Growing up, sugar was a big part of my life. In the Portuguese culture lunch and dinner should always come followed by fruit or dessert. Most of the times you’ll have both options available. And if you finished the main meal and are already full, expect to hear “there’s always space for a dessert”.
I’m not gonna lie, as a child I loved that! It was a sweet childhood around the table. However as I became a teenager, I started gaining weight. Part of it I think it was because my freedom of choice increased. At school we had a cafe with lots of pastries and sweets available, I would buy my own lunch and snacks and I was also a regular at the sweets kiosk by the bus stop. I knew it wasn’t good for me to consume that amount of sugar but I couldn’t really see the consequences in my body. I was putting on weight but I would hear everyone say that it was normal because I was a teenager.
As I’d see my body grow bigger I no longer was feeling good and confident in my own skin. I quit swimming which at that time it was the only sport I was doing. That only aggravated things and that’s when I developed an eating disorder. I didn’t tell anyone about it because I felt ashamed of it.
At that time my mum used to buy me a teenagers magazine each week. The day I became fed up with my relationship with food I asked my mum to switch from the teenager's magazine to the health magazine. I would read every page of each magazine to learn as much as I could about nutrition and exercise. That’s when I gained awareness of how much sugar I was consuming daily and how much I had to change. I began to test on my own body by applying the tips I was learning from the magazines. That, alongside with beginning surf, allowed me to lose a lot of weight and restore my health and wellbeing.
Years later I watched a documentary which took me to another level on sugar awareness. The documentary was focused on showing how many products we thing are sugar-free but in fact, they’re not. From cereals to canned food, yoghurts, kids snacks… I was shocked! From that day on I was that person in the supermarket looking at the nutritional information of each product I’d hold.
Since that time I’ve been on and off from sugar, but surely have never gone back to the amounts I used to have. One of the main things I feel different in me when I have these breaks is my focus and my mood. Sugar is more addictive than cocaine and like any drug, it brings you to a high state before it gets you down low. When you consume sugar, the brain’s reward system gets activated and dopamine is released. Whenever you feel stressed, depressed or anxious your brain will ask for that as a form of reward. If you feed it, it will continue asking for more. And that’s an easy way to get trapped in the emotional eating cycle.
That is one of the reasons why it is so important to establish in your life what are the healthy rewards you can give yourself. By having those clear in your mind, whenever the negative feelings come up, you’re more likely to engage in healthy rewards rather than poor choices that will damage your health.
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