Sugar Addiction and Anger

This blog is part of a series; its original title was Heilkunst Basics: Grade Four

Sugar is one of those fundamental elements of life which we have a very strong drive to make sure that we have enough to support our basic life functions. This is easy to relate to, even if you can recall one time you’ve had the experience of feeling that your blood sugar or the available sugar feeding your brain was too low. Our drive for sugar is incredibly strong, as evidenced by the fact that there almost always seems to be “room for dessert”, even after a big meal.

The link between sugar and our ability to think is quite important to understand, particularly when we are trying to come to grips with the phenomenon of the massive increase of available sugar in our industrial age, which parallels the corresponding increase in our cognitive faculties. Nothing emerges in history by accident, whether the mechanism which brings it forward is conscious or not.

T.S. Wiley researched and wrote extensively on the link between our hormones, our sleep, and our sugar consumption within the context of our age of access to artificial light. Her book “Lights Out” explains in great detail how we have created within our physiology the illusion of “perpetual summer” which is the most stressful state we can be in. It is stressful, because in nature, summer is the time where we need to properly prepare ourselves for the winter in order to ensure our survival for another year. Between our constantly available sources of artificial light, and our limitless access to sugar, this constant stress of “perpetual summer” is behind many of the chronic illness and premature deaths of our modern life.

The basic conclusion to take away from these facts is that we need to apply our conscious will power in order to radically tone down our consumption of sugar, if our interest is in health and longevity. At a practical level, there are a number of factors to be aware of on our way towards this goal, including:

• Sugar is everywhere in our modern food supply, and it takes a process of re-education to reshape our grocery-buying habits, and to understand exactly how to recognize the names of sugar in all of its obvious and hidden forms on package labels.
• Addiction to sugar is one of the toughest ones to break. When you’ve prepared your health sufficiently, you may want to attempt a 30 day “grain and sugar fast”, completely eliminating all forms of refined or artificial sugars from your diet. Be forewarned that you will need proper support for you liver and detox organs, as well as sufficient emotional support, which includes homotonic remedies. The remedy staphysagria, for example, is one which is very strongly linked to sugar addiction, which feeds our need to suppress so-called “negative” emotions such as anger. Build in as much peer support, along with formal support from your Heilkünstler to get you through this process. Warn your spouse and family of the emotional minefield that you are likely to be going through for the next while.
• Eating out, and especially when away from home, or travelling can be the most difficult time to co-ordinate a healthier grain-free/sugar-free diet. It takes time to recalibrate your habits and strategies to be effective in most of these situations.
• You don’t have to do it all at once – take it one step at a time, and build from strength to strength, rather than trying to change everything at once, likely setting yourself up for a big fall and failure. There are numerous online resources for alternative grain-free and/or sugar-free recipes which you can learn and incorporate into your lifestyle gradually.

• ← Soy Products, Grains and Pasteurized Dairy; How They’re Affecting Your Health
• Detoxification; Chemicals, Toxins and Emotional Processes →