Well, I’m into my fourth month of the no sugar/no flour experiment and I can’t believe how time flies. Sure, over the months I’ve dabbled a bit with sugar and flour, a little ketchup here, a little barbeque sauce there, but overall I still can say I’ve consumed less total teaspoons of sugar in this four month period than an average adult consumes in a day. You might be expecting this blog to once again tell you how great I feel, or how proud I am of surviving the current picnic season without cookies, but I’m not going down that road. If you really want to know, I honestly feel like Rowdy Roddy Piper of wrestling fame when he played the character in the movie THEY LIVE!
You heard me right. I feel like I’m a wrestler playing a character in movie, in fact, I’m a character in a cult film directed by John Carpenter. Now, before you panic and call the psychiatric hospital, let me explain.
They Live is a movie where an average guy finds these special glasses and when he wears them he can see subliminal advertising and messages that are making society mindless slaves. The world looks normal when you’re not wearing the glasses, but put them on and that billboard might really say OBEY, CONSUME, and CONFORM. He then makes it his mission to destroy an invading alien force that looks human to the regular population, but grotesque with the glasses. Their goal is to enslave humanity, which is going well for them because humans mindlessly accept the status quo. Things don’t go well for the character, but he does have some success before the end of the film.
My issue right now is that I’ve gone long enough with sugar and processed foods that I can take an impartial look at how much those things control our lives, much like putting on those special glasses. This puts me in a tough spot because my intention was that the experiment wouldn’t make me into someone who constantly pesters others about what they are eating. I don’t want to be “that guy” who looks at you funny while you’re eating a brownie at a barbeque this summer. Trust me, I have a hard enough time getting invited to events, I don’t want to burn my last bridges of friendship.
BUT, I can’t stop thinking about the control sugar has in our lives. When I see someone jogging in the heat or killing themselves at the gym for two hours, I really want them to understand that their results would be doubled if they just gave up sugar and flour for a month. When I hear someone complaining about some chronic leg or back pain, I want to recommend that they just give up sugar and flour for a few weeks, just to see what happens. Sure it might not completely solve their problems, but it did for me and it’s worth a shot. When someone tells me they wish they could get some of their health statistics to a normal level so their doctor won’t prescribe them medication that might have side effects, the first words out of my mouth tend to be “give up sugar and flour”.
I’m not trying to beat them over the head with it, but in the end, people just can’t imagine their lives without sugar and flour. Not for a day, a week, or a month. In fact, I’ve come to realize that most people have never gone a week in their lives without sugar and flour, so they have absolutely no idea what it would be like. Even myself in the healthiest times of my life might have gone a week, but then quickly went to processed “health foods” filled with chemicals that still contained flour, artificial sugars, and provided that sweet taste to keep my body addicted to sugar. I’m asking you, dear reader, can you think of a time in your life when sugar and flour were completely out of your system? If you can’t, then you truly have no idea of how different you can feel.
Now, I am not saying that all things sweet are evil. I’m not starring in a movie called THE SUGAR GAMES, and my name isn’t John-ness EverGraham. I don’t want to overthrow the government or sugar industry, making your life bland and sad. I just want you to gather the courage to try a period of time without sugar and flour, to judge for yourself. Take two weeks of your life and eat your favorite meals that don’t involve sugar and flour. If you survive those two weeks and feel better, then try two more weeks to make it a complete month. After that, live your life how you want, but at least you’ll know what it felt like to shake sugar from your body.
The generations of people currently alive in the United States have all been developed in the age of sugar and processed foods. We are given sugar, flour, and chemical laden food almost from the moment we can eat solids. We are conditioned to believe that we can’t live without it. Our personal reward systems are often built around sugar and we can’t imagine a world without it. If that doesn’t sound like some dystopian book or movie, then I don’t know what does.
My goal is to help you understand that there is a solution to your aches and pains, your potential medical issues, your desire to lose weight, and your overall wellness. When you reach that point in your life that you are ready to test the experiment, please contact me and let’s make a plan.
All the best!
John Graham
PS If you are a graphic designer and would like to make dystopian movie posters around sugar, I won’t stop you. I think it would be pretty cool. Here’s some ideas:
Mad Max: Sugar Road
The Sugar Runner
The Sugar Games
Sugar Lives
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