The first principle is that you must not fool yourself and you are the easiest person to fool.
Richard P. Feynman
You’ve watched her do it a hundred times.
She reaches into the bag, takes two cookies, eats them slowly, and then, this is the part that kills you, she just stops. Without hesitation, she closes the bag and walks away. The cookies don’t call to her from the cupboard. In fact, she doesn’t think about them again.
Meanwhile, you can eat a whole bag when she stops at two cookies. Two isn’t enough. Five isn’t enough. You keep going until the bag is empty, until your stomach hurts, until shame washes over you. Later, standing in front of the mirror, you call yourself weak, undisciplined, broken.
You’ve asked yourself a thousand times: Why can’t I stop eating sugar like she can? What’s wrong with me?
Here’s what nobody told you: nothing is wrong with you. Your brain chemistry is different, not broken.
The difference between you and her isn’t willpower. It’s not discipline. It’s not moral character. The difference is serotonin levels, endorphin receptors, and a feedback loop in your brain that doesn’t fire the way hers does.
You’re not failing at self-control. You’re experiencing a physical addiction with chemical roots, a sugar addiction that operates exactly like drug addiction, with tolerance, withdrawal, and physical changes in your brain.
Every time you blame yourself for this chemical reality, you’re participating in self-abuse. The same goes for starting another doomed diet or calling yourself weak for struggling with something others don’t understand.
This pattern of self-abuse doesn’t just feel terrible. It actually perpetuates the addiction. The shame creates stress. The stress triggers your brain to seek relief. And your brain knows exactly where to find that relief: sugar.
The truth is messier than “just stop eating” and more complicated than willpower, but ultimately more freeing. You are not broken. Your brain just works differently. And once you understand why you can eat a whole bag when she stops at two cookies, you can finally stop punishing yourself for a chemical addiction you didn’t know you had.
- The Deprivation-Abuse Cycle You Didn’t Know You Were In
- What’s Actually Happening in Your Brain
- The Accidental Discovery of Self-Medication
- The Chemical Snowball You Never Saw Coming
- How Shame Feeds the Addiction
- The Deprivation Pattern That Started It All
- What Makes You Different From Normal Eaters
- Why “Just Listen to Your Body” Doesn’t Work
- The Way Out
- The Real Prize Isn’t Thinness
The Deprivation-Abuse Cycle You Didn’t Know You Were In
Most food addicts have been set up to fail from the beginning. Not by some moral deficiency, but by a combination of genetics, brain chemistry, and a culture that has no idea how addiction actually works.
Think about every time someone has said to you: “Just put down the fork.” “You’d be so pretty if you lost weight.” “Your sister only eats one cookie.”
These messages, repeated over years, erode self-esteem like water wearing away soap. They’re built on the assumption that you can control your eating the same way normal eaters control theirs. But you can’t. And every time you try and fail, you conclude the problem is you.
You’ve tried. You’ve tried diets that had no chance of succeeding because they were too extreme, too foreign to your life, too focused on deprivation rather than understanding. And when the diet inevitably failed, you took the blame.
But here’s the thing: you can’t willpower away sugar cravings any more than you can willpower away a migraine.
You are not like normal eaters.
What’s Actually Happening in Your Brain
Let me explain what’s going on inside your head when you crave sugar.
Your brain operates on neurotransmitters, chemicals that carry messages from one nerve cell to the next across tiny gaps called synapses. When these chemicals are released, they determine how you feel. Your happiness, your pain, your hunger, your peace, all of it flows from these chemicals.
Two neurotransmitters matter most for food addiction: serotonin and endorphins.
Serotonin makes you feel relaxed, peaceful, less anxious. It decreases pain. It helps you sleep. Most importantly for our purposes, it’s supposed to tell you to stop eating when you’ve had enough.
Endorphins are your body’s natural morphine. They kill pain and create feelings of pleasure. One specific endorphin, beta-endorphin, has a special relationship with sugar: it both makes eating feel good and stimulates the desire to eat more.
Now here’s where your story diverges from normal eaters.
You may have been born with insufficient serotonin. This isn’t your fault, it’s likely genetic, possibly inherited from parents who struggled with alcohol, depression, weight, or compulsive behavior of some kind.
If your serotonin level is low, you feel pain more acutely than other people. Emotional hurts cut deeper. Stress weighs heavier. When you were a child and your parents made mistakes, because all parents do, those mistakes hurt you badly. You needed relief.
And you found it.
The Accidental Discovery of Self-Medication
When you eat sugar or refined carbohydrates (white flour, pasta, white rice), something specific happens in your body.
The sugar raises your blood sugar. High blood sugar triggers insulin release. Insulin makes other amino acids move into your muscles, leaving tryptophan, the building block of serotonin, floating in your bloodstream with less competition. More tryptophan gets into your brain. Your brain manufactures serotonin from that tryptophan.
Serotonin gets released.
And suddenly, you feel better.
The pain dulls. The anxiety loosens. You feel calmer, less overwhelmed. The world becomes manageable again.
