Managing Sugar Cravings

We first visited the topic of sugar in the early days of our program, but if you were anything like me in the beginning, you were in no place to address alcohol and sugar at the same time. One thing at a time, right? Well, now that we’re a little deeper into Reframe, let’s circle back and take another look at that sugar tooth you may have developed.

So remind me, what’s the deal with sugar?

Well, developing a hell of a sugar tooth after removing habitual alcohol use is an incredibly common experience. This happens for many reasons, but for starters, there’s just a lot of sugar in most alcoholic drinks, even if it doesn’t seem like it. Beer? Carby, aka, sugar. Wine? Sweet, aka, sugar. Don’t even get me started on mixed drinks.

But in addition to alcoholic beverages being a vehicle for hidden sugar, sugar just acts a whole lot like alcohol does within our human brain. When we eat a cookie, we get a rush of dopamine, much like when we take a sip of booze. And by now, we certainly know how imperative those feel-good chemicals are for addiction and living alcohol-free. So if you’ve removed alcohol, your body is desperately seeking ways to replace that artificial dopamine surge, and sugar is often a ready replacement.

And finally, long term heavy drinking can lead to hypoglycemia, a condition that makes you more prone to experiencing low blood sugar. When we have low blood sugar, we feel shaky, faint, and queasy. (Quickly remedied by—you guessed—sugar!)