Clean Eating: When You Realize Sugar is Poison

The Story So Far

On January 1, 2017, my husband and I decided to embark on a clean eating and strictly Paleo diet. Since we regularly eat gluten and dairy free because of my allergies, the switch was not difficult.

The hardest part, however, was cutting out processed sugar. Instead of using sugar in our cooking and baking, we now use honey as our natural sweetener. (Let me tell you, it tastes great in black coffee!) More recently, I switched to green tea instead of coffee, because the health benefits of green tea far outweigh that of coffee.

In addition to what we ate, we vowed to exercise five times a week and improve our overall health. It’s not that we were overweight or unhealthy, but we knew we could be making better choices about our food and our lack of exercise over the fall and holiday months.

Four weeks later, we both lost weight. I lost over 9 pounds and moved from a 34 inch waist pant size down to a 32″ waist. I bought six new pairs of 32″ waist khakis only to discover that today, I could probably get into a 31″ waist and still feel comfortable.

Over the past few weeks, we relaxed our strict Paleo and adopted and 80/20 model, allowing for the occasional healthy grain such as rice or something not strictly on the P diet.

Poisoning My Body

Now that I’ve set the stage for my story, let me tell you about Easter weekend. As a treat, Tim bought me a package of Jordan Almonds—one of my favorite candies—to celebrate Easter. I ate over half the package in a day and I didn’t feel so great on Monday. That day, at work, my boss brought a ton of leftover candy from her kids Easter baskets to the office. I stupidly raked through the candy, pulling out all the gummy type candies. I proceeded to eat over 15 small packages of candy throughout the day. Later that night, I nursed an unusual headache that would not go away with pain medication. After a rough night’s sleep, I woke up feeling absolutely terrible, slightly nauseous, and the damn headache still hadn’t gone a way. Finally, after popping a few Excedrin and walking the dog, the headache dissipated.

That’s when I realized I had poisoned my body.

After four months of clean eating with no processed sugar, I ingested enough processed sugar in two days to upset my system. It will probably take the rest of the week to purge the crap and toxins from my body, but I know I will feel better. When arrive at my office today, I’m going to look at the candy on the table and flip it the finger because I no longer want to poison my body.

Moral of the story: Candy, and other forms of processed sugar, are poison to the human body.