Why You Self-Medicate With Carbs and Sugar
#SugarBalancedLiving
Why do you always turn to sugar when you’re feeling blue? I mean, it’s not unusual for people to crave carbs and sugar when feeling down, stressed or even dealing with depression. But what’s the reason for these cravings? Does carb/sugar loading actually make you feel better or is it just temporary? And can eating carbs and sugar actually feed depression, tiredness or stress? Well, here are all the answers you’ve been asking for!
Sadly, I'm going to have to start off by telling you that diet high in sugar does in fact contribute significantly to depression, anxiety, tiredness and stress.
For example, frequent consumption of fast food and commercial baked goods can increase the risk of depression by up to 38%.
Yep, you read that right…
However, despite this, when you’re feeling stressed out, anxious, tired or depressed, your natural preference and need for sweet or carb rich foods kicks in and starts works against you.
As you crave these junky and sugary foods, you probably indulge and find that eating these foods (or drinks… I'm looking at you soda) make you feel better... but this is only temporary and ends up backfiring on itself.
Sugar packed foods and types of carbs (especially refined carbohydrates) are anything but going to make you feel better in the long run.
Along with inflating waistlines, and causing acne, sugar and other sweeteners (yes I'm including high fructose corn syrup, honey, molasses and maple syrup) may contribute and worsen a number of mental health problems.
There’s a deep complicated relationship you have between sugar, your brain, and mental health. Let me explain…
Hold up…
Before I start explaining the different causes and reasons behind why you always reach for a bag of chips or candy bar to cheer yourself up, we first need to identify the sugar we’re talking about and the differences between the different types of sugars; the good, the bad and the ugly.
Understanding The Main Types of Sugar
1. Sucrose
White crystalline sucrose, a.k.a table sugar is highly processed, and has no nutritive value, zero, zilch, none. If you never ate or drank table sugar again, you would be totally find and even healthier.
To understand sucrose, we need to take a look at the two components which make up sucrose: glucose and fructose, and then we’ll be able to better understand how it affects your mood.
2. Fructose
Fructose is naturally found in fruit and sweet vegetables and because it’s naturally occurring in whole foods with fiber and nutrients it can usually easily handled by the body. When you eat non-natural ‘added fructose’ health problems start to arise.
Fructose, which makes up more than 50% of table sugar (sucrose), is one of the worst sugars you can eat in excess. This is mainly because fructose is metabolized by your liver and turned into fat way faster than other sugars. With the entire burden of metabolizing fructose falling on the liver, it can cause visceral fat.
This particular type of visceral fat accumulates and surrounds the organs and the abdominal area, which research has now shown leads to a higher risk of heart disease.
Furthermore, fat droplets accumulate in the liver and skeletal muscle tissues when fatty acids are made during the metabolism of fructose, leading to insulin resistance amongst other health issues, including chronic inflammation, and is an underlying cause of a wide range of psychiatric and neurodegenerative disorders. See now how it’s connected?
3. Glucose
Glucose is one of the body's preferred sources of fuel in the form of carbohydrates. People get glucose from bread, fruits, vegetables, dairy products and legumes. It is essential to life. You need food to create the energy that helps keep you alive.
Glucose, is the primary source of energy for every cell in the body. Because the brain is so rich in nerve cells, or neurons, most brains run on glucose most of the time.
Unlike fructose, glucose stores only a very small amount of fat, unless eaten in excessive amounts. While glucose is important, like with so many things, it's best in moderation and although the brain needs glucose, too much of this energy source can be a bad thing.
And… its still best to eat your glucose from pure natural whole forms like whole grains, veggies, legumes, and peas. Many carbohydrates are the main sources of glucose and therefore don’t seem as threatening, but don’t over look that carbohydrates can instead be full of sugars, especially when they are processed and refined - where they become stripped of their nutrients and spike your blood sugar levels too high.
Okay, now you understand our main different types of sugar and just some of the ways they can cause us damage, we can now deep dive into how they’re affecting our mental health, and becoming a crutch for us to lean on when we feel the need to self-medicate and find happiness.
What Role Sugar Has in The Brain and Its Effects On Mental Health
1. Serotonin Crashes
Sugar-rich and high carb (esp. refined) foods mess with the neurotransmitters that help keep our moods stable. Consuming sugar will stimulate the release of the mood-boosting neurotransmitter serotonin, a major neurotransmitter known as the “happiness molecule.”
We eat sugar, and we get a mood boost. What could possibly be wrong with that?
