Food Theory: I Quit Sugar for 30 Days!

Do you have a sweet tooth? *Maniacal Laughter* Next question. This guy right here, he's about to give up sugar for the next month. Spoiler alert, it's going to change his life. Hello internet! Welcome to Food Theory, the show so sweet it might just give you cavities. If you've been watching for some time, you might have noticed that it's kinda hard to have the cleanest of diets when you're the host of a food channel. You're constantly devouring sour candies, super spicy sauces, fast food burgers

, edible underwear, sometimes even edible trees. Even outside the realm of this show though, as a father of a 5 year old, I am constantly surrounded by unhealthy eating decisions. Especially when it comes to sweets. It's something that I didn't really think about until recently. Just how much sugar and artificial sweetener I'm consuming all the time. And look, I'm not old by any means. I mean, I'm ancient by YouTube standards, but I'm at least getting to the age where I have to start looking aft

er my own health. So, since it's a new year, new me, I decided to cut out sugar for the last month. And since misery loves company, I'm not going to be alone on this little adventure. Steph, our social media manager Kai, as well as our live producer Ash are tagging along and joining me in eliminating almost all the sugar from our diets. To see what physical and mental changes occur when a bunch of sugar fiends like us leave their favorite vice behind. Will we end up feeling healthier? Will we wa

nt to continue with this style of eating? Or is it just going to be a month of sugar-free misery? So, we had our goal in mind and our time frame, but as soon as I started looking into the logistics of this, I realized that, oh boy, sugar is a vague term. We all know by now that our bodies need sugar to function, namely in the form of glucose. But at the same time, we hear reports about sugar being this evil thing that will leave us with no teeth and a weak heart. So, do our bodies need something

that's so bad for us, or is sugar not as evil as all the headlines make it out to be? Well, the answer lies somewhere in the middle. Now, pause right here. This is a very confusing topic because there's a lot of discussion about the best terms to use when it comes to talking about sugar. You've probably heard people refer to sugar in two groups, good sugars and bad sugars. And, let me be totally clear about that, I'm not trying to assign any sort of moral value to the foods or sugars that you'r

e consuming. These names have more to do with their long-term effects on the human body, because in excess, nothing is good for you, and everyone has different nutritional needs for their diet. So, for the purpose of this video, we're going to be sticking with those two labels, since they're the ones you're most likely to hear about when you're out in the real world. That way, you'll have the context behind these names and what they actually are, rather than just framing them as what you should

eat and what you should never eat. That type of advice? Not very helpful coming from me. So, with all of that out of the way, I think we can unpause the video and continue with the episode. The sugars that you find in fruits, vegetables, and milk, those are known as good sugars. These sugars are in the cells of their respective foods, and so when you eat them, you're also taking in additional nutrients like fiber, which leads your body's blood sugar to not spike as intensely, instead absorbing t

he sugar slower. Obviously, though, this is keeping in mind that everything is always dealt with in moderation. If you start eating your body's weight in strawberries every day, it's not going to end well for you. All the other sugars, though, like the ones that you find in donuts, syrups, even fruit juices, those are called free sugars. They're free because they're not inside the cells of the food that we eat, which is why fruit juice has sugar that isn't good for you. If you're confused, well,

so were we at first. But essentially, when you squeeze the juice out of a fruit, you're breaking the cell walls, releasing that sugar, but also losing all the other good nutrients that you would otherwise be ingesting. Not to mention, it's also way easier to have more sugar in juice form than in a whole fruit. 200 milliliters of orange juice, or a little less than a cup, it's the same as four oranges. Now, you're unlikely to go off and eat four whole oranges in a row, but you can easily sit dow

n and drink a cup of orange juice in one sitting. Not only in that sitting are you taking in more sugar, but it's hitting your bloodstream way faster, and that much free sugar can lead to a lot of detrimental effects over time, like heart disease or liver disease. So naturally, when it came to this experiment, we decided that whole fruits were fair game, but fruit juices, candies, cookies, sodas, and anything else with added sugars, totally off-limits. The natural question to follow, though, is

about the most unnatural thing that I put into my body, Diet Coke. I mean, it says right there on the nutritional label, no sugar or added sugars, but those artificial sweeteners inside of it actually get a similar response from the brain as regular sugars do. Sugar is a highly palatable food that triggers our reward systems due to both caloric input and taste. Highly palatable foods, namely those rich in sugars and fats, they can strongly trigger those reward and motivational systems, encouragi

ng food intake beyond the necessary energy requirements. This flood of dopamine in the brain causes our body to want more of that food, and can even result in cravings and withdrawals without it, as our brain craves an additional hit of dopamine. Artificial sweeteners like aspartame, they're not just questionable for your health, they also trigger those same reward systems in a very similar way. Basically, while our body can tell the difference, our brains can't. So out the metaphorical window,

