Stop Sugar Cravings Without Quitting Sugar (Women Over 40)

You don't need to quit sugar to stop craving sugar. I'm gonna say that again because you might have missed it the first time. You don't need to quit sugar to stop craving sugar. I'm going to show you why your brain is screaming for sweets right now, especially if you're over 40, in that perimenopause and menopause era of your life. And I'm going to show you how to break those cravings without feeling restricted and deprived, or without doing cold turkey sugar detoxes. Listen, when you listen to this episode, it's going to make your whole week easier. Here's what I know that you're struggling with, because I was there too. You want to stop eating so much sugar because you know sugar is not helping you reach your goal. And you know that you want to quote unquote be good, but you're like, ugh, I need to get sugar out of the house. But then it's like 9:37 at night and your brain is like, hey girl, Do we have anything sweet in here? We need something sweet to eat. I get it. I know how that feels. It's so frustrating, even though you want to break up with sugar, but your brain and your body is like, no, we need to eat some sugar right now. We need something sweet. And I just want you to know that there's nothing wrong with you. You are smart, you are successful, and you are carrying a whole life on your back, especially if you are in your grown woman era. You're taking care of kids, you're taking care of parents, you're taking care of clients. You're taking care of patients, you're taking care of your team, like you're doing all of the things, you're juggling all of the balls in the air, and you're just like, I just want to stop eating the sugar. And the sugar thing just feels so impossible to control because if you're like me, you probably had some stints, right? Where you could go 7 days, 14 days, and really not eat sugar, right? Maybe some of you have been able to go like 30 days or longer with no sugar, but then something happens and you get little taste of that sweet again, and right back before you— before you know it, you're right back where you started again with this whole desire to eat sugar. Some of you may call it an addiction, right? Some of you may laugh about it online of like, how do I stop eating all this sugar? And I feel like a crackhead in the '80s, and that's how I'm addicted to sugar. Like, all of that But inside, for real, for real, like if we keep it real, this whole sugar controlling your day-to-day, your thoughts, contributing to all of this food noise, it's scary, right? It feels scary because you don't know how to stop the sugar cravings. And every time that you try to cut it out, it backfires. So here's what I want you to understand as my dear beloved audience member. The problem is not the sugar. The problem is the relief that you feel every time you consume sugar. Sugar gives you this quick dopamine hit. Your brain gets a minute of calm. It's like a temporary exhale. It's like, oh, this feels good. This tastes good. This is good to me. And it's that moment when you're biting down on that Snickers bar or you're taking that sip of the caramel macchiato and that sugar hits your bloodstream and your brain just exhales and you just feel like everything just feels a little bit easier, right? Every— it's that moment where everything feels just a little bit softer. And when you're in perimenopause, let's keep it real. Like, your cortisol is gonna— it spikes faster. Your stress, the stress that you have, it hits your body harder and your brain becomes even more desperate for quick relief. I wouldn't be surprised I've been talking about Starbucks a lot in my community, especially on my email list for Everwell. If you're not in my email club, you don't know what you're missing because this week I'm doing Starbucks audits. This is a side note, but I wouldn't be surprised if the median age for people who go to Starbucks are women in their 40s, 50s, 60s, and 70s. I should look that up. So when you're in perimenopause, you've got the cortisol, which is spiking faster, the stress that you're under, it hits your body harder, and then your brain becomes more desperate for quick relief. And this is why we feel like we're battling our need to eat sugar. So now when you're in your forties and above, in your fifties, and you're dealing with perimenopause and those changes, we got hormone changes, we got chronic stress, We have emotional exhaustion because most of us are at like the peak of our careers. We're taking care of children. We may be taking care of elderly parents. Like there's— we're volunteering in social and civic and church organizations. And there's a lot happening and there's a lot of things and a lot of people that depend on us. And so our brains automatically go to sugar to help relieve all of the stress and the pressure that we feel that we're under. And this is that identity that whispers to you, you're addicted to sugar. You always