It’s not that simple. Eating excess much sugar releases way more serotonin than we need. When these serotonin pathways continue to be activated, our limited store of serotonin will eventually become depleted. After usual abuse, due to decreased levels of serotonin, depression actually starts to form, along with constant blood sugar crash and exhaustion.
In the short term the boost from sugar is short-lived, as it only lasts for an hour or two, before you’re hit with a serotonin crashes and leaving you exerted and groggy.
2. Your Association with Sugar and Happiness
Candy, fun and good times go hand in hand.
Sugar and blood spiking carbs like junky foods like fries and bread are directly linked to some of our most positive memories and life events. On your birthday you eat cake and celebrate, on Easter the bunny brings us baskets of sugary goodness, at Christmas we see family and feast on pies, when you go to beach what would the day be without ice cream and when you hit the ball game, hot dogs and caramel popcorn are a must!
See what I mean? And these are just a small portion of when sugary foods are a joyous celebratory part of our lives.
Therefore, our brains naturally associate candy, carb and even alcohol sugars with fun, friendship and positivity. SO, when you partake excessively in a slice of cake or hot dog when you feel tired, stress, sad or depressed you’re subconsciously wanting to recreate those positive feelings.
3. Sugar Causes Energy Spikes and Slumps
When you eat a large amount of sugar (a large amount of sugar is not that much - you’re only supposed to eat 6-9 tsp of sugar per day, which is very easy to go over), the sugar spikes the body’s blood glucose level, causing the pancreas to release insulin in an attempt to control blood glucose levels.
This causes your blood sugar levels to dramatically drop, leading to the crash which makes you feel tired, lethargic and gives you lack of focus.
This is why so many people struggle with the sugar cycle: when they feel tired, they go back for another energy drink or chocolate bar, suffer a crash, and repeat, ending up with a host of health issues!
4. Sugar Could Be Causing Your Hormonal Imbalance
When you eat excess amounts of sugar regularly, your body can go into a stressed state leading to hormonal imbalance, and when you get and hormonal imbalance, you’re looking at triggering many nasty health conditions, and, perhaps more shockingly, psychological issues and imbalances.
In other words, sugar messes with your mind.
To make it worse, one affects, feeds and aggravates the other.
So as the physical toll of sugar starts to manifest in the body - weight gain and difficulty losing weight, acne, fatigue, sleep disorders, irregular periods and so on - it then spikes and compounds the negative psychological effects sugar has on the neurons in our brains: depression, difficulty concentrating, irritability, moods swings, and so on.
In me, it triggered a pattern of destructive eating and self-sabotage. Before I knew it, I had gained over 30 pounds. I was devastated, and this put me into a terrible frame of mind which caused more cravings and so on, before I broke the cycle.
5. You Have a Physical or Mental Imbalance Which is Causing Your Sugar/Carb Cravings
Your sugar craving could also be telling you that you have some sort of imbalance in your life - like I once did. Too much stress, lack of sleep, fatigue, and hormone imbalances (like I just mentioned) can all cause cravings.
The first thing you’ll want to address is your sleep pattern. You’re more likely to crave sugary, salty, and fatty foods after a poor night’s sleep.
A poor night’s sleep and that ravenous feeling of hunger go hand-in-hand, which explains why you crave sugar, salt and fried goods when you’re running on no sleep.
When tired, high levels of grehlin (aka hunger hormone) is released, and leptin (the satiety hormone) is lowered, leaving us feeling hungry when we don’t actually need food.
A bad night’s sleep also affects our cortisol levels. When you’re tired (or stressed) more cortisol (your body's main stress hormone) is released into your body, and this my friend when unchecked can lead to weight gain and result in us needing more serotonin, causing us to crave higher calorie foods.
Also when we’re tired it affects our cells’ ability to process sugar as well, leading to elevated blood sugar levels, and even insulin secretion.
If you’re not a great sleeper, I totally get. I didn’t used to be either. I used to suffer from sleeping issues as a child, which then developed into insomnia during a period of my teens. Luckily I was able to resolve this problem, and I actually did a blog post on how I did that here.
The second thing to address is your level of stress.
Stress is normal, and a little bit of stress in your day is healthy, BUT problems arise when you’re experiencing chronic levels of high stress, in which your body says hello sweet cravings.
As someone who was chronically stressed (due to injuries, lack of confidence, body image issues, and so on) for so long, I can personally attest to this one.
I mean, who doesn’t think a chocolate bar at the end of the day wouldn’t make them feel better? Of course, it never does it the long run.
