I ain’t no doctor
a weekly column by charles faris, hhc
Charles,
I am finding myself plagued by the desire to eat sweets; breakfast, lunch and dinner, morning, noon and night. What foods are good alternatives to satisfy my sugar craving?
Massachusetts Sugar Fiend
Dear Sugar Fiend,
Thanks for asking me one of my very favorite questions! And pardon me if I break this answer up into two parts, and give you the answer you were probably looking for next week! And why is the non-doc going to make you wait a week to get the answer you are looking for? Because this week I want to introduce an idea that may make the whole issue of sugar and sweets substitution less vital as well as possibly unnecessary.
Primary and Secondary foods
First off I want to introduce the idea of primary food, which is all the stuff in life that feeds and nourishes you, like healthy honest relationships, a meaningful career, physical activities that make you wake up wanting to move, in short all the stuff that makes life great and isn’t breakfast, lunch and dinner (or as you say, morning noon, and night!). That stuff you put in your mouth? Let’s call that secondary food, and being secondary, let’s talk about it next week.
Getting to the root of your sugar cravings
Now, this simple shift of perspective regarding what food is, enables us to drastically broaden the palette for dealing with your cravings. Instead of looking for some kind of food to replace the sugar, lets look instead and the sweetness quotient in the rest of your life.
The first thing to do is to take an honest assessment of your life in terms of sweet and sour. How much of what you’ve got where. Are your primary relationships satisfying your desire for sweetness, or are they pushing the scale for sour? How about your experience at work? Is your spiritual practice nourishing the part of you that is yearning for sweetness? How about exercise and physical activity?
Pour some sugar on thee
Once you’ve made an assessment of the sweetness quotient in your everyday life, your primary food, it’s time to make the necessary changes. Bring some sweetness into all the areas of your life. Don’t stop until you have shifted the quotient in all of your daily activities. You’ll find that when life is sweet, because you are making it so, the desire to reach for the sugar bowl, or the honey pot, begins to diminish.
This simple method also applies to all the other flavors in life that we need to balance in order to feel comfortable and enlivened; the sour, the salty, the bitter, and the pungent. You might even begin to ascribe secondary food qualities to your daily activities, like that wasabi run you took on the hills yesterday, or that anchovy of a business meeting this morning, or…maybe not!
Tune in next week as we talking about some secondary food strategies to nip your sugar cravings in the (taste) bud.
Charles Faris, hhc
“i ain’t no doctor”
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