Resisting Sugar

How can we learn to resist sugar? Especially when our human drive towards wanting sugar is challenged at every point. It's all around us. All the time.

Transcript

Hello,

I'm Charlotte Watts.

Welcome to these podcasts that were first broadcast live in my Facebook group Charlotte Watts Calm.

Hope you enjoy them and if you want more,

Please look at my website charlottewattshealth.

Com.

Hello,

Welcome to this video on my three key tips for resisting sugar.

I've started with this video as this weekly series because it covers many aspects of what I like to teach,

What I like to explore personally in my life,

What I like to explore with others in consultations and classes and retreats.

So very much I think encompasses where many of us feel ourselves falling with stress responses in the modern world and let's face it,

This modern world is often one of abundance and one where our human predilection,

Our human drive towards wanting sugar is challenged at every point.

Sugar is all around us.

It makes us feel good.

It gives us a beta endorphin hit.

It's often in offices in abundance as a kind of bonding,

Making cakes,

Baking has become a big kind of cultural interest.

So it's something that we are often feel like we're battling time and time again.

So it's a good place to start where I tend to meld my areas of nutrition and yoga.

And although yoga might not seem directly related to nutrition,

I'm very interested in actually that embodied awareness that it creates and our mindful link to how we feel and our consciousness around our living.

And also in terms of yoga,

A real connection with physical feelings and the fact that we don't always have to feel fully comfortable,

That we can be with being in places of discomfort.

So I'm starting here and there is these three key tips,

Follow lines that I expand in many other areas.

There's a little bit of an overview and partly doing this is so that I can really gauge from you the points that you might want pulling out a little bit further expanding in the future,

These Facebook lives and even kind of bigger later on in terms of webinars and content for stuff coming up.

So it's a bit of an overview and I really welcome questions,

Comments to get this restarted as a community discussion and support for each other as we're all facing this stuff.

So my first key tip for resisting sugar is very much about what happens in the here and now when a craving happens.

So I'll talk about kind of long term and short term stuff,

But really when a craving hits,

What can we do about it as it were?

So if you're really caught in those,

That swell of a craving and you've just got that overriding want over need and maybe there's something available to you or you could go to the shop and get something or you can see something in sight in an office for instance,

What can you have there to intercept,

Intercept that impulse and three things I find really useful for myself to have in the house to maybe have in my bag just to consider as kind of out and about even.

One is I tend to turn to coconut chips or coconut chunks quite a lot recently.

They're very dense in healthy fats and healthy fats really soothe brain chemistry.

They produce a sense of satisfaction that our brains are kind of seeking when they go into that quick fuel up stress response mode that can have us just reaching for the sugar for that instantaneous quick fix.

Coconut and coconut chunks,

They need a lot of chewing so they've got a very physical satisfaction and a very bodily sense to really tune into.

That chewing mechanism itself satisfies the brain.

We must be receiving something that is fully satisfying if we need to chew it that much as a whole food sense about it if you like.

And they also have a sweetness about them.

There is a sweetness to them that satisfies that part of the brain as well so incredibly useful.

Another thing you may have,

I'd certainly turn to over Christmas was oranges or satsumas or clementines,

That kind of citrusy family.

Oranges are very high in satiety index so they're rated high in their terms of satisfaction level,

I.

E.

They keep up satisfaction for a long amount of time.

And on that satiety index,

That satisfaction level,

They're shown to be much higher than things like pastries,

Like sugars,

Sugary snacks that we might choose.

And their aroma is very satisfying and actually said to have addictive qualities in terms of making us feel self-soothed.

And again,

There's pith,

There's chewing and there is a very palpable sweetness about them,

Which is incredibly useful.

The other thing I tend to turn to often is nuts.

Nuts are very soothing in terms of,

Yes,

They provide us with soluble fibre,

They have a really good essential fat profile,

And they provide us with minerals like magnesium,

Zinc,

B vitamins that really help us to regulate blood sugar.

Almonds in particular have been shown to help abate and curb sugar cravings.