need sugar. You always need something sweet. You always lose control around sweets, right? That's that identity loop that is playing in your brain that is driving this, this incessant need to always have sugar. And this is why the cravings feel so intense. This is why trying to detox from sugar, like go cold turkey, feels like torture, literally. And this is why cutting it out never works long-term, right? Like I said, some of y'all may be good for like 30 days, 45 days, but something happens and then you're right back where you started. The goal is not to exclude sugar from your life. The goal is to learn how to dance with it, right? How to let sugar be in your life without letting it control you. So that's what we're going to— we're going to talk about today. So just breathe easy. You don't have to cut out sugar completely, full stop. You don't need to cut out sugar completely because anytime you tell yourself that you can't have something, that little internal bratty brain of yours is like the rebel comes out and you just like cross your arms and stick out your lip and you're like, no, I'm going to eat it anyway. So even though you have the best intentions of like, okay, body, we're going to cut ourselves off from sugar. Inside your brain is screaming like, no, we're going to have the sugar anyway. And that voice gets really, really, really loud. So here's the solution that I want you to follow. This is the solution that we follow in our grown woman era. Okay. The first thing, it's 4 things. The first thing you're going to do is learn how to calm your body down first. So do something that brings you down a notch. Very simple, right? Take some deep breaths whenever you get that urge to eat something sweet. Wherever you get your mouth starts watering, when you see the, the, uh, the app, the notification pop up on your phone of like from Starbucks or from Krispy Kreme or from Dunkin'. No, it's not Dunkin' Donuts, it's Dunkin', right? When you see that sugar, uh, reminder like, oh, it's time to eat sugar, I want you to just like Whew. Take some slow breaths. Go out, take a walk. Go get on the treadmill for a little bit of a walk. Do some stretching. Do a dance. Drink some water. Like, just calm your body down first. And when you do that and you don't give in to the urgent need to go get something sweet immediately, you're telling your brain— you are training your brain to believe, Oh, that we're safe. Yes, there is this craving for sugar, but in this moment, we are safe, right? And I don't need sugar to calm down. I have recently picked up my meditation practice again. I have been practicing meditation on and off since 2016. So I was trained— I went to— I was trained in TM, Transcendental Meditation. And they teach you 20-minute sessions twice a day. And there's so many, many, many, many, many benefits to meditation. But just like anything, right? Just like a normal human being, I do things very well for a period of time, and then something happens, and then poof, that meditation practice is no more. So, I was recently reading a book, I think it was called "Metaphysical Millionaires." And one of the common threads with all of the people that were highlighted in the book is that they all meditated. They all had a type of meditation practice. So, I got inspired again. I was like, oh, you know what? I'm going to pick up my meditation practice. And the only reason I was thinking, I was like, well, what happened to it? Like, why did I stop meditating? The only reason that I could think of is like, because I have this, my morning routine. Once I started going outside of the home to go to the gym, because we have a gym here at home, but I like to go out to the gym. Once I started doing that, that literally adds on like almost an hour to my morning routine. Right. So it's 20 minutes to the gym, sometimes 30 in traffic, 20 minutes back. And so my morning routine was like getting long and I was like, okay, I can do my journaling. I could do my prayer. I can go to the gym, come back and I was like, oh, I don't have time to meditate. Right. I only have time 20 minutes. We're taking 20 minutes off of my time in the morning. So that's the reason why I stopped. But then I was like, you know what? There's many mornings where I wake up and I'm not fully out of bed. I don't wake up and jump out of bed, but there's many mornings where I wake up and I'm just laying in bed thinking for 20, 30 minutes before I actually get out of bed. So I was like, oh, why don't I just do my meditation as soon as I wake up, which is the best time to do it anyway. So I recently started just waking up and sitting up in the bed 20 minutes doing my meditation. I'll put, um, I use my Oura Ring to track my biometrics during the meditation and First of all, the feeling of meditation is like giving my brain a massage. It's like my whole brain exhales. And I was like, oh, I forgot how good this feels. So now I have the biometrics from my Oura Ring, which