Sugar Addiction Recovery: Replacing Cravings

Can I just be real with you for today?  I struggle.  I struggle with wanting food more than I want God.  More than I want a lot of things.  I am in recovery for sugar addiction.  As a culture, we tend to go to food with all of our emotions.  Tired?  Eat.  Happy? Eat.  Sad?  Eat.  Are you familiar with that routine?  Since when have we looked at food for the true nourishment it can and should be to our lives?

Today, we begin replacing our cravings in two separate ways.  First, let me share the nutritional tip.  Start adding naturally sweet foods into your day, preferably in the first half of the day.  This is especially important if you crave sugar for that mid-day energy crash or evening commute home.  Of course, you can use naturally sweet fruits but I’m going to suggest something better.  Use naturally sweet vegetables full of fiber and low in sugar.  Sweet vegetables include corn, onions, carrots, beets, sweet potatoes, and yams.  These are best when cooked to bring out the sweet flavor.  Semi-sweet vegetables include turnips, parsnips, and rutabagas.  Finally, red radishes, daikon, green cabbage, and burdock don’t necessarily taste sweet but are helpful in fighting the body’s sugar cravings.

Secondly, replace your unhealthy cravings with God.  Over the next several days, I will be reading and sharing thoughts from a chapter of “Made to Crave” by Lysa Terkeurst.  In chapter two, she shares how she wakes up, rolls out of bed, and heads to the bathroom scale, stripping down to nothing, and then once again finding disappointment in herself.  Vowing to do better for that day, she quickly loses her resolve the minute she is faced with something sweet and/or unhealthy.  Oh how familiar I am with this scenario!  Just like she ends the chapter by not promising a change in the scale but her heart DID change; my heart has changed MOSTLY.

It wasn’t all too long ago, I woke up one Sunday morning and got on the scale.  Feeling not so fabulous, the numbers on the scale just screamed back every negativity that I could let the enemy shout into my poor self-image that morning.  As I prepared to pick out an outfit to wear for church, keep in mind our church doesn’t care what we wear, I began to let every little whisper of the enemy become a shout.  A shout for his evil victory.  It got to such a point that my husband entered the room and looked at me (in no way negative) and I told him to get the hockey pucks out and stop looking at me!  I let the enemy win in that moment.  But, I then turned to my closet and I cried.  I cried for God to help me to love myself like only HE can love me.  My daughter said to me, also in the midst of myself listening to those lies, “Mommy, it doesn’t matter what you wear.  You look good.  It’s what is on the inside that matters.”  At the time, the words stung.  But you know what, she spoke truth.  Truth, I taught her!

As I cried into my closet and out to God, I prayed that as a woman, a wife, a mother, a sister, I would find VICTORY!  I will help other women find victory over unhealthy eating habits, poor self-images, insecurities, and all those same struggles, I have faced or continue to fight.  So, even more important than adding in sweet vegetables, cry out to God when you feel like you are losing the battle.  I still forget at times.  It’s a journey.  We will win!