When we’re stressed out, that hormone called cortisol (your body’s main stress hormone) increases its level in our bodies, and we crave sugar because if we eat some sugar, we will actually get that hormone serotonin.
It’s basically your body’s way of finding ‘balance’.
You see, stress made our ancestors eat more, but back then, it was a good thing. They were trying to survive, and stress helped them find and eat sugary sweets like fruit, as it meant better nutrition.
The problem with today is that today our stress is triggered constantly by family, work, friends, societal pressures, etc., not a need to survive, so that extra food isn’t actually a good thing, and that extra food is going to be processed.
The good news is that by recognizing the reason for your craving when you experience stress, you can make better choices.
This is why identifying all your stressors in your life, particularly unhealthy lifestyle patterns and behaviors, and then focusing on shedding your mind of conscious and sub-conscious negative habits, attitudes and patterns triggering it, is such a huge part of The Stress Reset Course© because it’s SO IMPORTANT for clearing them for good.
CLICK HERE TO GET THE CALENDAR
Remember, stress management and self-care is NOT a luxury, it’s a necessity. Period.
Lastly anxiety is another big one...
You eat to relax when you are feeling anxious, and the powerful crashes that sugar causes can make you feel irritable, shaky, and tense — all of these side effects that can worsen your anxiety.
6. Sugar/Carb/Junk Food are Part of Your Reward System
When you put sugar into your mouth, it is instantly sensed by the tongue’s taste buds and a message is sent to the brain. This sugar-induced signal stimulates the release of dopamine, which is a neurotransmitter responsible for activating the brain’s reward system.
It may sound scary, but sugar fires up dopamine and lights up your brain in the same manners as drugs, and there’s gotta be a problem with that - especially given the issues that come with high sugar consumption, problems I have had first hand experience with. I used to have a full blown sugar addiction - I was in really bad shape, both physically and mentally - so I certainly know the signs of an unhealthy relationship with the stuff.
A study in 2007 found that 94% of rats tested would rather choose artificially sweetened water over cocaine (after being sensitized to the drug). Just think about that for a second!
The same goes for sugary junky foods; junk food is addictive in the same way that heroin or cocaine is addictive too.
A study published in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition suggests that high sugar, high glycemic foods are just as addictive as table sugar.
Sugar’s similar effect, fortunately for us, it is not nearly as extreme, but is still highly addictive in the form of cravings and obsessiveness and can mess with us in other ways. The dopamine burst lead to craving and will even cause withdrawal symptoms when sugar isn’t available.
Before I wrap it all up... how start reducing sugar the RIGHT way
Now we’ve gone through why sugar keeps drawing us to that bag of chips or cinnamon bun when we feel like we need support and comfort, it’s hopefully made you think about reducing sugar and refined carbs in your diet - and that is totally great. BUT, I don’t want you to go trading in sugar for some artificial sweetener, because trust me they come with their own drawbacks.
Most artificial sweeteners affect your gut bacteria, collectively known as your microbiome, and as we know from sugar’s effects, a dysfunctional microbiome can be a root cause of anxiety and depression and many other brain-related disorders. Meaning that artificial sweeteners changing your microbiome can impact your brain, mood, and mental health, just like sugar.
How to Cope Without Sugar and Junk Food?!
We know that the evidence is clearly showing us that refined sugars contribute to depression and anxiety, and if you can’t go jumping on the artificial sweetener train to help you deal with cravings and mood boosting what can you do?
Solutions exist.
Work on your mindset, behaviors and swap processed foods with natural whole foods.
Step 1: Get to Know Your Feelings and Behaviors
Work on acknowledging and getting to become aware of your of when emotional triggers cause you to start eating.
When you next time you pick up a sweet treat or plate of comfort food, first stop and ask yourself; are you feeling sad, anxious, stressed or even lonely, why are you about to eat this when its toxic for your body? Identify, pause and reflect.
Try replacing eating “bad” foods which you find comforting with something else, preferably in the form of activity like, taking a walk in nature, enjoying a warm bath, or speaking to a close friend. Breaking that emotional eating grip over your joy and happiness is a massive step toward breaking self-medicating habits.
Starting a journal (no not a diary) is actually a really fantastic way to break self medicating, acknowledging and getting to know your feelings. Journaling helps to control and even fix your symptoms and improve your mood by improving prioritization of problems, fears, and concerns.
Track any symptoms of self-medicating cravings day-to-day so that you can recognize triggers and learn ways to better control them.