tracks my heart rate. It tracks my HRV, which is my heart rate variability. And it tracks the temperature of your skin. So when I meditated this morning for 20 minutes, my heart rate slowed down, which means I felt less calm, right? My HRV was higher, which means that there was less stress in my body. My body was not in a stressful state. It was in a relaxed, calm state. And my, the temperature of my skin went up, which means that my body was relaxed. And so when you can get into this state of just like, calming yourself down, you can make really good decisions. When you get into the state of calming yourself down, when your body's less stressed, the cravings are quieter, your hormones, your blood sugar starts to, to balance out, and cumulatively, all of those things will work in your favor. So learning how to calm your body down first is the number one thing you want to do. The second thing you want to do is ask yourself, OK, OK, I know I want sugar right now, but what do I actually need in this moment? And I always believe when you ask yourself good questions, when you ask your brain really good questions, your brain is like Google, Google Gemini. It's always going to give you a really good answer, right? So the first thing that comes up, it may be like, OK, self, what do I need right now? You may hear comfort. You may hear a hug. You may hear, girl, go laugh. Go do a dance. Maybe it's just a break, go take a nap, like listen to yourself. I always say your body is sending you text messages. You just need to open them up and read them. So this question alone, what do I actually need right now? If it's not sugar, what do I need right now in this moment? Breaks this cycle of this urgent need of wanting to, to have to have sugar immediately. The third thing I want you to do is add structure, but don't restrict yourself, right? Don't be like, no, girl, you can't have sugar. Sugar is— oh, no, no, no, no. I want you to allow yourself to have the planned sweet moments when you are calm and intentional. So this means eating with intention versus eating from emotion. When you have that strong urge to go eat sugar, you feel like the Ben Jerry's is calling you from the freezer, that usually is an emotional urge to eat. When you eat intentionally, you are planning ahead of time to enjoy some sugar. So that could look like, on Thursday, I'm gonna go grocery shopping after work, I'm gonna come home, this is what I'm gonna make for dinner, and I'm gonna buy myself that, uh, that artisan dark chocolate bar that I that cost a ridiculous amount of money, but it feels luxurious, and it's such a treat for me. That's how you eat intentionally. That's how you enjoy sugar intentionally. Or you're like, "Hey, my birthday's coming up." Like, my birthday just passed, and I— did I have cake on my birth— oh, we had dessert. I'm like, "Did I have cake?" I did not have cake on my actual birthday. We celebrated it a little bit later. But yes, I intentionally was like, "Ooh, we're having dessert." And it's so funny, we actually ended up with 3 desserts because they, the restaurant brought one out. My husband ordered one. I ordered another because the food was amazing. And let me give a shout out to Aviv in the One Hotel in Miami. Oh, that food was so good. Service was excellent. If you find yourself in Miami, go check them out and have a beautiful food experience. But then they brought out the birthday dessert, you know, with the candle and it says happy birthday on the plate. So we ended up having like 3 or tasting 3 desserts. My husband, he finished them all, but it was delicious. And I was excited and I was like, yes, this is my birthday. This is what I wanted. That was planned. That was an intentional decision to enjoy dessert and sugar. The 4th thing that you're going to do is Upgrade your identity. If you're new to me and you're like, what the heck does that mean? What I teach is identity-based weight loss. So you will lose weight, you will stop dieting forever and achieve the weight that you want and live in your dream body when you change your identity. So right now, your identity is saying, I'm addicted to sugar. Right now, your identity is like, sugar is like crack to me in the '80s, right? Stop saying that you're addicted to sugar because that is a reality that you are creating for yourself. I want you to begin to tell yourself that I'm learning to soothe myself in new ways. I'm learning to live with sugar without being controlled by sugar, right? These thoughts alone, actually, this one, that one thought, I'm learning how to soothe myself in new ways. Like that one thought alone can change your cravings. So instead of thinking, I need sugar right now, you can say, what do I need in this moment? And okay, brain, we are learning how to soothe ourselves in new ways that don't involve and include sugar. And this is the exact process that I teach my clients. This is what I use myself. I have a client who recently finished Inside Learn