I tend to go for,

If I'm kind of at home and my kind of go-to thing in the house is a teaspoon of something like a whole nut butter.

This one,

I like the three nut butter particularly,

I find it satisfying.

This is the Whole Earth three nut butter,

Which has got cashew,

Peanuts and hazelnut.

And yes,

For the Puritans,

Peanuts are not nuts,

They are legumes.

And I do tend to avoid those,

But I'm not really pious about these things either.

And that one just kind of does it for me.

A teaspoon of that seems to just ground things.

And that's what we want when we're sugar craving is a grounding sense because cravings are very kind of bodily up here and lack a sense of being rooted and connected.

So that brings me on to the second tip,

Second key tip,

Which is much more about how present we can be with our cravings and learn how to ride them,

How to be with them without them turning into giving into an impulse.

And that is to become really interested in them.

They're not essentially going anywhere.

If we see sugar,

We want it.

That's natural.

It's part of the seeking mechanism that any animal has in the wild to get food to fuel.

So we practice a particular technique or tool,

If you like,

In mindfulness that's often called disidentification.

And this follows part of the mindful path to note that our cravings,

Our thoughts,

Our ruminations,

Our stories are not us.

They're something that we create,

We generate.

But ultimately,

If we put our hand on a heart or a head on our belly,

We feel our physical presence here,

Our breath in our body.

We can start to get the sense that everything else kind of being generated in what we might see up here in the head.

And even that kind of bodily sense that's more kind of a quick fix,

A reaction,

A quick response,

Like a craving,

It's not the same as being connected into our core self,

Into our belly,

Into our feet on the ground,

And into that depth of breath that drops us down there.

So disidentification is where we can start to see anything that comes up.

And in this instance,

That is a craving.

It might be a difficult emotion at a difficult time.

It might be a craving that's related to a difficult emotion.

We might want to quash or mollify a difficult emotion.

But with a craving,

Having a substance that soothes us,

So disidentification is noticing a craving or an emotion linked to a craving and just removing it away from us so that we notice that we are here and that can be over there.

And then there's a space between us and the thing.

And then we can start to see that there is a separation,

That we are,

We start to breathe into our sense of being,

Putting our hands on our body gives us a very palpable sense that we are here in the world.

And that gives us a chance to just breathe and feel where we might feel the craving,

Where we might feel in our body,

We can maybe place a hand onto,

For me,

I'm putting my hand here because it's often kind of solar plexus,

It's around the heart,

Might be a bit lower down into solar plexus,

Into the diaphragm.

So where I feel it then I can start to breathe in and start to feel that sense of craving in felt tones,

In heat,

Texture,

Flavour.

And then we can be with it for the amount of time that it takes to move through its natural cycle.

And it's often said that an emotional craving can take three minutes to just go through its cycle if we're not fuelling it from the original source.

So this is removing it so that yes,

It has come up,

But we're not generating more power,

More story for it.

So that then gives us the space to come on and examine and explore number three in this key tips for resisting sugar,

Which is really tuning in to why,

Why is it that we personally want to avoid sugar?

And yes,

There's that overview,

Lots of stuff in the press,

Which is wonderful for me to see,

Nutritionists to see in terms of that,

That sugar really does have damaging effects,

It does have addictive qualities and our lives are happier and our health can be more sustained and free and easy and our energy and mood more sustained and free and easy,

The less we have in our lives.

And tuning in to not that big overview of,

Oh,

You should be avoiding sugar because should is a very resonant word.

It creates a push back from us.

Even if it's just a little push back,

It can create that kind of stressful push response rather than say that we should not be having sugar.

And rather it's why do I want to do this?

Because when we're in a craving space and that might be that we're craving because something stressful is happening for us,

We want that comfort or we feel we just want that reward,

We deserve it or our biochemistry isn't feeling nourished enough and we want a quick fix in terms of energy,

Many of these reasons and more.

If we come back to actually,

Yes,

That that's a short term,

That's a knee jerk response and all of those cravings for sugar generally are,

They're generally something that just satisfies a want,

A need that appears to be in the present moment,

But it is a knee jerk response.

