American Fitness Professionals & Associates

By Nancy Appleton, Ph.D.
www.nancyappleton.com When I was a child, a bakery truck used to come regularly to the back door of our house.  If my mother wasn’t around, I could buy anything I wanted and charge it.  No one seemed to know who had charged what when the bakery bill came.  I would buy six donuts, four nut bars, and a couple of coffee cakes, hide them from the rest of the family, and eat them in private.  In two days, all of the goodies would be gone, and I’d wait for the bakery truck and more sweet morsels.

Although I didn’t realize it, I was a sugarhohc and a chocoholic.  Almost from birth I craved the stuff.  In my early childhood, I was plagued with bothersome allergies-the signals of an unbalanced body chemistry.  My nose ran continually, and so did my eyes.  
I was constantly sticking fingers in my ears to try to stop the itching, rubbing my fingers over my throat, or even scratching the back of my throat with my tongue for the same reason.  Like most people, I misread these body signals and continued my dangerous dietary habits.

My upsetting addiction became worse in my teenage years.  I played tennis for four hours a day, every day, and the calories I burned up on the tennis court more than compensated for the calories in the sweets I continued to eat.  Therefore, I could consume an incredible amount of sugar and chocolate and not gain weight, even though I was upsetting my body chemistry.  

After winning a tennis tournament, I would treat myself to two hot-fudge sundaes.  When I would lose a tournament, I would eat a whole package of chocolate cookies.  Winner or loser, I was a loser.  Again, I just wasn’t aware of the connection between my sweet addiction, upset body chemistry, and illness.

All I knew at that age was that I wasn’t fat, Just young, strong, and unhealthy.  Every tooth in my mouth was eventually filled with gold or silver.  My first bout with pneumonia came at age thirteen, and it put me in the hospital for two weeks.  During my second year in college, I had a large tumor removed from my chest, which, after a great deal of expensive investigation, turned out to be a calcium deposit.  No one told me that my body was unable to digest milk and calcium properly.  No one suggested that the sugar in my diet and other lifestyle factors might be upsetting my body chemistry and causing my increasing health problems.
I continued to ignore the signals my body was giving me and, in my ignorance, went right on with my unhealthy lifestyle.

I spent my junior year of college studying in Switzerland, land of chocolate.  While in Geneva, I phoned a nearby chocolate factory, explained that I was a food and nutrition major in college, and asked for a tour.  What I really wanted, of course, were the chocolate samples at the end of the line.  That little trip fed my habit for about a week.  This time, however, the weight game didn’t work.  Because I was traveling and not playing my usual four hours of tennis every day, I wasn’t burning off the excess calories.  
I came back from Europe 30 pounds overweight, my sugar and chocolate cravings stronger than ever.

My adult life was plagued with boils, canker sores, varicose veins, headaches, constipation, fatigue, colds, flus, and four more bouts with pneumonia-the results of a lifestyle that promoted an upset body chemistry.  Each time I became sick with pneumonia, recovery took longer; my immune system was being weakened continually by my dietary habits and my lifestyle.  

After my last bout with pneumonia, my cough lasted for six months.  Every specialist I consulted diagnosed my problem as chronic bronchitis.  ”Take antibiotics ten days out of the month for the rest of your life,” I was told over and over.  Not one doctor ever asked, “What do you put in your mouth? What do you eat?”

I was forty years old before I realized how little I knew about nutrition, sugar, allergies, or health.  Although I still believed that doctors would take care of me, somehow I just couldn’t swallow their diagnoses any easier than I could swallow antibiotics ten days a month for the rest of my life.  As my cough continued, I decided to try yoga.  I thought that if I stood on my head long enough, the phlegm would come out of my chest.  Wrong again.  My cough was still there after hours of viewing the world upside down.  
I hadn’t realize that my chemically unbalanced body would produce excess phlegm whether I stood right side up or upside down.

This was the beginning of a long road for me.  I withdrew the sugar . Then I would make a mistake, and have to start over. I finally realized that the process was evolutionary, not revolutionary. My recovery was full of insights, withdrawal symptoms , and finally my body started feeling like spring had sprung.

 As with any addict, I was in denial about my addiction to sugar .  Until I could realized that sugar was a definite addiction, I could make little progress.  I could stop but, as Mark Twain said about smoking.  ”Stopping is easy.  I have done it many times.”  
So have I stopped eating sugar,  too many times.

