Sweet Calamity

With determination, commitment and support from your weight loss surgeon, St. Petersburg and Bradenton residents can kick the sugar habit once and for all.

A spoonful of sugar can make more than the medicine go down. While we all know too well the brief spurt of energy that a sugar high can provide, eating sugar ultimately causes your blood sugar levels to drop—and down with them go your mood, your energy levels and your ability to resist more sweets.

The health consequences of eating too much sugar have been shouted high and low in recent years. The amount of sugar that we eat regularly is tightly linked with the prevalence of obesity in the U.S, and sugar can increase your risk of developing heart disease, diabetes and even certain cancers. What a lot of people don’t realize are the emotional consequences that sugar can have.

Sweet, Sweet Depression?

Sugar causes a number of chemical reactions to occur in the body. When you indulge in sugar, your insulin levels rise and your endorphin levels are stimulated. This enhances your mood and gives you a natural chemical high. Since sugar is so prevalent in our diets, we are constantly experiencing this high. Oftentimes, we will indulge in more sugar before the chemical high has worn off, or begin to feel the high wearing off and mistake that for hunger—which leads to further sugar consumption and overeating.

Over time, this becomes a dangerous cycle. We adjust to so much sugar and need more and more to get the same sugar high that we might have once experienced from a simple treat. Unfortunately, when the sugar high wears off the result is a drastic drop in insulin and endorphin levels. You might not notice this as you continue to eat sugar, but once you alter your diet for Lap Band surgery this is something you will have to face.

The declining insulin and endorphin levels often prompt fatigue, mood swings and even depression. For many people these emotional changes come out of nowhere and are hard to make sense of. Most people don’t recognize that these are signs of sugar withdrawal, but instead associate how they feel with the negative effects of losing weight and ultimately give in to eating sweets. This starts the cycle all over again. Since the body was craving sugar and they had a sweet, they are likely to feel an improvement in mood—but not for long.

Breaking the sugar habit is one of the hardest steps bariatric surgery patients encounter. Eliminating processed sugar from your diet is hard to do, and even after Lap Band surgery it is difficult to cut the ingredient out of everything. However, by switching to natural sugar sources like fruits and vegetables you can give your body a bit of sweetness without getting stuck in the sugar cycle all over again.