And that's very different to actually what we might wish for ourselves in the long term.

Why we might prefer to avoid sugar for our health,

For the way it makes us feel.

I mean,

For me personally,

This is about energy.

It's about the fact that I have had chronic fatigue.

For me,

Regulating my energy and feeling that I don't have highs and lows is really important to my quality of life and what I'm able to do and how I'm able to live my life in the way that I want to.

When I have sugar creeps into my life,

It creates cravings that take up a lot of my time and energy,

A lot of kind of conflict in terms of dialogues or do I want something,

Do I not when I'm standing at the queue?

I'm free of those,

The least sugar I have in my life and I prefer living like that.

So it's really connecting in to having reasons why writing those down,

Maybe regularly,

Maybe having even something that you refer to that pulls you back into a tuning into the present moment that brings you away from cravings and back down to an embodied sense where we can be more reflective.

Stress tends to be short term knee jerk stuff.

Our reflective self,

What we want for ourselves long term is more reflective and it can intercept impulse control if we can really tune back in to why we might want to have less in our lives.

And this is the thing about sugar,

Its effects aren't necessarily short term.

We don't necessarily get those real highs and lows.

Some people do and that's kind of slightly easier for them and some people don't.

It's a creeping thing,

Might be kind of a creeping thing on the waistline.

It might be the way that it just creepingly impedes on your quality of sleep or your PMS or skin health or digestive health,

But it's not necessarily obviously there when we have something.

So tuning in to that longer term view for ourselves is very helpful.

And doing that with a disidentification,

Giving ourselves the space to be able to have that exploration.

And if we need having those snacks around,

Something that handily just intercepts that knee jerk response to give us enough time that if we do end up having something it is a reflective choice and we actually enjoy a treat rather than feel guilty about it.

These three key tips really start to allow you to have a relationship with the want for sugar that isn't just about not having with willpower.

It really starts to allow you to have a dialogue which might always be there,

But then might actually give you the liberation of being able to feel more in control of your choices.

So please do send me questions,

Send me any requests for expanding on these things.

What I'm planning to do for next week is to talk a little bit more about snacking.

So although I talked about having kind of some intelligent snacks in here,

Why actually finding ways to live life with sustaining ourselves without snacking,

Without having to keep putting ourselves in,

That will be the topic for next week.

But I will take all of your suggestions into consideration and we'll get a good plan going for the future.

So thank you for listening and I will see you back in the group very soon.

Goodbye.

Reviews

A very helpful talk with 3 tips that I will be trying out!

One of the most helpful talks I’ve ever heard about resisting sugar! Thank you Charlotte!

This was so helpful! Practical strategies and also ways to go deeper. Thank you so much.

Great tips! Thank you

Thank you just what I needed to hear during an evening craving !

Very insightful- thank you

Thank you for this helpful talk! I’m looking forward to hearing more of your Insight Timer programs—and would love if you did more on healthy nutrition, especially avoiding sugar.

One question: Can you please say more about the coconut you recommend for snacking? Are you buying it in chunks? I didn’t know that was available! But I don’t think you mean shredded, do you? Thanks in advance for your clarification.

❤️🙏❤️

Thank you! I definitely. Oils benefit from more talks like this with tips and tricks for my sugar addiction!

Very helpful tips. Thank you 💜 x

Good techniques! Need to chew on them to digest and internalise! 😊

Wonderful talk, Charlotte. Thank you for the lovely tips! 🌷

Interesting and helpful! Thank you!

Thank you for the wonderful tips.

Short but full of good information and insight. Comfortable presentation style.

Excellent suggestions!! Thanks so much for dealing with a substance that has affected my serenity and spiritual well-being.

Excellent advice, thank you, I'm going to listen to this a few more times to really absorb it properly, and hopefully put your suggestions into practice 🙂

very insightful, thanks Charlotte

Good tips thank you

Thank you. V helpful suggestions.

Suggestions that actually make sense and seem possible to put into play. Thank you.