I had to quit eating refined sugar back in my 20s.
My family is plagued by type 2 diabetes.
And after watching it destroy my grandfather’s health and the health of several of my uncles, I decided I just wasn’t going to eat sugar anymore.
Whatever pleasure I was getting from eating sugar simply wasn’t worth that type of pain in my future.
Nerve damage, heart problems, wasting away to nothing despite an active lifestyle and otherwise healthy diet…
It just wasn’t worth it.
So, my mindset was in the right place to quit.
I had the motivation.
I had a solid diet plan.
I figured it would be easy.
But it wasn’t.
Quitting alcohol was easy.
Quitting sugar was insanely difficult.
The cravings would hit so hard and so fast that I’d find myself driving into town late at night to grab an ice cream or a candy bar.
“Just one last time!” I’d tell myself, every single time.
It took some serious digging around and experimenting, but I finally discovered that others in my situation were getting great results with probiotics.
I had no idea why that should work at the time, but I was desperate, so I grabbed a decent probiotic supplement from my local health food store and started taking it, and…
Those intense nighttime cravings cleared up within a week.
Why?
Well, I wouldn’t find out until several years later, but apparently, according to more recent research, it turns out that the bacteria living in your gut doesn’t just hang out and help you digest food.
It plays a much more active role in regulating your hunger than we ever realized.
The bacteria that thrive on sugar, in particular, will completely take over down there if you eat a lot of sugar for a long time.
And, when you realize that you’re eating too much sugar and try to quit…
They start releasing chemicals that make you crave sugar!
Those little monsters actually hijack your digestive system by feeding on all the extra sugar you’ve been eating, and then get to work making sure that you keep giving them more sugar, so that they can maintain their population.
So, in my case at least, it seems that having the right mindset wasn’t enough.
Because my goal to quit eating sugar was in direct conflict with the goal of an entire civilization of microbes that didn’t want to be wiped out of existence.
And, apparently, the probiotic supplement helped balance things out down there, and those sugar-craving monsters lost their influence over me.
Kinda spooky in hindsight, if that’s actually what happened.
But it’s something to keep in mind if you’re trying to quit sugar and you experience stronger than usual cravings.