4 Surprising Things I Learnt from Eating a Handful of Sweets
This was a Guest Post by Lara Zibarras on Elephant Journal
For five years, sweets never passed my lips.
I avoided all processed sugar for the sake of my health and was determined to never ever eat sugar.
I’d bought into the whole “sugar is poison” concept but never took the time to look beneath the alarming headlines about how sugar is slowly killing us all. That was it, sugar-free baking from now until eternity.
I honestly thought I was doing it for my health and my family’s health. Only it wasn’t so healthy. I worried about sugar all day long. I substituted processed sugar in everything, I avoided cooking with sugar, and I even started worrying about the sugar in fruit. At one point, I would only eat berries because all other fruits were too high in sugar!
I would religiously study food labels and calculate how many grams of sugar there were in certain foods, especially anything that was remotely processed. I started to avoid anything prepackaged (I mean, hummus and pre-cooked beans included), and I’d constantly worry in case I slipped up from my healthy eating regime.
You see, I was suffering from orthorexia but didn’t realise it at the time. Orthorexia, although not yet an officially recognised eating disorder, is seen to be an unhealthy obsession with eating “clean.” And it was slowly stealing the joy out of living, eating, and hanging out with friends.
I got to the stage where eating out was stressful because, along with sugar, there were many other things I avoided. I was gluten-free, dairy-free, sugar-free. I would also only eat organic foods. All this worry and stress was starting to take its toll.