Just thought I’d update this in case anyone is actually following! I went 4 weeks with no obvious sources of fructose (sugar, juice, fruits, honey), just some occasional dextrose for sweetness.
An interesting thing happened after just over 4 weeks of doing this, I went from not feeling particularly bothered about the lack of sugar in my diet (I didn’t crave it particularly) to waking up suddenly with massive sugar cravings, particularly for Kitkats – I haven’t eaten a Kitkat for about 10 years so this was odd!
I figured my body is telling me I need sugar, so I had some real sugar on cornflakes, had a piece of cake and some chocolate, and found that the Kitkat craving finally went away and I felt rather happy and well :) I had a few days of eating more sugar than is my normal habit, but my sugar cravings have settled back to something acceptable. I now don’t think sugar is addictive necessarily, if it were, surely I’d spiral into a sugar binge frenzy needing more and more rather than having a bit extra then feeling “ok, that was enough sugar for now”.
So my month of no fructose/sugar resulted in:
1. about 1.5kgs of weight loss (nothing spectacular).
2. a kind of taste-bud reset, making everything taste sweeter than usual (that was kind of cool).
3. A few weeks of feeling kind of blah… not really tired, but not massively motivated either. Everything just felt kind of boring. I didn’t realize how much so until I had some sugar and felt like my brain/moods/energy got revitalized and suddenly life seemed interesting :D. I’m guessing this is something to do with dopamine?
After this, I don’t have much interest in quitting sugar, while it was nice to have a little weight loss, it isn’t worth it if the cost is feeling kind of blah and unmotivated. I think I’ll stay off the fruit juice for a while though, as I think it’s been better for me to eat more actual food instead.