Life After Sugar

Beck signed up for the Freedom from Cravings Formula 5-step program in the spring of 2024 because although she knew all about the negative effects of sugar, she was still struggling with sugar cravings. Especially for chocolate. Chocolate with nuts, to be precise. In fact, Step 2 of the program is designed to be a deep dive into learning to make sustainable habit changes. One example is that inste...

In this episode, I talk about what I ate on my recent trip to visit my family in the UK. Yes, you can travel and still choose to eat real, whole foods! But it may not always be possible to make the best choices... Do the best you can with the options available. I didn't eat sugar, but I did eat foods that I wasn't used to. Listen to how the temporary change of routine in my diet affected...

This episode is Part 2 of my chat with Siobhan Harris, who struggled with sugar addiction her whole life. Listen to Part 1 (Episode 179) here . In this episode, Siobhan shares the 5 tools that she uses in her recovery from sugar addiction. These tools are helping Siobhan to remain happily committed to living a sugar-free, flour-free lifestyle for life. These tools may surprise you... and they coul...

This is a crossover episode with my friend Michelle from the Fast and Fabulous podcast . We talk about: how I fought against cutting sugar for the longest time  how I fell into intermittent fasting  how eating more often can make you feel more hungry, and eating less often can make you feel less hungry building our relationship up with food how the idea of not eating any sugar and flour/grains see...

Dr. Michael Mosley is the author of several books, including The Fast 800, The 8-Week Blood Sugar Diet, and The Clever Guts Diet. Sadly, he passed away in June 2024 while on holiday in Greece. In this episode, I want to share with you a book report that I made a couple of years ago for the members of the After Sugar Club private community (find us here) . This episode is my summary of his book The...

My guest this week is Nikki, who's a fellow mom with 3 boys at home.  In this episode, we talk about whole foods, how she feeds her family, and how she helps other moms find more energy in the sometimes overwhelming life that we live as moms. Nikki grew up with pretty healthy meals, usually some sort of meat or fish and  vegetables. Rarely desserts, she says - they were just for special occas...

From November 2023 to June 2024, we had an Italian student staying with us. Not exactly an exchange student, more like a big brother for our daughter. And during those months of his stay with us, I learned quite a few things about food, especially carbs like pasta and flour. For example:  teenage boys eat a LOT! he doesn't eat between meals he doesn't often eat desserts he didn't gr...

From early childhood, Siobhan remembers sneaking cookies before anyone else woke up in the morning. Even as a toddler, she was never able to eat sugar in moderation. Once she hit puberty, this addiction caused her to gain weight and so she started dieting, which led to a diet/binge cycle that lasted decades. After college, Siobhan struggled more and more with weight control and grew increasingly m...

Claire grew up in New England with European parents. She enjoyed a whole foods diet and loved fresh seasonal foods, including fruit, vegetables, and cheeses. Processed foods didn't hold much attraction for her. She grew up loving to cook. So she didn't eat foods with added sugars. So she didn't feel like she was missing out. But with the stress from her job and the breakdown of her...

Susannah grew up with a typical North American diet. Sugar was part of that diet, and sweets were a very big part of her family's everyday life. Susannah's mother would serve ice cream every night after dinner, and every weekend she would bake something like a cake, cookies, or a pie. Sugar is a part of daily life, she says, and nobody thought about it. Many years later, when her mother...

In this short episode, you'll get some consumer tips for how to spot hidden sugar in cereal. For example: Beware of health claims on the packaging! Read the list of ingredients before you look at the Nutrition Facts table. Watch out for the serving amount. The amount of total carbohydrates does not always tell the whole story (find out why in this episode!). Stick to real, whole foods to star...

Danielle's journey with sugar started in childhood.  She remembers that sugar was a massive part of her upbringing. With her family, she always had ice cream after dinner.  Sugar was always a treat. They even had a trunk in their house that had little goodie bags with sweet treats for whenever she and her brother were good.  So there was a lot of rewarding with sugar. As a child, Danielle was...

