No Day Is So Bad You Can’t Make it Worse By Adding Sugar

One thing you have to remember if you’re trying to give up sugar:

No day is so bad that you can’t make it worse by adding sugar to it.

No day is so crappy it can’t be made crappier by adding sugar to it.

We think that adding some sugar (or flour or nuts or popcorn or whatever our own personal food devil it is), will bring soothing and happiness to our lives.

But it’s actually just the opposite. When you add crap to a crappy day, you make it crappier. You give yourself more fat, a headache, guilt, regret — a string of unpleasant, bad, unwanted feelings.

Remember that next time you’re having a bad day and think eating will make you feel better. Adding sugar to anything doesn’t make it better. It makes it worse.

Don't add stress to your stress

Here's the thing about feelings: Life is full of them. If you are a living human being, you will have feelings.

But when you eat to avoid your feelings, you are adding stress to your existing stress. It's like pounding your hand with a hammer to avoid boredom. Sure, you're not bored anymore. But now you've got a bigger problem.

Eating for any reason other than your body's nourishment is just adding a problem to a problem.

Three turning points that were essential in my BLE journey

After slogging along on this BLE path for so many months, it's easy for me to feel like I'll just never get it. It's just never going to click for me.

So sometimes I have to stop and acknowledge that I've had some many "ah-ha!" moments on this journey. And those turning points have been profound. Here are the three most remarkable turning points I've hit:

1. Realizing that I cannot have "just one" and resume BLE tomorrow. This belief wasn't something I ever really consciously articulated. In fact, the longer I did BLE, the easier BLE seemed to be. So, since it didn't seem that hard, I couldn't understand why I couldn't just resume. "I do this every day. I can take a day off and then just go back to doing it." It took 16 months of trying to resume for me to realize that resuming is wildly, incredibly difficult. So no, I cannot take a day off. I cannot take an evening off. I cannot have just one.

2. Realizing that flour is as much a problem for me as sugar. Early on, I thought that my real problem was sugar, so I could have flour, at least in moderation. It wasn't until I eliminated sugar entirely that I realized how quickly my addictive behaviors switched to flour-based foods. After binging for months on Ritz crackers and croissants whenever life got hard, I realized that, yes, flour is a problem and yes, I need to eliminate it.

3. Realizing that "not eating" is not a substitute for "eating." When I broke my bright lines, it was usually because I was trying to avoid something: feelings I didn't want to feel, thoughts I didn't want to think. For a long time after starting BLE, I didn't know how to deal with those overwhelming feelings and thoughts. Eating had been my primary, if not my only coping mechanism. "Not eating" wasn't a coping mechanism. I needed better coping strategies and habits. Meditation was a good start, but it wasn't enough for me. I needed a lot of other tools: gratitude work to help shift my thinking patterns, developing solid self-care habits (learning to say no, relaxation rituals, time-outs), learning to sit with uncomfortable feelings. I needed tools to deal with the feelings I was trying to avoid by eating. Only when I got those in place did BLE work for me.


An eating-disorder recovery expert, Andrea Wachter, said, "If you keep going and don’t give up, your awareness will deepen and your progress will reveal itself, often when you least expect it."

Disclaimer: This blog and I are not officially affiliated with Bright Line Eating or Susan Peirce Thompson. The opinions expressed here are entirely my own.