Life After Sugar

Chef AJ considers sugar was a drug for her. For the first 43 years of her life, she says that she was addicted to sugar and caffeine. She needed sugar to function. But in general, the medical profession doesn't really recognize sugar addiction, so her need for massive amounts of sugar was left unchecked. Not only was she overweight, but she also developed signs of pre-colon cancer. As a vegan...

Emily Harveaux's childhood was filled with sugar and sweet treats. From a very young age, she associated comfort and warmth with candy (like most of us!). Over her lifetime Emily says that she has run the gamut of sizes as well as her relationship with food and disordered eating. Sugar was definitely part of it. Her weight has fluctuated a lot: as much as 300lbs at one point. Now she's a...

Allison would eat to cope with all her emotions. Primarily highly processed foods made from flour and sugar (bread was her thing!), especially crunchy and salty. By the time she was in her 20s, she was morbidly obese. She tried and tried to control her weight, but she never really made the connection that it was because of certain types of foods (sugar + flour). She had a gastric bypass and lost s...

Zippi says that she was born with a "fatal attraction" to sugar. No amount of sugar was enough for her. When she moved to Israel and became a nurse, she knew all the theory and the caloric value of different foods. So, as a nurse, the problem wasn't the knowledge. She knew what to do. The problem was applying that knowledge. She felt so ashamed, like something was seriously wrong wi...

Do you love sugar? I certainly used to! Sugar in all its forms: chocolate, desserts, ice cream, cookies, as well as bread and pasta. But then when I stopped eating sugar, I realized that... well, maybe it wasn't really love! In this special Valentine's edition, I encourage you to question whether the relationship you have with sugar is really "love". Maybe it is. Or maybe you d...

Paula Yolles grew up like most people: eating sugar. Sugar was part of her daily life. Throughout her childhood and into adulthood and parenthood, she had stomach aches, and she was constipated, with gas and bloating. Plus she put on weight, even though her family ate relatively healthy. After an emotional divorce, Paula needed a change. But she never intended to stop eating sugar. (Who does?!) Sl...

On January 31, 2021 I hit "publish" and the Life After Sugar podcast was born! In this 1st birthday edition, I'm talking about the highlights over the last year with my special guest Dan Greef from the UK Low Carb podcast . As we were recording this podcast, it got me thinking: Making a podcast, or reducing / cutting sugar, as with anything in life, requires one thing of us: Just ge...

Before January 2021, Gord Isman used food to alleviate stress, isolation, and tough emotions. He would turn to food to find solace. Over the course of the pandemic, Gord says he started to get lazy with his eating, and would turn to pizza, Chinese food, sweets, soda, and late-night snacking. And of course, he started to gain weight. On January 18 2021, Gord had to be taken to the hospital in an em...

This week's episode is a sneak peek into our regular support calls, which I call "check-in calls". These calls allows participants to share their challenges, their wins and their aha! moments and get all the empathetic support, encouragement and accountability they need. This is where we have real, personal interactions in a safe environment. We go way deeper than just talking about...

Laura Bonicelli grew up with Italian food in Minnesota. With home-cooked meals and surrounded by a close community, she became a chef. She created a meal delivery service to bring fresh, organic meals to people. Her business allowed her to learn about all kinds of different needs and eating habits, and this led her to develop a meal plan for weight loss. After she closed her own restaurant, she op...

Dr. Jen Unwin is a clinical psychologist and a self-confessed lifelong carbohydrate addict. She's the author of Fork in the Road. In this episode, she tells her own personal story about her addiction to sugar and all processed carbs. From her early childhood, through her teens and into adulthood, Jen had a love-hate relationship with food, especially sugar. Her mother was always on a diet and...

Vikki Jones is a former competitive athlete. She moved from the UK to the US in the 1980s and excelled in the pentathlon. She had a coach for every sport she did, as well as being supported by the US Olympic Committee. In this episode, Vikki tells how as an athlete, she wasn't taught how to eat. Because she was so active, she would pick herself up with sugar to get quick energy. She would &qu...