Do you remember Episode 6 of the Life After Sugar podcast , where I interviewed my daughter Lily? She was 12 at the time. She's 16 now. In this special Mother's Day edition, I take a quick trip down memory lane to revisit some of what Lily talked about with relation to my hiding chocolate in the car,  her Halloween candies, and her own interest in sugar. Whether or not you have kids or g...

Krissy grew up eating a normal American diet: lots of carb-heavy processed and packaged foods. When she was younger, she was active, which together with her tall frame helped her stay slim. Then in her late 30s, stress and hormones started to change her body. She consulted a personal trainer and started calorie counting and eating less, without necessarily changing what she was eating. But the &qu...

My guest Dr. Paul Kolodzik trained as an MD in emergency medicine.  In this episode, he freely admits that like most physicians, he didn't get much training on nutrition. But what he learned over a period of time is that avoiding sugar, eating low carb, and making sure you get adequate protein really is the way to both better health and better longevity. Dr. Kolodzik explains what insulin res...

This episode actually comes from a request from listeners of this podcast to talk about the long-term benefits that I've experienced after all these years of living sugar-free. Because it can seem pretty hard to imagine what it can be like to live day after day,  feeling free from cravings and free from the hold that sugar has on you.  Oh! And I just wanted to clarify that when I say "su...

Wendi and I have been good friends for several years. We have lots of things in common, including living our lives with less sugar and more joy. We can't chat without breaking into giggles! In this episode, we talk about whole foods, as well as Wendi's prepping and self-reliance skills that help her look after her large family. But especially, we talk about life, and how we choose to liv...

Tracey recently celebrated her two-year anniversary for intermittent fasting. But sugar was always a problem during her eating window. Tracey believed she really had a sugar addiction because when she would eat sugar, like cake and ice cream, she would eat the desserts and then always want to go back for more. In fact, she would eat as much sweet stuff as she could, and the next day she would feel...

Today's episode is going to clarify the relationship between alcohol, sugar, and cravings. But first, a disclaimer: I'm not a doctor, so nothing in this podcast should be construed as being medical advice. Also, I'm not here to tell you whether or not you're "allowed" to drink alcohol any more than I'm here to tell you if you're "allowed" to eat su...

In this week's episode, I'm truly honoured to be chatting with Dr. Nicole Avena who is the author of her new book called "Sugarless" . Dr. Avena is a Princeton research neuroscientist and a pioneer in the field of food addiction, with over 16 million views of her TED-Ed video, "How Sugar Affects the Brain" . In this episode, we talk about Dr. Avena's own backgrou...

As Charlotte was growing up, her parents used food to reward good behaviour. This led her to develop an early love of sugar, especially chocolate. During her teenage years in the 1990s, Charlotte felt pressure to conform to society's ideal of a thin body, and so she aimed to look attractive and lose weight rapidly through  dieting.  And her weight yo-yoed as her relationships began and ended....

When Noreen joined the Freedom from Cravings Formula 90-day program, she was struggling with various health challenges, including diverticulitis and poor sleep. She is now experimenting to learn what foods truly agree with her body, making gradual, lasting changes rather than drastic shifts. As she tracked her sleep data,  Noreen discovered that her deep sleep increased dramatically after eliminat...

I hate to say it, but many of us have been fed some pretty widespread myths about food - especially sugar - over the years. This episode is a recording of a live online workshop that I gave in January 2024, where I bust two myths: 1. The myth that craveworthy foods are everywhere, that we can't get away from them. 2. The myth that it's impossible to be sugar free and enjoy life. For myth...

This is a shared episode with Michelle, host of the Fast and Fabulous podcast . We talk about our experiences with perimenopause, and the link with sugar. Perimenopause hits women at different ages and with a wide variety of symptoms.  Although it's a natural process, it can cause all kinds of physical and emotional symptoms. What if intermittent fasting, together with cutting down on sugary...

Julie used to eat junk food until a car accident led her to gain weight and feel unwell. That led to her holistic healing journey. She decided to follow a program that required her to weigh and measure her food, but she didn't really understand why she was doing it, she said.  What inspired her the most was witnessing her mother's transformation with sugar-free and flour-free living. At...