Confession. I call myself Paleo, but I have been cheating on my diet with too much sugar! Every woman I know has this problem. The dreaded hormonal sugar cravings that strike just when we are doing so well eating clean. Sometimes I tell myself that it must be normal to crave sugar since everyone seems to do it. But then I listen to yet another podcast and hear someone saying how they no longer crave sweets. Heavy sigh. I look back over the last few days or weeks at what I’ve been eating. Way too many Haagen Dazs pints. Way too many Mexican Cokes. Way too many bags of trail mix with M&Ms and raisins. Ya know, raisins are nature’s candy! Meaning, too much sugar. So, waaa! I have to kick the habit AGAIN. Why do I even care? Because along with cheating, I have had a rise in mood swings, zits, period problems, and feeling hungry when I shouldn’t be hungry. That means I am having insulin spikes and my body is stressing. I’ve also been using GU again on long runs in preparation for my half marathon last weekend. I really want to become fat adapted and be super cool like Abel James the Fat Burning Man. 

Another reason I must not eat sugar is that I have a condition called Polycystic Ovary Syndrome. Actually that is a really bad name for this condition. But that is only one of the many symptoms and many of them are much worse than having cysts on your ovaries. For example, PCOS causes infertility, obesity, acne, excess hair on your body, mood swings, and eventually if untreated, can lead to heart disease and diabetes. What is the common factor? Hormone imbalance, namely the hormone insulin is not reacting properly. High levels of insulin circulating at all times is not healthy at all and leads to the above.  So this should really be considered a metabolic disease and treated by diet but unfortunately many doctors know very little about it, or at least they did when I was younger and trying to get pregnant. They don’t know how to treat it. But that is a very common problem with doctors and women’s health problems. The best treatment is a Low carb, low sugar, high good fat diet and regular exercise and , for many, supplementation with natural progesterone . I’ve used this cream Emerita Pro-Gest for ?? years. Ever since reading What Your Doctor May Not Tell You About Premenopause and other books about infertility.

I’m a DIYer when it comes to trying to fix my health problems, only after I got no real help from doctors. I did have one doctor who was willing to prescribe Metformin after ‘I’ told him about it. It seemed to help a little. But I stopped taking it after a while.

If you have hormonal imbalances, getting off the sugar habit is your best first step. That also includes going off of wheat because it acts like sugar in your body if you are carb sensitive. I would also avoid other grains. I do eat white rice but only with meals with plenty of meat. Yes, white rice is better than brown. Google it.

The good news is that the more times you kick the sugar habit and stay off it for awhile, the easier it gets to kick it if you start to cheat again. So I should be back to feeling good in a few days. By the way, this applies to high sugar fruits as well, like most of them. Eat clean!