Constant Craving (WLC)

As I may have mentioned, I’m a picky eater, I hate to cook and I loathe change. So everything about the Whole Life Challenge was initially very difficult for me. I’m afraid that sometimes I make it sound too easy: Oh, I lost a bunch of weight and all I had to do was give up sugar! 

Giving up sugar was, in fact, very, very hard.

You must think of sugar as a drug, not a food. And you are an addict. You have to get through the withdrawals and then you will be fine. Most people can get on the other side in a few days. Three…five…my friend Laura was an extreme case and took nine. Sugar will beckon to you and you will either be stoic and avoid it, or you will give in and have to detox again. Because once you have a little, the cravings come right back. I’m sorry to tell you that, but it’s the truth.

Here’s what I did:

My kids have food allergies, so for a few days, I carried around an Epi Pen, like a method actor, pretending I was deathly allergic to sugar and if I ate just a smidgeon I might go into anaphylactic shock. Yes, I really did do this.

I attempted to white knuckle through the cravings and I was a raving bitch to everyone in my family. Over the course of the three worst days, my husband begged me to go eat a cookie. “Please eat a fucking cookie and give us all a break,” may have been his exact words.

Then, a strange and miraculous thing happened. Into my email landed a link to a website that happened to have a video on it of a woman "Tapping Away" a sugar craving. I’m sure you are now asking, What could that possibly mean?

“Tapping” (also known as EFT) is a psychological tool/technique that is far too complicated for me to explain here fully (partly because I don’t really understand it), but you can simply think of it as (to quote my friend Jamie Wasserman) a descrambling of your mental energy. Basically, you tap on different points on your head, face and upper body – points that correspond to acupressure points – while saying (out loud) some things that rejigger your mental state about a certain issue, in this case: sugar.

There is no doubt about it, this is weird. But I was desperate, and I did it, and, for me, it worked. Meaning, after following this video and “tapping” along with this woman for 10 minutes, my sugar craving vanished. Like, in an instant. One minute I could think of nothing but chocolate, the next minute I couldn't care less about it. My craving came back a few weeks later, I pulled the video up again, tapped again, and again it disappeared, this time not coming back at all.

I was a person who could not go a day without a cookie, or a white chocolate macadamia nut Clif Bar, or (many) Chobani Strawberry yogurts, or some kind of chocolatey goodness. I have not had any sweet treat since the middle of January and it's been completely effortless. In fact, when I started the challenge, I made sure I had several different kinds of dark chocolate around for an emergency, and I see those boxes in my fridge and in my pantry every single day and they have nothing on me.

The most cynical among you will roll your eyes at this video and say, There is no way I’m doing that. That’s fine. But when you text me and ask me how to get through your sugar DTs on Sunday, this is what I’m going to tell you to do.

You can find the Tapping Video here. Use the one called Overcoming Sugar Addiction.  Bookmark it. This is your methadone clinic.

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