Help! I’m addicted to sugar and it is thwarting my efforts to stay lean.

I started on the right track.  Halloween was coming but I refused to buy any of my favourite snack-sized chocolate treats this year.  It was fruit gummies and plain chips to hand out - treats I know I won’t binge on…

Night of Halloween I’m exhausted, having worked a lot that morning (1 personal training client + 2 back-to-back fitness classes).  My sabotaging thoughts creep up…”I deserve it; I worked so hard today.”  I end up eating a few chocolate treats on the road during trick or treating with the girls.

Girls go to bed and I totally binge.  I hadn’t eaten chocolate bars for ages and they had ALL the best ones.  I kept thinking, “Oh, they’re just little bite-sized chocolates, I can try a Crispy Crunch, and a Dairy Milk and my favourite, Kit Kat.”

Bite-sized is totally deceiving!  Those calories add up, bite by bite!  And, every chocolate bar is my favourite!  Ahhh!

After eating 15-20 bars that night (lost count!) I woke up feeling yucky.  I said, “I’m finished with Halloween treats” and even told my husband and a few clients, to keep myself accountable.  I let my daughters eat a few treats a day, after their healthy meals.

I kept it up for a few days, but those treats were still in the house.  3 or 4 in the evening when I’m exhausted, sometimes more (eeps!).  I have such a hard time stopping and while treats are ok once in awhile – not everyday.  Especially not good at night when I won’t be burning off those empty calories.

Then I read more about High-Fructose Corn Syrup and how awful it is.  It is a very modified ingredient added to so many of our processed foods as a sweetener.  The average person gets 179 calories a day from HFCS, plus 209 from other sources of sugar.  That is twice as much as what we consumed in the early 1980s.  If we cut those numbers in half, we’d lose 2 lbs. a month!  Researchers are concerned that HFCS is contributing to our North American obesity problem.

So, I just threw the rest of the candy out.  My kids haven’t been asking for them, and they, like me, really shouldn’t be eating them anyway.  I got rid of them while my resolve was strong.  If it isn’t in the house, I won’t eat it – that is a basic rule of healthy eating.

I’m going to try to watch my sugar intake today and get my sweetness from natural sources (fruit) if at all possible.  I’ll take it one day at a time, to wean myself from this sugar addiction.  With the holidays approaching, I want to avoid weight gain and the yucky feeling I have after a sweet-tooth binge!  Bleh!

Here’s some more info about High-Fructose Corn Syrup.  Can you break your addiction too?http://www.shape.com/healthy_eating/the_truth_about_high_fructose_corn_syrup/p/page/1