You just self-medicated a serotonin deficiency. Of course, you had no idea that’s what you were doing. All you knew was that eating something sweet made you feel better. Naturally, you did it again.
This is how the addiction forms.
Not from weakness. Not from lack of discipline. From a brain that wasn’t functioning properly finding a way to fix itself.
The Chemical Snowball You Never Saw Coming
While sugar is fixing your serotonin problem temporarily, it’s creating another problem entirely.
Sugar triggers the release of endorphins. Those endorphins make eating pleasurable, which is normal. What’s not normal is what happens in some people’s brains.
Beta-endorphin, released when you eat sugar, doesn’t just make you feel good. It stimulates hunger. Specifically, it increases cravings for more sugar, more starch, more fat.
You eat sugar → beta-endorphin is released → beta-endorphin makes you crave more sugar → you eat more sugar → more beta-endorphin is released.
It’s a chemical feedback loop. A snowball rolling downhill, gathering speed and mass.
And here’s the truly devastating part: research suggests that eating sugar in high concentrations over time may actually increase the number of endorphin receptors in your brain.
Think about what that means.
You’re not just craving sugar because it makes you feel good temporarily. Instead, your brain has physically altered its structure to accommodate the presence of sugar. Over time, you’ve developed more receptors waiting to be filled. In fact, this is the same type of physical change that happens in other substance addictions.
This explains why you can eat amounts that would make normal people sick and why you can’t stop at one cookie. More importantly, it’s why the craving feels so powerful it overrides your values, your goals, even your promises to yourself.
Your brain has changed.
How Shame Feeds the Addiction
So there is a serotonin problem. And also an endorphin problem, chemically induced by years of using sugar to cope. Your brain has physically altered to expect and need sugar.
And on top of all this, you’ve been abusing yourself for having these problems.
Every diet you’ve tried added more stress to a body that was already struggling. Extreme food restriction triggers the sympathetic nervous system, your body’s stress response. When you severely restrict food, your body reads it as scarcity and goes into survival mode.
When you diet, you’re adding stress to a system that already feels pain too intensely. You’re using force to control something that requires understanding.
And when the diet fails, because it must, because your brain chemistry is screaming for the chemicals it needs, you call yourself weak.
That’s self-abuse.
You sneak food and feel ashamed. Then you eat past fullness and berate yourself. Later, you stand in front of the mirror mentally listing everything you hate about your body. In every instance, you’re treating yourself with a cruelty you’d never direct at anyone else.
This cruelty creates its own pain, which demands its own relief, which sends you back to sugar, which triggers more shame.
The cycle perpetuates itself.
The Deprivation Pattern That Started It All
For many food addicts, the self-abuse cycle started long before the first diet.
If you grew up with what I call “the minimum”, minimum parenting, minimum attention, minimum safety, minimum love, you learned deprivation early. Your needs weren’t met consistently. Asking for help often didn’t work. Over time, you learned the world was fundamentally unreliable.
But food? Food was reliable.
Food was always there. It always worked. Unlike people, it never rejected you, forgot about you, or prioritized someone else. Eventually, food became your primary relationship.
This psychological dependence developed alongside the chemical addiction. They reinforced each other. The brain chemistry made food intensely rewarding. The emotional deprivation made food intensely necessary.
And nobody understood, not your parents, not your doctors, not your friends. Possibly not even you.
What Makes You Different From Normal Eaters
Normal people eat when hungry, stop when full, and don’t think about it much beyond that.
You can probably eat more sugar in one sitting than normal people can. You don’t stop eating because you’ve had enough, you stop when the bag is empty, when your stomach hurts, when someone walks in and you have to hide what you’re doing.
That’s not weakness. That’s tolerance. Like an alcoholic who can “hold his liquor,” you’ve developed the ability to consume quantities that would make others sick.
And withdrawal? When you try to cut out sugar, you experience discomfort. Anxiety. Irritability. Restlessness. Trouble sleeping. Feeling overwhelmed. The exact symptoms that sugar was relieving.
Does the discomfort go away if you eat sugar? Immediately.
This is physical addiction.
Your relationship with food has the same characteristics as any drug addiction:
- Loss of control over eating
- Habituation (psychological dependence)
- Physical dependence (your body has adjusted to expect the substance)
- Negative consequences in major life functions
You cross your own moral boundaries to get sugar, lying about what you’ve eaten and manipulating situations to create eating opportunities. You hide evidence. Eventually, you arrange your entire life around food.
None of this reflects your character, it’s the nature of addiction.
Why “Just Listen to Your Body” Doesn’t Work
Some recovery approaches say: “Just eat when you’re hungry and stop when you’re full. Listen to your body.”
That might work for people who don’t have food addictions. It doesn’t work for you, for three reasons.
First, if you eat trigger foods (sugar, refined carbohydrates), the chemical reactions in your brain will tell you to keep eating. This is a false message. You’re not truly hungry. Your perception of hunger is chemically induced. When you listen to your body while under the influence of a drug, it lies to you.
