The Great Sugar Mutiny

I didn’t wake up one day and decide I was going to wage war on sugar. I’m not the food police. I don’t lecture people at dinner tables or side-eye their plates like I’m the Snack Gestapo. When I’m invited into someone’s home, I eat what’s offered because that’s what respect looks like — not performing your diet at someone else’s table. But when it comes to what crosses the threshold into my home, that’s a whole different story.

Because here’s the thing — I’m done poisoning myself. Dramatic? Maybe. But also true as hell. And if you’ve ever tried to break up with sugar, you already know — this shit feels personal. It’s not just food. It’s an entire system, a whole-ass culture, built to keep us addicted and sick and just functional enough to keep buying more of it.

I was raised on the usual American diet — sodas, candy, cereal that’s basically dessert with a cartoon mascot screaming at you from the box. I was a sugar baby before I even had teeth. And when you grow up swimming in that, you don’t even realize you’re drowning. Feeling like garbage after you eat feels normal. Cravings are just “a sweet tooth,” not withdrawal. “Cutting back” means switching from Coke to sweet tea — and that’s when someone inevitably pops up to smugly inform you that sweet tea is just as bad or “basically liquid sugar.”

It’s not. But thanks, Janet.

But nothing woke me up faster than having a kid of my own. I made her baby food from scratch because the jarred stuff tasted like lukewarm garbage. I wasn’t preaching. I wasn’t trying to prove a point. I just wanted her to eat actual food. But you’d think I was committing some kind of crime the way people reacted — like I was depriving her of the sacred American childhood experience of fluorescent snacks and type 2 diabetes.

That’s when I realized it’s not just the food. It’s the whole damn culture.

You clean up your own plate, and people around you act like you just insulted their grandma. You didn’t say a word — just existing without a pile of junk on your plate makes some people defensive. They’ll push it at you like you’re offending them by refusing. They’ll call you “too much” just for reading a label. They’ll say you’re depriving your kid, even when your kid is thriving.

And school? Don’t even get me started. The reward for doing literally anything — behaving, finishing a worksheet, not setting the classroom on fire — is candy. Emotional eating isn’t just normalized, it’s baked directly into the curriculum. Good day? Here’s a lollipop. Bad day? Cupcakes. Managed to breathe air for eight hours straight? Have a grab bag of sugar and red dye #40. Half their meals might as well be dessert, and somehow, we’re all just supposed to pretend that’s normal fuel for growing brains.

And it’s not just the food — it’s the whole lifestyle stack. People will watch my kid, pump her full of sugar, let her stay up late, park her in front of a screen for hours, and then act absolutely baffled when her behavior goes off the rails. They’ll shake their heads and say, “She’s just difficult” — like they didn’t personally assemble the chaos cocktail themselves. It’s wild how often adults create the conditions for a meltdown and then blame the kid for melting.

I’m not some perfect health guru — I’ve stumbled, backslid, stress-ate three bags of gummy bears in a single sitting, and told myself I deserved it. Then, of course, I sat there feeling like a literal bloated zombie, wondering why I felt like crap just hours later. I’ve justified it six ways to Sunday — all while my body was very clearly trying to file for divorce. And there’s nothing quite like the humbling experience of standing in your own kitchen, contemplating life choices over a coffee shake, knowing full well you’re gonna slam three brownies after it. You catch yourself mid-chew, laughing at the absurdity of it all — how you went from thinking you had a “sweet tooth” to realizing your entire personality might actually be high fructose corn syrup in a trench coat — but, yeah, you still can’t stop. The struggle is real. And at the end of it, you wonder if this is all a cosmic joke.

But I’m done pretending sugar isn’t a drug. Done acting like the boxes in the middle aisles of the grocery store are food. Done watching people I love feel like crap every day because they were lied to about what’s normal. I don't want that for myself or my family, and they shouldn't want that for us either. 

This isn’t a blog about sad kale and chia pudding. (Okay, I actually like chia pudding — I might even throw some recipes on here eventually if I feel like it.) But I’m not here to sell you some aesthetic wellness fantasy with perfectly lit smoothie bowls and avocado toast on reclaimed wood. I’m not a guru, I’m not your coach, and I’m not cashing in on your desperation. I’m just a regular person who had to unlearn a mountain of garbage — from doctors, from "professionals", from family — and I’m sharing what I’ve figured out so far in case it helps someone else claw their way out of the same mess.

Because let me tell you, health information is a goddamn landfill fire. Half of it’s marketing, the other half is outdated nonsense, and somewhere in the middle is a tiny, flickering flame of actual truth you have to fight to find. Even the “experts” will feed you junk if there’s a dollar in it. They’ll swear some chalky protein bar tastes “just like a Snickers” while dead behind the eyes, fully knowing they’ve long forgotten what real food even tastes like.

This isn’t a quick fix. There’s no magic detox tea, no supplement stack, no prescription strong enough to medicate away a lifetime of shitty choices. It’s a full-scale lifestyle overhaul — and not the sexy Instagram kind. It’s messy, it’s slow, and it forces you to face all the ways you’ve been using food (and caffeine, and screens, and every other dopamine hit) to cope with life. It’s uncomfortable as hell — but it’s real.

And while we’re at it, let me warn you — the people around you? The ones who aren’t ready to face their own habits? They are going to sabotage the hell out of you. I don’t even know if they mean to — some do, some don’t — but they absolutely will. They’ll passive-aggressively push junk on you, they’ll sneak your kid the sugary garbage you’re trying to cut back, and they’ll act like you’re depriving your child of some core childhood experience if you dare suggest fruit snacks are candy too. It’s the same energy non-drinkers know all too well — the way people can’t just respect it and move on. They’ve got to question it, mock it, and keep pushing you to “just have one.” Turns out that cleaning up your eating triggers the exact same groupthink nonsense. It’s relentless. Vegans wish they knew this level of pressure.

But that’s all part of the game. You don’t do this for approval — you do it because you’re tired of feeling like garbage. And if laughing at myself battling a coffee shake like I’m trying to quit heroin helps take the edge off, so be it.

So yeah — I’ve been at this for years. Stopping, starting, unlearning, relearning. And now, I’m going to tell you all of it. What I changed, why I changed it, and how I’m still figuring it out.

Because the truth is — sugar is everywhere. And getting free? That’s not a diet. It’s a damn rebellion.

And if that’s where you’re at too, welcome to the table. (We’ve got chia pudding.)