Sweeteners: Yay or Nay?

Mindset - Why do I get upset/emotional at the suggestion to give up sweeteners?

**I am not saying that if you use sweeteners, you are not food sober. What I am saying is that you may find in your recovery journey that sweeteners might be something that you need to let go of someday. Quitting sweeteners may not be in your first layer of sobriety and that’s okay. **

When you read that regular use of sweeteners are not a great idea in food sobriety, what does that voice of sabotage in your head say?

“What? NO sweetener? That’s too rigid!”

“That’s no way to live you have to have some fun in life!"

“But keto friendly sweeteners have 0 cal! There’s no reason to give them up!”

There are two categories of people when it comes to sweets whether they are keto friendly or not. There’s moderators and there’s abstainers.

Moderators don’t have to try to be moderators. They just are. They don’t have to plan ahead for how many cookies they’re going to eat, how often they’re going to have something sweet, whether or not they’re going to finish the whole thing – moderators eat sweets if they want to when they are presented with it, moderators don’t finish it if they are full, moderators don’t walk away obsessing about what they ate. They literally really don’t care about food that much. They only give it thought when they’re hungry.

The rest of us are not like that. We have a problem with portion control, frequency, obsessing before and after, attempting to use willpower not to eat more than we “should“ and often times when we take that first bite it leads to a downward spiral. Sometimes it’s a slow fade and we declare we’re going to have something once a week and then within weeks or months we’re having it every day again. Sometimes the first bite leads to an immediate downward spiral of a binge that can be out of control for days, weeks, or months.

This is clear evidence we are not moderators and we must acccept that we’re not or we will continue to battle and lose our peace of mind over the food.

I used to have extreme emotions about food and for some reason had a scarcity mentality and was always anxious about not getting to eat something. These days I remind myself that there’s food literally everywhere. Most of us live in cities and towns that have food on every block and more than one grocery store.

When we really stop to think about the abundance of food available to us it really doesn’t make sense for us to be concerned about missing out.

When that voice of sabotage says something to us and the results of hearing it/thinking it causes anxiety we need to stop and ask ourselves why.

What do I think consuming this sweetener or a food item is going to do for me? If I am really and truly hungry then my answer is to eat nutrient dense food not a dessert.

Does any of this resonate with you?

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