all those artificial sweeteners go. Speaking of our bodies being dumb, we also realize that other simple carbohydrates like flour, rice, or rice flour, they also tend to act similarly in the body. This is because things like flour contain chains of simple sugars, which are really just glorified carbs. So when they're absorbed by our bodies, our blood sugar spikes in the exact same way, leading to the exact same reactions by our pancreas to release insulin to bring that blood sugar down. The reas

on this is a bad thing is because over time, our body can develop a resistance to its own insulin, which in turn can lead to things like type 2 diabetes. Cutting these sugars out meant cutting out things like pastas, certain breads, cereals, waffles, pancakes. The list here goes on and on and on. Before even starting the experiment, it seemed almost impossible to truly eliminate all sugars from our diet. We all had to become experts at reading nutrition labels and ingredient lists up and down an

d sideways to make sure that nothing we bought or ate contained any sort of sugar. And friends, I feel compelled to say this right now because what we got ourselves into isn't exactly the brightest idea. It's what's known as a crash diet. And I can't say this enough, but please do not go taking these sorts of extreme diets on your own. Any significant change in what you're consuming on a regular basis is something that you should probably double-check with a doctor or some other expert. Us, thou

gh, we dumb YouTubers, and we just jumped right in. And the consequences are what you're about to witness. So, without any further ado, let's just dive into it because the results were astounding. Not just how we felt by the end of it, but how it permanently ruined dessert for all of us. I want fruit right now. I want fruit! I know, it's hard to watch. Right off the bat, I gotta say, even though I knew that this month was gonna be pretty hard on me, I knew I was in good company with Steph. Do- d

o I have a sweet tooth? Are you kidding? Sugar, I think, if I had to estimate, it's like 80% of my diet. Ash too, very proud of their sugar addiction. I am like a little sugar fiend. It just goes all throughout my veins. I am completely driven by sugar. Yeah, I, uh, it's not good. Honestly, it seemed like Kai was the only one not insanely addicted like the rest of us. I don't always crave sugar constantly. At least that makes one of us. Kai was also alone in her go-to sweet treat, if you could e

ven call it that. My go-to sweet treat is an unfrosted blueberry Pop-Tart toasted with a little bit of butter. I will die on the hill to a toasted, unfrosted Pop-Tart with butter on it. I see you shaking your head, Josiah. It's S-tier. Yeah, you're gonna be all alone on that one there, Kai. But, overall, despite some reservations, we were all excited to start the journey and see how long it would take us to start feeling withdrawal symptoms. And when I say withdrawal symptoms, that's exactly wha

t they are, because our bodies do become addicted to sugar. It's not addictive in the same way as, say, like nicotine or other drugs, but over time, high sugar levels, like you get in the average American diet, can physically alter our brains and affect the levels of dopamine we're getting, making us crave more sugar. In other words, sugar literally changes our brain chemistry and turns us into zombies that crave less brains and more skittles. Symptoms vary from person to person, but if you ever

do want to cut out sugar, be prepared for things like anxiety, depressed mood, difficulty concentrating, fatigue, nausea, intense cravings, changes to your sleep patterns. When you say it like that, it makes it sound like the end of a commercial for a medicine. And I tell ya, we got a fair number of those symptoms. I'm definitely, like, groggier throughout the day. I feel myself getting tired more throughout the day, but not as bad as I thought it was going to be. Maybe Kai has something going

on with those unfrosted, toasted Pop-Tarts, because the rest of us, yeah, we definitely felt the symptoms coming on a bit stronger. I feel hungry. I feel hungry. That's what I feel. I feel a little bit like I've gotten hit by a truck. And she wasn't the only one. So last night, I was laying down on my couch. Every bone in my body hurt. It hurt to breathe. I had chills and a fever. It felt like I was really, really sick. Before you start wondering if Ash had the flu or something else, no. They ac

tually went to see the doctor, and it wasn't COVID or the flu. It was actually the lack of sugar. What Ash was experiencing was something called keto flu, or the carb flu, named after the trendy keto diet. We were all shocked by the fact that this even existed as a thing, but basically, when you cut out virtually all the carbs from your diet, your body goes into a state of ketosis, where it begins to burn fat instead of the glucose that it's no longer getting. What happens to some people during

this process is they begin to feel a different type of withdrawal than what I mentioned before. This one closely mimics the symptoms of the flu. Stomach aches, nausea, soreness, dizziness, and brain fog. And Ash, Ash was definitely feeling all of those. My back, my hips, my legs, my head, everything is killing me and is super painful, and I would love to curl up in a ball on my bed and conk out. But maybe the worst part of it all, this was just the beginning. Honestly, once we got past the first

few days, it did get a bit easier. I say a bit, because not only did Santi have me quitting sugar, but Amy over on Style Theory had me quitting caffeine for the first two weeks of the experiment as well. All the joy that I could potentially have had in my life just, poof, gone. I miss flavor in the things that I drink. I want a soda. I want a tea. I want something that has some flavor to it that isn't just water. I love my Arup bottle, but retro nasal olfaction can only get you so far, people.

