie's definitely much better around the kitchen than I am. I primarily eat for sustenance while she cooks and eats for the love of the food. I found workarounds and substitutes for all meals that included sugar. Instead of fig jam sauce, I used mustard. Instead of vinegar, I used olive oil and a healthy squeeze of lemon, topped with some salt and pepper. Three weeks in, and I noticed that my energy levels became more stable. No longer did I have huge swings of high to low energy throughout the day, especially as I tried to balance my diet out with protein, carbs, greens, and a little bit less bacon. So what you're experiencing there is energy levels, but it's blood sugar fluctuations. So when you have lots of added sugar in your diet, you can get really big fluctuations in your blood sugar levels, which make you feel like you've got a lot of energy, and then, holy crap, you're crashing and you have no energy. And then what you typically do when you feel like you have no energy, especially if you're not paying attention, is to gravitate towards something that will give you quick energy. Sugar. Gravitate toward sugar, so you go back up. You feel good for a little while, and then you crash again. In addition to more stable energy levels, I also noticed a significant reduction of my dad gut. It didn't disappear, but the tide had turned. All right, so the 30-day challenge is done, and I feel pretty good. I feel pretty good. There were a few things that I changed over the past 30 days. I did start going to the gym more now that I'm not traveling as much. I also reduced my carbs, partly because of the reduction in added sugar, and it's hard to pinpoint the exact percentage benefit that I received from getting rid of sugar. To steal a phrase from Dan Harris, I'd say maybe I was 10% healthier. It definitely made a huge difference in my energy levels and how I felt every day, and it was definitely nice to curb those cravings because who knows how bad it could have gotten if I just kept snacking and kept going. My dad gut could have potentially turned into a grandpa gut, which would have been really scary. But going forward, I love sweets. I love dessert. I'm a big fan, and I don't want to just get rid of it completely because I think in this life, we need to actually enjoy things, but I want to bring it back in moderation. So starting next month, I'm going to experiment with a once-a-week cheat meal, and that starts tomorrow. If you'd like to get exclusive videos on habit change, filmmaking, business, and lifestyle design, go to patreon.com slash Matt D'Avella. Get access to all my extended interviews like my conversation with Becca Schirn. Sleep deprivation is epidemic in our society. Sign up today to immediately get 18 videos and seven podcast episodes with new content coming every month. And if you want to take part in these 30-day challenges with me, I'm doing them all year and announcing them in three places, my newsletter, Twitter, and Instagram. You can find those links in the description below. Thanks for watching. Oh, that was a mistake. I feel sick. My stomach hurts. I ate like a donut and a half, and I still feel horrible. This is terrible. Look at this. This is bad. I need to give these donuts away to somebody. Yeah. Thanks for taking these donuts. You're welcome. Bye. Happy birthday.