Also, if you find that you’re not upset—but actually bored (yes this happens all the time, many people actually eat out of boredom) instead of eating try pursuing a stimulating activity.
Step 2: Healthy Snacking
Maybe you really are just craving sugar because you’re hungry, and you body’s just looking for the a quick source of energy. If that is the case be prepared, by having a healthy energy boosting snack that you enjoy and find comforting on hand. Plus, if you have a slip up and are too tempted to reach for something out of boredom or emotion at least you'll be less likely to pick something high in refined carb and sugar, because you’ll have something healthy and comforting on hand.
An important fact to note is that eating fat is very important when healthy snacking. YES, fat, as long as it’s healthy fat of course. It’s important to know that missing out on healthy fats in low-fat diets is critically unhealthy for brain health and function. Healthy fatty options include avocado, nuts, olive oils and eggs.
Great snacking options are:
Vanilla banana nice cream is sweet option. Made from a ripe frozen banana whirled through a blender with bit of unsweetened almond milk and pure vanilla extract, until it’s soft and then into a freezer safe container, and it’s perfect to pop in the freezer at work, until later and ready to serve. To make it extra filling, a tablespoon of no-sugar peanut butter adds a pop of fiber and protein.
Another fantastic option is sliced veggies and a serving of hummus or guacamole.
Sometimes if you don’t want any fuss; fresh fruit and some nuts is a simple, tasty and easy option. With the naturally very sweet fruit easing your sweet tooth and the nuts hitting you with protein and fiber you should be in good hands.
If you’re really starving, then filling up on some fat may be all you needed. YES, fat, but only healthy fats. It’s important to know that missing out on healthy fats in low-fat diets is critically unhealthy for brain health and function. Healthy fatty options include avocado, nuts, olive oils and eggs.
Step 3: Moderate with Mindfulness
Mindfulness is a state of being in which you are focused 100 percent on the present moment and without distraction. Taking on daily tasks with mindful practice engaged will have a calming effect and keeps you in a state of being aware of your thoughts, actions, triggers and decisions.
As we now know awareness like this is particularly important when attempting to avoid sugar thoughts, cravings binges and self-medicating. Just like your mind might think you’re hungry when you’re actually dehydrated, the meaning of a particular craving is complex, and that is where practicing mindfulness is helpful.
If you need help getting started with mindfulness, and don’t know where to even start? No worries, there is no need to go searching through pages of the web for help, because I got you covered with my The Ultimate Mindful Eating Exercise + Workbook for Beginners.
A full how-to exercise + workbook for getting started with mindful eating to improve eating habits & health.
Wrapping it all up...
Whenever, wherever you find yourself feeling blue: stressed, sad, anxious, depressed or just generally down, please don’t go reaching for the vending machine or that snickers in the back of your drawer, you really don’t need this to feel, happier, relaxed or joyful.
As you NOW know this strategy of self-medicating with sugary junky foods doesn't work and just makes situations with the mind and body worse. The evidence is clear — sugars, especially refined sugars and processed carbs significantly contribute to depression and anxiety via several mechanisms.
Understanding now, using the power of recognition and acknowledging why you are craving these foods with a thinking that it will bring you recovery or happiness is the first step in breaking these bad habits and triggers that a bringing you to negatively self-medicate with food.
Hopefully, learning about this connection between food, mind and mood will bring you realization and empowerment to control your cravings rather than letting them control you.
Of course you don’t have to completely deprive yourself of the treats you enjoy, the key is moderation, creating balance, taking back your control of cravings and overall eating a balanced and nutritious diet.
At first it may be quite hard to start cutting out sugar - especially with sugary or carb-y pasta cravings - but once you’ve started decreasing sugar for a few weeks, you will notice the decreased cravings, and will be really surprised at just how much better you feel.
I’m evidence of this, I used to be a sugar addict!
Sometimes it’s harder for some rather than others when it comes sugar cravings… so if you need extra help don’t worry, I’ve got you covered!
This is exactly why I've put together a complete, helpful step by step guide on cutting back on sugar and beating sugar cravings! Check out my FREE ‘Ultimate Guide to Crushing Your Sugar Cravings’ Downloadable Guide.
It’s your turn!
Do you experience sugary or junky food cravings? Do you need to stop self-medicating with sugar? How do you work on reducing sugar and stopping self-medicating with sugar? Do you need support with cravings?
Let me know in the comments or on Instagram @itsisabellem using #SugarWithIsabelle!
That’s it from me, 👋
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