Second, if you experienced trauma, especially physical or sexual abuse, you may be dissociated from your body. You might live entirely in your head, cut off from physical sensations below the neck. You can’t listen to a body you can’t feel.
Third, your hunger signals may actually be masking emotional emptiness. The desire to eat is covering up a need for a different kind of fullness, connection, purpose, expression, rest.
You need structure first. Clear boundaries. Avoiding trigger foods. Only after your brain chemistry stabilizes can you begin to hear your body’s actual needs clearly.
The Way Out
Yes, there’s a real chemical problem. Your brain chemistry is different. Using sugar did alter your brain, more endorphin receptors, disrupted serotonin feedback loops, physical changes that are real and documented.
But here’s what changes everything about withdrawal: the symptoms can be dramatically minimized with the right understanding.
When you approach quitting sugar thinking “this will be hell, I’m fighting a powerful addiction, this will take years of white-knuckling”, that mindset creates the suffering. Your brain responds to your expectations. You brace for battle, and you get one.
But when you understand that sugar is just processed food with no real power except what you’ve given it, when you recognize that the discomfort is temporary and manageable, when you see withdrawal as your brain recalibrating rather than being deprived, the experience transforms.
The physical adjustment period exists. You might feel tired, irritable, foggy for a few days to a couple weeks while your brain rebalances. But that’s your body healing, not breaking. It’s temporary recalibration, not permanent suffering.
The real difficulty isn’t the sugar itself. Sugar is just processed food. There’s nothing profound about it, nothing irreplaceable. The difficulty is what you’ve been using sugar to avoid feeling, knowing, and facing.
When you remove the crutch, you have to stand on your own. That’s the real challenge. Not the absence of sugar, but the presence of everything you’ve been numbing.
Without sugar, you feel your feelings at full intensity. Suddenly, you notice the gaps in your life, the loneliness, the unfulfilling work, the relationships that drain you, the dreams you abandoned. Most importantly, you can’t escape into the fog anymore.
This is why people think sugar is hard to quit. They’re not actually withdrawing from sugar for months or years. They’re withdrawing from avoidance.
But here’s what changes everything: once you face what you’ve been avoiding, sugar loses its power completely. It has nothing left to offer you.
The real work isn’t fighting cravings. It’s building a life you don’t need to escape from.
This requires several shifts:
First, stop the self-abuse. You’re not weak, nor undisciplined. You’ve been using sugar to cope with a brain that feels intensely and a life that hasn’t given you better tools. Treat yourself with the compassion you’d extend to anyone struggling with pain they don’t know how to process.
Second, understand what you’re actually dealing with. Yes, the brain chemistry is real, serotonin deficiency, endorphin imbalances, physical receptor changes. These create genuine cravings. But they don’t create years of suffering unless you believe they will. The chemical piece resolves in weeks when you stop feeding it. The suffering continues only when you’re using sugar to avoid something else.
Third, face what’s underneath. Why did food become your primary relationship? What were you not getting that you needed? What truths about your life, your relationships, your choices are you using sugar to not see?
Fourth, build something worth staying present for. You don’t need willpower when your life is compelling enough that you don’t want to check out. When you have real connections, meaningful work, creative expression, genuine rest, sugar becomes boring.
Fifth, get support for the facing-it part. Not support to help you resist sugar. Support to help you process what comes up when you’re no longer numbing. A therapist who understands trauma and addiction. Friends who’ve done their own emotional work. People who won’t let you hide from yourself.
Sixth, understand this might happen faster than you expect. Once you genuinely face what you’ve been avoiding and start building a life you actually want to be present for, the sugar cravings often just… disappear. Not because you’re fighting them. Because they have nothing left to do for you.
The initial withdrawal period might be uncomfortable for a few days to weeks while your brain chemistry rebalances. That’s real. But the ongoing “difficulty” of staying off sugar? That only exists as long as you’re using sugar as an escape route.
Close the escape route by making your life something you don’t need to escape from, and sugar becomes irrelevant.
The Real Prize Isn’t Thinness
You probably picked up this topic hoping to lose weight. I get it. But if you focus only on weight, you’ll miss the real transformation that’s possible.
The real prize is freedom.
Freedom from obsessing about food all day. Freedom from the fog that settles in after sugar, from the relentless shame cycle. And perhaps most importantly, freedom from organizing your entire life around when and what you’ll eat next.
The real prize is clarity. Clear thinking. Access to your real feelings instead of the numbness sugar provides. Ability to know what you need and ask for it.
The real prize is energy.
Not being depleted by the blood sugar crashes. Not using all your emotional resources to fight cravings. Having energy left over for things that actually matter to you.
The real prize is choice.
Right now, sugar makes your choices for you. It determines your schedule, your social life, your budget, your mood. Recovery gives you your choices back.
The real prize is the life you’re meant to live.
The one that’s waiting on the other side of this addiction. The relationships, the work, the purpose, the joy that sugar has been blocking.
Weight loss may happen. It might not. Bodies are complicated. But freedom from the compulsion? That’s guaranteed if you do the work.
Copyright ©Nutrinama Ekaterina Choukel
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