Sugar Fast for the Soul

This year, I did something that would have been unthinkable to me in the past – I observed Lent, and I gave up sugar. I have long eschewed organized religion and what I believed to be silly pageantry and quaint rituals, and I’m also stubborn as heck and hard-pressed to give something up if I don’t want to. But this year, I was thinking about how many religions include some sort of fasting, some sort of contained self-denial, and I got curious and decided I would do a little experiment with myself to see what it’s all about.

I tried not to be too dogmatic about the process; I decided I would still eat fruit and not look too carefully at nutrition labels for rogue grams of sugar in unexpected places. The main project was to not eat sweets or sweetened beverages and just see what happened. Let me tell you, it was a wild ride.

The first 4-5 days, I was fiending for sweets. I craved them all the time, wandering mindlessly to the cabinet where we keep the chocolate, fighting myself from putting a scoop of sugar in my coffee in the morning, driving morosely past the gelato place. I wanted it bad. And to be honest, I hadn’t even realized I craved it that much. I never thought I ate that much sugar.

After riding the struggle bus for 4 and a half days, I had dinner out with my husband and our friend, Parth. Parth had done a sugar-fast in the past and said he had never had such clear thinking and energy. He said when he had done it, he felt like a different person. Even while we sat there chatting, I felt my mindset start to shift. Perhaps it was the power of Parth’s suggestion, or perhaps I was reaching a level of sugar detox in my body and mind, but over the course of dinner, I stopped having the fiending cravings for sugar. I still wanted gulab jamun for dessert, but now I was able to appraise the craving, to evaluate and analyze it to see why I was having it. I popped into my metacognitive witchy self and started thinking about my thinking.

It’s worth mentioning here that even though I had these cravings in the first few days, I didn’t really want the sugar. In fact around day 3, I ordered a latte, and the order was incorrect and had sweetener in it. I didn’t drink it. I think there’s something about the power of commitment to an experiment, to science, to curiosity, to overcome a craving too.

The next phase of the sugar fast lasted up to about day 20 – I was still having cravings, but they weren’t urgent, and I was able to use them as bits of self-insight. In this period, I found that sometimes I craved sugar because it was coupled with other activities, like getting dessert after dinner when we went to our favorite Indian restaurant or when I got in my car because I had gotten in the habit of buying cake pops at Target and having one when I went for a drive. Other times, I found I was craving sugar because what I really wanted in that moment was taking too long or I didn’t have the energy to do it. This was often the case for work I was doing – writing blog posts, working on my website, other kinds of important, meaningful, but time-consuming tasks. I just wanted to be satisfied, and I knew sugar would hit that button in my brain (however briefly and unsatisfactorily).

Then about half-way through, the sugar cravings were quiet enough that I was able to perceive some different signals from my body, signals that had been squashed down and buried underneath the sugar bomb to my sensory system. Seriously, how did I not know how powerful the sugar signaling cascade was in my brain and body?!

I started to feel thirsty for water again, a feeling which had long gone by the wayside. Then I felt my desire for sex come roaring back. I was thirsty. I mean, it makes sense – it’s all part of the dopamine pathway, the pleasure cascade.

At about day 35, I started to feel the most subtle desire yet – the desire to write. We all have a creative outlet (or several) that we are pulled to, and mine was always creative writing, especially poetry. I loved writing, but I don’t think I ever even let myself entertain the possibility that I could be a writer. I squashed that little impulse down deep in my body for fear of failure, humiliation, shame, and the whole spectrum of negative human emotions. But without the sugar to satisfy the sweetness my soul was craving, I felt my soul calling again. I started to write.

What I started writing was a bit of a surprise, but more on that later.

On the 40th day, I ate some sweet potato casserole, a favorite that my mother-in-law makes, and boy was it sweet. The first bite was like magick, but then the joy ebbed. It was too much, too sweet. I didn’t want more. I had managed to re-wire my preferences in this 40-day period, and now I am eager to avoid sugar except for rare occasions. I’ll write instead.

What cravings do you think would resurface in the absence of sugar?

Is it worth giving up sugar for you to find out?