 What made me stop for good was because I started feeling so lousy, and I was yelling at my children much too much.  I realized that I would have symptoms and diseases the rest of my life if I did not stop, and my children would end up on Ritalin because of hyperactivity.  Sometimes I was in such pain that I could not even hear my children.  Sugarholism is similar to any addiction.
Many people have to get to the bottom before they can pick themselves up.  

 I had another fortunate thing happen to me and that was I heard a lecture that explained exactly how sugar can cause symptoms and how it suppresses the immune system.  What I learned I want to pass on to you.  Hopefully, this information will help sugarholics as it helped me.

 Recently, information has emerged as to what happens to the minerals in the body when abusive foods are eaten.  For example, every time we eat just as little as two teaspoons of sugar our blood chemistry can change, and we can throw ourselves out of homeostasis, the wonderful electrochemical balance needed for health and life itself.  Doctors and clinicians do not usually test the total blood chemistry of a person before and after ingesting sugar, but if they did, they would find that the minerals increase or decrease, and change relationship with each other.  

In the usual case the calcium increases and the phosphorus decreases (the ratio of calcium to phosphorous increases too much) and there is toxic calcium in the body because minerals only work in relation to each other.  A mineral can become toxic to the body when there is an excess of that mineral in the body.  Toxic calcium can cause plack on the teeth, kidney stones, arthritis, cataracts, bone spurs, and hardening of the arteries.  These are effects of an increase in a particular mineral ratio.

When minerals decrease, they can be reduced to such an extent that our enzymes are unable to function well as each enzyme is dependent upon a mineral to function.  As a result we do not digest our food completely and some of this undigested food can get directly into the blood stream and is treated as a foreign substance.  This by-product of incomplete digestion, causes the immune system to come into action.  Actually, this is one form of food allergy.  The immune system must respond to this undigested or partially digested food in the blood stream.  

For some of us, this undigested food can cause an inflammatory response with sneezes and wheezes.  For others it might cause headaches, anger, arthritis, fatigue, multiple sclerosis, psoriasis or other problems.  On top of all this, too much sugar can overwork and exhaust our white cells and weaken our immune system while the white cells are not receiving the correct protein combinations since protein is not being digested and assimilated properly.

 When I learned this information I realized that with each tablespoon of sugar that I was ingesting, I could be causing another symptom.  The sugar could cause me to yell at my children more, make many symptoms reappear, and I was cutting time off of my life span with every chocolate candy.  Finally I was able to get sugar under control. I did go through withdrawal symptoms and I felt lousy for a few days, but after about 72 hours many of my symptoms went away.   

I think that the main reason that I do not go back to sugar is because I feel so much better.  I only sleep six and a half hours rather than eight and a half hours.  Psychologically I can deal with life much better.

That was over twenty years ago.  I have been living symptom free most of the time.  Only when I get back into the sugar do the symptoms come back.   I am 63 years old now, lecture all over the world, still play “A” tennis, climb mountains, and love life. I know what sugar does to my body , in particular my immune system.   I do not like the symptoms that I now know are related to sugar, so I eat very little sugar.  I know that in restaurants I can get some sugar in a salad dressing ,and I like ketchup which is loaded with sugar.  I do not eat sweets nor soft drinks.  I no longer have the cravings.  Carrots, that I used to dislike, now taste sweet to me.  My taste buds have changed.

I do not suggest that you remove sugar cold turkey.  Rather, remove the sugar slowly over a two week period.  Start by eating half as much: half the sugar in your cup of coffee, half a dessert and put in just half the amount of sugar required in a recipe.  
Then continue to wean  more sugar  from your diet.  It is possible to lick the sugar habit, live a longer healthier life and have fewer symptoms.  The health or sickness, the choice is yours.

  For more information on the effects of sugar on the body and methods to lick the sugar habit, read Dr. Nancy Appleton’s LICK THE SUGAR HABIT.   Appleton is also author of HEALTHY BONES, THE  SECRETS OF NATURAL HEALING WITH FOOD and THE CURSE OF LOUIS PASTEUR.  Learn more about her work on the internet: www.NancyAppleton.com.

Nancy Appleton, Ph.D. is author of LICK THE SUGAR HABIT and LICK THE SUGAR
HABIT SUGAR COUNTER. Learn more about Dr. Nancy Appleton at www.nancyappleton.com