Overcoming sugar addiction is the same as overcoming any addiction.  And yes, you can pretty much be addicted to anything.  Being addicted to sugar isn’t the same as wanting it every now and then.  When you HAVE to have it and have it NOW and this thought bounces around your skull 24/7, you just may have a sugar addiction.  The sure-fire way to find out if you are a sugar addict is not to have any sugar for twenty four hours (including any processed or canned foods that may contain sugar).  If you feel incredibly ill, you are experiencing withdrawal pains.

No Need To Go It Alone

There is plenty of help available in overcoming sugar addiction.  Unlike addicts of most other substances, you don’t need to cut it out completely, but cut back substantially.  This will de painful and difficult enough.  It can help you to hear the stories of how others have or are in the process of overcoming their sugar addiction.  You can go to places such as Overeaters Anonymous and sit in on a meeting.  You can ask your doctor for help.  You can go online and find sugar addict support groups.  If you can make the computer room a no-food room, this will enhance your actions overcoming sugar addiction.

Unlike other kinds of addiction like for drugs or drink, you usually don’t need to be hospitalized during the drying our period.  Your body will protest, but after a couple of weeks, the protests will die off as your body becomes adjusted to your new diet.  You need to keep yourself busy and occupied in order to make you tired enough to sleep and to keep from eating.

Other Tips

You can use visualization to help in overcoming sugar addiction.  When you see a sugary snack, imagine it is laughing at you.  It still laughs as someone eats it.  It continues to laugh while being stored as fat.  If you have an imagination like Stephen King, eventually you will need a gun put to your head in order to swallow a spoonful of ice cream.  One Tales Of The Darkside episode had a woman put on special glasses that made all food become alive, and hearing aids to hear their tortured screams as they were being eaten.  Unfortunately, she couldn’t get them off.  Don’t go that far.

Tell your family that you are overcoming sugar addiction so they will hide sugary foods from you, or at least not eat them in front of you.  Just seeing the food can trigger a craving.  If you eat while watching TV, stop watching TV for a while as your body readjusts.

Junk food exists for all species, and junk food addiction is lethal in some species.  For humans, junk food addiction usually leads indirectly to poor health and sometimes death.  By looking at junk food addiction in animals, it can help us as junk food addicts to see ourselves in the future.  We can also learn to emphasize more with animals and see that we are not so different from them after all.

Iceberg Lettuce Addiction In Iguanas

In the 1980’s, the hot pet was an iguana.  They were hearty, looked like dinosaurs and were cheap.  The fact that they grew to over six feet long didn’t seem to deter the pet buying public.  One of the advantages for iguanas in this boom (which dropped off considerably after the lizards reached full length) is that more people observed what made iguanas healthy and what could kill them.

Oddly enough, iguanas can develop junk food addictions to iceberg lettuce.  This lettuce is not known in South America, so North American pets were the first introduced to them.  Iguanas need a variety of foods in order to survive.  But when exposed to Iceberg lettuce, they would refuse all other foods but the lettuce.  They then died … of starvation, even when given all the lettuce they could eat.

Acorn Addiction In Horses

Domestic horses at first ignore and spit out acorns.  If, however, there isn’t much else to eat, they will eat acorns.  Some will then develop a craving for acorns, even when re-exposed to better food.  This equine junk food addiction can sometimes kill a horse, as acorns do contain a tiny bit of poison.  At the least, the horse will become jittery, disoriented and have diarrhea.  The only way to get a horse off an acorn addiction is by going cold turkey and praying a lot.

Bread And Milk Addiction In Hedgehogs

For years in England, bread and milk was thought to be the food of choice to leave out for wild hedgehogs.  They certainly went crazy for it.  Unfortunately, it took decades later to realize what happened to the hedgehogs after they ate bread and milk.  It can give diarrhea, but more than that, it can give a hedgehog a junk food addiction.  They usually are omnivores, like us.  Imagine what would happen to your body if you only ate bread and milk.  You wouldn’t be very healthy.  Because of this junk food addiction, hedgehogs can also die of malnutrition.