and Lose. So she was in the group for 6 months. And our very first call together, she was like, I am addicted to sugar. I am addicted to sugar. She was like, this has been so hard. She was like, I don't know if this is— I want to work with you or not because I've tried to break up with sugar. She actually said, quote, I am a massive sugar addict. And these cravings feel compulsive. She said she's tried detoxes, she's tried cutting it out, nothing worked. She's 45 years old, going through menopause, and she never had a weight problem until now. And she was like, I don't know if you can help me because I feel like this problem is unsolvable. And I told her that it's not about you learn— trying to like muscle through and just you know, use your willpower to cut out sugar. We have to work from the inside out, and that is changing your identity. And so I also told her, we got to shed this whole identity of like, I'm addicted to sugar. Yep. You're busy at work. Yep. You have a long commute every single day. Yep. You have— you work long hours. I get it. You're overwhelmed. You're stressed. Your hormones are loud. And sugar right now is the fastest relief that you know of. You don't have any other tools. And so I had to teach her and I had to tell her, I'm like, there are other things that you can do to calm yourself down that don't involve going to eat sugar. So I never told her you can never eat sugar again. No, we— she learned how to calm herself down. She learned how to manage her mind, reduce her stress. She learned how to balance her blood sugar through nutrition. And we, we rebuilt her identity as a woman who knows how to to soothe herself and not run to sugar. 6 months later, she no longer calls herself a sugar addict. She lost 24 pounds. She hit her goal weight, and sugar has stopped controlling her life. Very, very, very simple, right? It's not that you can't do this, it's just that no one has taught you how to change your thinking about food in this way. But I know what you're thinking. You're like, but Jennifer, I can't live with sugar. Like, if I don't cut out sugar, like, if I don't get rid of it in my house, I'm just going to keep overeating it, right? And I'm here to tell you is no, that is not the scenario. That is not your life. That is not what will happen when you shift your identity, because the overeating that you're doing doesn't come because of the sugar. Again, it's coming from you not knowing how to manage your stress. It's coming from you being emotionally illiterate and not knowing that you need to soothe emotions with other things besides sugar. It's, it's, it's coming from you not understanding your emotional triggers and you thinking that restriction is the best way to solve the problem when really that's the worst way to solve the problem because you're always going to backfire. You're always going to go back and have the thing that you said, oh, I'm not going to have that. So once you can calm your brain, right, once you know how to calm your brain and stop making sugar the villain, Stop talking about, oh, I'm so addicted to sugar. Girl, don't bring that around me. Don't bring those cookies around me. I'm going to eat all of them. When you stop talking to yourself that way, the cravings and sugar, it loses its power. And guess who takes the power seat? You do. You do. And when you are in the power seat, that is when stop dieting forever becomes real easy. You are the one in control again, not the cookie, not the caffeinated sugary beverage from Starbucks. So if this episode hit home with you and you resonate and you were like, oh my God, I need to break up with sugar, but I need to do it this way. What were those 4 things again that I need to do? First of all, go back, listen to this episode again, take notes, but if you're tired like literally tired of sugar controlling your life and feeling like it has so much power over you, I want you to reach out to me. I want you to tell me, I want you to book a consult with me, and let's talk about how I can help you change your relationship with sugar inside private coaching. And yes, it is possible to break your sugar cravings. Without giving up sugar, without cutting out sugar. So book a consultation with me, uh, or send me a DM on the socials and say, hey, I'm interested in learning how you can help me create a new relationship with sugar, one where I'm in control and one where I can stop dieting forever, and one where I can lose up to 10 pounds every 30 days until I reach my goal weight. I got you. Let's talk about it. The link is in the show notes to book that call with me. But this is what I want you to know as a listener of this podcast. You do not have to fight sugar. That is a waste of your time. You have more important things you need to be focusing on. I don't want you to spend any more time trying to fight sugar. You just have to learn how to take your power back. All right, y'all. Live luxe, and I will see you in the next episode.