This year’s thanksgiving went very well for my family. We had close friends come over, and we all enjoyed our meal together. The next day, when all was said and done, we still had about 4 pies left over. We had made 3 pies, and 2 were brought to our Thanksgiving for only 8 people.

My inner fat kid was bursting with joy! But my body was saying “Oh shit.”

Now during the holidays, there is a “real” excuse to eat sugar. I ate more pie than I should’ve. But the problem is not having some pie on Thanksgiving and Christmas. It’s an issue if you keep eating sugar for the entire month until Christmas.

For those of us who seem to always crave sugar it gets very difficult to hop in and out of eating sugar for only those special occasions. I had a sugar addiction for the almost 10 years. Only in the last 3 years with all my experiences of training 2x per day 6 days a week, and all the nutrition data I have logged, have I noticed the patterns of why I would keep falling off the road to my goals, and I learned how to break the pattern.

There are two very powerful forces at play when it comes to sugar:

First, it’s addictive. This compilation of studies conducted by the department of psychology at Princeton University concludes that “intermittent access to sugar can lead to behavior and neurochemical changes that resemble the effects of a substance of abuse.” They study also overviews the withdrawal symptoms of sugar, including intense cravings, depression, anxiety, and dopamine inbalances.

Second, it solves a need. For me, whenever I eat sugar everything else seems to disappear. It’s just me and the ice cream, and I forget about everything else. Very often, the reason that we fall into bad habits is because they solve some sort of need within us. If you eat sugar when you’re feeling alone, sad, tired, or depressed, you are using this substance to temporarily fulfill an innate human desire to escape pain. This only exacerbates the cycle of addiction.

Now eating sugar for Thanksgiving dinner doesn’t make you a bad person. Eating grandma’s fruit cake for Christmas doesn’t make you a bad person. (Eating the fruit cake probably means that you’re actually incredibly brave!) But you have to separate the occasions that are actually appropriate to enjoy the worlds most popular drug, and the times that aren’t, based on how quickly you want to achieve your goals.

So spend some time and really think about how you feel, and what environment you are surrounded by when you are suddenly craving sugar. Then find something else to fulfill that same need or desire that creates the craving. For me, I put my big headphones on, and crank one of my favorite songs all the way up. I close my eyes, and imagine I’m at the biggest concert in the world and everybody is going crazy and having fun. That releases me of the anxiety that would normally make me want to eat sugar.

Now the hard part. Depending on how deeply rooted sugar is in your system, you have to be prepared to fight. Recognize that sugar has withdrawal symptoms like many drugs, and be prepared to defend your body against the indulgences that you have allowed yourself in the past. Confront the problem head on, and you will succeed.

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