My tongue craves something other than water. I suppose you could say that I was starting to feel a bit irritable at this point. Oh, please, let me just taste something. Just something, man. I say, and now all the comments are gonna be like, Matt, Matt, you know that you did an episode how you can taste the differences of water. I know. I know water has a flavor. I get it. But also, it's not the right flavor. Just remember, it's not me. It's the sugar, I swear. Despite that little outburst, thoug

h, around the one-week mark, we started to feel like we hit a bit of an equilibrium. I feel, honestly, pretty good. I have, you know, I feel like I've gotten through the main struggle of everything, of all of the cravings. Thankfully, Ash was feeling better, too, and recovered from the keto flu. I feel fine. I was expecting to feel a whole lot worse after what happened last week, but, to be totally honest, things are alright. The good news was that our energy levels seemed to be coming back to n

ormal. What really started to affect us, though, in week two was the foods that we could eat. It really seemed like 90% of our days were dedicated to planning out what we could make for our next meal, so that it didn't taste like cardboard. I went from never really thinking about the food that I was gonna have for the next meal to constantly thinking about it. You know the, is this a butterfly meme? I felt like that. All this worrying about food and what I'm eating, is this health? What really c

aught us off guard were the foods that we didn't expect would have sugar, and then having to cross even more things off the list of things that we can eat. Most pasta sauces, lots of canned vegetables that have sugar added for apparently no reason. More and more, it felt like we had to learn how to photosynthesize with how few foods we were allowed to eat. Luckily, we started to find not just individual foods to eat, but also entire meals. Between sugar-free pastas, sugar-free breads, hot pot st

eaks, and lots and lots of buffalo sauce, we were able to fill our stomachs, and we all ended up finding little tricks throughout the week that would get us through each and every meal. So speaking of things with sugar, but things that are allowed to have sugar, I discovered my cheat sheet for this entire challenge. There is one food out there with a very high sugar content that is still allowed on almost every no sugar diet that you look up, and that's dates. It's a total hack. It's a total hac

k for this experiment. Finally, it seemed like we were starting to get the hang of things, but there was still one area where we were all struggling. Despite all the homemade recipes and crafty solutions to keep us from starving to death, in week three, we were suddenly faced with another obstacle. One that, to be honest, seemed insurmountable. Eating out at restaurants. It's an inevitability for me and Steph, especially when we're on the road traveling for business, because you're not at home.

You don't have the ability to cook incredibly specific sugar-free meals. Unfortunately, all of us had to travel in week three, and man, we learned the hard way how hard a sugar-free diet is to maintain when you're not in the comfort of your house. Here's the thing that we should talk about this week, which is me venturing out into the world of restaurants. Most small, local restaurants don't have their ingredients really listed out one by one, right? You can't just hop on a website and check the

nutrition facts and see, are there added sugars here, or anything that might relate to added sugars. So that's really tricky. And then if you go in, you know, it's socially awkward to ask, like, the waiter or waitress to be like, hey, do you know what gets put into this dish? Steph and I have tried this a couple times, and they've been incredibly polite about it, but also, it's socially uncomfortable, because you're asking them to go above and beyond, they don't know in a lot of cases, and then

they're bothering the chefs in the kitchen, and that's weird. Pretty much nine times out of ten, the answer you get back is, yeah, everything's got sugar. And so you're like, well, I guess I'm not eating here then, thank you so much for your time. It really made it almost impossible to eat out anywhere that wasn't a giant franchise. Smaller, independently-owned restaurants don't tend to have their ingredients lists readily available. Meanwhile, big chains like McDonald's or even Outback Steakho

use, they have all their nutritional facts proudly on display at their website for you to go and check out. There's not much at all that you can eat at most of these places, but it is possible to find something. Whether or not you're gonna be able to enjoy it is a whole nother issue. I was really hyped when Ash came in the other day and said, like, I figured out a meal at Chipotle that you can have, and I'm like, yes, this is awesome. Then I went in, and it was crushingly disappointing. And so I

