Vegetarian Diet Causes Sugar Cravings

I never thought of myself as having a sweet tooth—I take my coffee with just cream, I loathe hard candy, and I cringe at the thought of sprinkling sugar over breakfast cereal.

So when WomensHealthMag.com asked me to go off of added sugars for a week, I got a major wakeup call…I actually eat a ton of sugar.

The first day was rough. By the afternoon, I was exhausted and my head ached—if you've ever tried to give up caffeine, you know what I was going through.

Plus, it was just plain hard. I realized I was in trouble when I spun my hummus container around and spotted sugar on the ingredient list. Second from last, but still—hummus?! Bread was impossible, as was cereal—even the most boring, cardboard-like cereal in my cupboard contained two kinds of sugar: both honey and cane syrup.

Breakfast, thankfully, I found to be pretty easy. I'm a big egg person, and I also make a lot of yogurt parfaits. The non-fat plain yogurt in my fridge was no problem, but the second ingredient on my super-hippie, locally made granola? Evaporated cane juice sugar. So I dug muesli out of the pantry—essentially rolled oats with seeds and raisins—and used that instead, along with frozen fruit.

For lunches, I typically had a bun-less veggie burger, though I mindlessly squirted ketchup on top before realizing my mistake (high-fructose corn syrup!), scraping it off, and replacing it with mustard. But one can only eat so many bun-less veggie burgers…

Dinners—at home—weren't too bad. After all, you don't typically add sugar to grilled chicken, chili, and lots of other usual dinner suspects. But there were plenty of go-to dishes to scratch off the list: teriyaki, pizza, meatballs with sauce, even my favorite salmon dish (made with a brown-sugar rub) and stir-fry (it calls for honey).

Dessert was tough, obviously. Deprived of my usual low-fat ice cream sandwich (which contains dextrose, high-fructose corn syrup, corn syrup, and sugar—likely to make up for the decreased fat content), I actually drank orange juice for dessert one night. I was that desperate for something sweet.

It's also pretty much impossible to go out to dinner on this diet. My waiter at one restaurant told me as much after I quizzed him about the sugar content of the salads, tomato sauce, even the Brussels sprouts. Though he did offer me a reason to keep on going with my sugar-free diet: "My buddy went off sugar and lost, like, 100 pounds," he said.

That reminds me of the best part: By the last day, in addition to having more energy, feeling less irritable, and not getting those mid-afternoon slumps, I had also lost three pounds.

You'd think that would be enough to keep me going, but even with all those benefits, eliminating added sugars altogether just wasn't sustainable for me (which shows the addictive power and sheer ubiquity of this stuff). Sure, I'll watch my sugar intake more carefully now, but I do have to say—at the end of my week without it, I couldn't wait to tear into a big, carby sandwich. As good as I felt, returning to sugar felt better.

More From Women's Health:
Curb Your Sweet Tooth
Is Sugar Sneaking Into Your "Healthy" Foods
There's HOW Much Sugar in that Coffee?

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Vegetarian Diet Causes Sugar Cravings

Source: https://www.womenshealthmag.com/food/a19928271/sugar-free-diet/

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