Megan Lifto  is a nurse who's had her own health issues, including having her ovaries removed. She knew that the decrease in estrogen would affect her metabolism, and indeed her weight went up 60lbs, mostly around her belly, even though she was still active. With the extra weight, she started to have joint pain when she bent down, as well as in her hands.  Some hormone therapy (low dose estro...

This is our special holiday edition of the Life After Sugar podcast! This week I'm talking to Holly Howe, a Fermentation Educator, a cookbook author, photographer, and blogger. Holly's goal  is to have sauerkraut fermenting in 100,000 homes... including yours! If you're anything like I was a few years ago, you may not know much about  fermented foods. Maybe you know that yogurt is f...

Jackie Fletcher and Louise Reynolds are the hosts of the Fabulously Keto podcast. After starting on her low carb eating journey in May 2017 and then moving to a ketogenic way of eating in January 2018, Jackie  discovered a passion for everything low carb and keto. Jackie tells about her childhood, when she always felt left out and overweight. She tried yo-yo dieting, but she couldn't sustain...

Dr. Vera Tarman is the author of the book Food Junkies: Recovery from Food Addiction.   Her book (as well as the podcast Food Junkies ) tackles the complex and often poorly understood issue of food addiction. It's so poignant because it's written from her own clinical experience with dozens of her patients who suffer from overeating, binge eating, obesity, anorexia, and bulimia. But Vera...

Colli Christante grew up eating whole foods and very little sugar, and she brought up her daughter that way too. She doesn't remember her daughter being sick as a child. Naturally, as she grew up, Colli's daughter experimented with sugar and other types of processed foods, but then when she herself became a mother, she reverted back to whole foods. Colli tells about her experience with a...

When Nikola Howard was still eating sugar, she had no energy, she was in pain, she had skin issues, and she was often moody and "hangry" (which is when you're so hungry that you're angry). She had to eat every two hours or so, otherwise she would become impatient and bad-tempered. It wasn't until  she was in her 40s that she realized how sugar was affecting her brain and h...

Janine knew all the facts about sugar: what it does to your health, how it can feed cancer and cause inflammation... but she still ate it because she liked the taste, and it made her happy to eat it. When she'd tried other diets, like keto, she realized that the fake sugars and the recreations of desserts that she was making were just causing her to miss the "real thing". And when s...

Michelle Hurn is the author of the book "The Dietitian's Dilemma". As a health professional, the oath she took was to "do no harm". And yet, after several years in the profession, and after several challenges with her own health, she realized that as a dietitian, she was actually hurting people more than helping them. That was her dilemma: Do I continue to repeat the offic...

Like many of us, Jennifer's sugar story goes way back. Her health-conscious mom had the family try all kinds of diets, and her dad and her grandparents had a huge sweet tooth. And this solidified Jennifer's sweet tooth. She experimented with different ways of eating and various diets in order to control her weight and her health. And now she works as a coach to help people eat healthier....

Denice Whiteley always had a problem with sleep. She'd fall asleep, but then she'd always wake up during the night and not be able to fall back asleep. She also had two young kids at the time. She stopped eating sugar because she was having yeast infections, but then she noticed that she also began to  sleep through the night. That was over 25 years ago. Since then, she's only had s...

Lynn Louise knows all about emotional eating. In fact, she did all kinds of activities in order to distract herself from her feelings: drugs drinking running eating She freely admits that she had lots of distractive habits. The trigger was a traumatic experience that she had when she was a teenager, but she didn't know that at the time. She first drank alcohol socially, but it soon turned to...

Ever since she was a small child, Florence Christophers suffered from debilitating, blinding migraines. She grew up on sugary and processed foods and never thought that what she was eating had anything to do with her suffering. In her teens, Florence started dieting, restriction, and bingeing. And she put on weight, she had brutal PMS with cramps and moodiness, and her migraines continued and got...

Judy Wolfe describes herself as "a person of more". In other words, after that first bite, she always wants more. In this episode, Judy talks candidly about her journey to freedom from sugar, grains, starches, sweeteners, and alcohol. She's been living that freedom for 16 years, maintaining a 130 lb weight loss. How Judy eats can be perceived as restrictive by many, but as she says,...