The science-based system to overcome sugar & food addiction
Hanna (top) and Laura (bottom) living our best Sugar Sober lives with the Sugar Sober Food Journal.
Trigger Warning + Disclaimer
We talk about food and body. We’re pretty unabashed in describing self-deprecating thoughts, binges, specific foods, and dieting.
Sugar Sober (it’s content and offerings) is absolutely not intended to substitute for psychological counseling, therapy, or professional health care advice.
If this is triggering for you and/or you need qualified, professional health care, we recommend you check out our Eating Disorders Resources page first.
Here’s a hint: it has nothing to do with being “off sugar” for the rest of your life.
Actually, it’s kind of the opposite…
In the New York Times Bestselling book on human identity and consciousness, The Untethered Soul, author Michael A Singer describes two distinct paths to respond to discomfort in life:
#1 When there’s a thorn in your arm, do everything you can to not agitate it so it doesn’t hurt. Don’t move your arm. In fact, wear a sling. Don’t let people come close. In fact, don’t go to many places at all. And no matter what you do, don’t touch it!
You avoid the discomfort of the thorn prick, but the thorn is still the center of your world. Everything orbits around the thorn. The thorn is part of you.
And, worst of all, you’re still uncomfortable, but now it’s from all of your baby-proofing to try to avoid discomfort.
#2 Pull out the damn thorn. Now you move freely. You are in control.
We see diets, sugar free programs, and most overeating recovery conversations treat food addiction as the thorn in path #1. It’s there every day, and it’s so uncomfortable, so let’s structure our entire lives around trying to not stir it up, touch it, tempt it, etc. It’s now part of who we are.
Most people come to Sugar Sober directly from diets and lifestyle models built on path #1. Every day we hear the (incredibly common) statements:
“I just can’t be trusted with food”
“I can’t have just one, so I make my husband/roommates/kids hide them from me.”
“If I can just stay away from it completely, I’m fine, but once I start it’s all I crave.”
“If I could just stop being around it/stop eating it, I’d be fine.”
Food addicts identify as the addiction. The thorn (the addiction) is now accepted as part of who you are (living in your arm forever), thus you simply have no choice but to model your entire life around it.
Today’s culture is so obsessed with restriction and food shame, it’s hard to recognize path #1 as an approach to food sobriety rather than the law of nature. It’s the water (0:16-1:08)
We call bullshit.
Sugar Sober is path #2.
We touch, tug, and coax out the thorn that’s so deeply embedded in scar tissue and quick-fix bandages. We take a magnifying glass to it to really understand how it’s embedded and model all of our work around how to best remove it.
We’re crystal clear, the entire time, that food addiction, the thorn, is not actually you. It’s completely separate and 100% solvable.
Sugar Sober is life without food addiction, not without food.
A Sugar Sober life is...
...going to a birthday party and enjoying a slice of cake while actually staying in your pleasant chats and the celebration vibes at the same time
without your food addiction chewing at your ear for another piece (c’mon, you could just grab it when no one’s looking and eat it really fast in the bathroom), or building a mental roster of what to buy on the way home to turn it into a full-on binge.
….head thrown back, laughing until your stomach aches while tucked into a booth with friends at your favorite restaurant. It’s being 100% present in the conversation, the experience, the night
without mentally living a hidden double life in which you’re actually fixated on how many servings you can have or bites you can ‘steal’ before your friends notice.
...trying new foods and at-home recipes with intrigue, excitement, and immersion of the senses
without it triggering obsession over your waistline or micro-tallying carbs, calories, or whatever microscopic metric the newest diets have told you to track.
...keeping a bar of chocolate in the fridge until you think “oh hey, I’d love a bite of that,” pulling out a piece, enjoying it, and then putting the rest back for later and moving on
without that chocolate bar talking to you from the fridge, taking your attention hostage, until you finally (once again) end up standing over the kitchen sink scarfing it down like a ravenous animal, not even tasting it.
To become sugar sober, you’re gonna have to touch the thorn.
What do we mean by “touch the thorn”?
We mean...
Name the thorn
Hint: it’s not you, remember?
So what exactly is it? How do you define it? How do you experience it?
Take a magnifying glass to the thorn
Trace how it got there and how long you’ve carried it
Study what thoughts and feelings it triggers
Learn it’s patterns (so that in future steps you can create detours and off ramps)
Poke at it
Where is it most painful?
I.e. What social situations are hardest? What foods are the most challenging? What thoughts are the most difficult to challenge?
Where does it give a little?
Are there some foods, some times, some places that are easiest for you to manage? What’s the easiest/least painful way to start working on this thing?
Tend to yourself (rather than the thorn/food addiction)
Who would you be if you didn’t have a food addiction? Let’s take care of that person, they’ve been neglected for a while.
Feed yourself delicious, gorgeous food that nourishes your body and your soul
Push yourself to make incremental changes towards the life you keep promising yourself, holding off for “someday, when I have food under control”
Learn (and incorporate) new practices and thought patterns centered around supporting YOU, not the addiction
Relearn how to use your arm
Stop limiting what you do on a daily, weeky, yearly basis because of the food addiction
Connect with others who get it, and support each other throughout the process
Go out, be seen, do things!
Stop keeping fucking secrets, they are debilitating.
Notice nothing in the system is centered on specific foods to remove or add. Food addiction is a behavior problem, not a food problem. Hence, the Sugar Sober system is a behavior change system.
As is true for all systems, it’s a process. It has a series of steps. Our job is to teach you and take you through those steps. Everything we teach, build, and lead is to help you change your eating behaviors for the long term.
You can be sugar sober and absolutely love & enjoy food.
In fact, that’s the definition of a Sugar Sober life.
If you read to this point, it’s because we’re speaking your language. Let’s continue this conversation.
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Tell us in the comments,
When you imagine a Sugar Sober life - a life free of food addiction, food shame, and the Big Scary God of Diet Judgement Looking Down Upon You - what do you most yearn for? What are you most EXCITED for?