'm like, well, I guess that was a meal that happened today, and I sustained myself for another day. Week three also brought back the cravings hard. It seemed like we started to curb them a bit with our newfound love of fruit in the previous weeks, but despite chewing on some blueberries, strawberries, maybe some nuts as a snack, in week three, when we saw sweet treats, our bodies almost instinctively lunged at them. I went to my girlfriend's parents' house the other day. My girlfriend brought th

ere some of the Christmas cookies that we made, and she put them in the freezer so that we could have them later, like months after, if we really wanted them. When I tell you, my girlfriend is such a gifted baker, and I watched her parents eat these delicious chocolate chip cookies, and I knew I could not eat them for the purpose of this experiment. Part of me died inside, just a little bit, just a smidgen, but it was enough. If someone, when after this is all over, wants to hit me up and send m

e a box of Cinnabon and a sushi boat, um, I'll love you forever. And for all of us, the morale started to dip a bit when we realized just how hard it was gonna be to be social throughout the experiment. Doing something like this, as restricting as the diet is, really started to bleed into more areas of our life than just the kitchen. The social element of this is the complicating factor. In any type of sort of quote-unquote specialized diet, what really plays into it much more strongly than you

realize isn't the food, it's everything around the food. It's the context of where you're eating, who you're eating with. These diets affect those moments, and so a lot of it's not about the food, it's about where you're eating the food, and it turns out that restaurants are just chock-a-block full of sugar. Every restaurant out there is a dessert restaurant because they put sugar in everything. Anything with a glaze, a sauce, a butter, a cream, and anything, there's sugar in that. You bet your

bottom dollar. You should have seen the eye rolls and looks of concern that we were getting as we went back and forth trying to find a place where we could actually eat at. Granted, we knew that there was a light at the end of the tunnel, but doing this for such an extended period of time really started to seem impossible in week three. Speaking of the light at the end of the tunnel, we were finally starting to see ours four weeks in, but just when we thought that we were in the final stretch an

d our bodies were acclimated, most of us ran into a wall. This week has been rough. I was thinking that this far into the experiment that I would be feeling better, that my body would be a lot more used to what I was doing to it by, you know, not ingesting sugar, but it seems like this week has been not good for quite a few of us. I don't know what happened. I am hungrier this week. I am craving sweets more this week. It's weird. It kind of came out of nowhere. I thought I was through the hardes

t part of it, and yet here I sit and I am craving just literally anything sweet. My body is just desperate for it. Honestly, it seemed like Ash was the only one to come out unscathed this week. Yeah, man, I'm doing fine. I've kind of hit that equilibrium phase, you know, nothing too crazy, but I'm also not like, I don't know, feeling very lethargic or anything. That's great, Ash. I'm happy for you. Really am. Kinda. But across the board, it seemed like our cravings returned full force. What made

the cravings get so hard in week four wasn't solely the fact that our bodies were starved for sugar, but the mental associations we develop in connection to sugary treats. We condition ourselves to crave sweets through our habits. For all of us at Team Theorist, weeks three and four were exhausting, with lots of travel and late nights. And historically, we all used sweets to self-medicate through those, to get through the pain and keep going. But without those crutches to lean on, it made us hu

ngry and angry. So our minds were joining our bodies and revolting against us. Week four was really about deconditioning ourselves, forcing our bodies to just accept that they weren't gonna be getting sugar no matter how big of a tantrum they threw. And luckily, as we crested into week five, it was time for the experiment to end. Let me tell you, friends, there is nothing sweeter in the world than crossing a finish line. Even if the lack of sugar did leave us with a bit of a one-track mind. Donu

ts! Donuts! Donuts! Donuts! Can you blame us? I mean, this episode just lasted a couple minutes, but this was a full month of all of our lives. We decided that as a final experiment to see just how much our bodies had acclimated to the change in sugar consumption, we'd stuff our faces with some donuts as a final reward. But honestly, despite all of us looking forward to the sweet relief of sweets, we came out on the other side of this with a brand new perspective. And that's the most fascinating

part about this whole thing. Every single one of us came out of this feeling more informed and better equipped to take control of the things that we're consuming in our day-to-day lives. Sugar was such an intrinsic part of my daily life prior to this experiment, and it's something that I never really thought about. But now, I find myself going to the grocery store and actively looking at the nutrition facts, analyzing the things that I'm putting in my cart and asking myself, is this actually so

mething that I should be putting in my body? It feels like I'm taking ownership over my own health in a way that I've never done before, never prioritized before, but as someone who's getting up in the years, probably makes sense for me to do more and more increasingly. You're right there with me, Steph. Sorry, hate to break it to you. We did this because it's a trendy topic in food, but we also did this before we wound up our time on Food Theory because we need to. Yeah, it's dire. Steph and me

confronting our own mortality aside, Ash and Kai also came to a similar point of view. I actually feel a lot of the same way. I am so proud of myself for making more, I think, conscious choices about what I'm eating in terms of snacks and also just like full meals. Like I have eaten so many vegetables and fruits and plants. I feel like this feels like an achievement for me. Like I have gotten so many different plants and whole grains into my diet and I feel so awesome about that. So I'm really

proud of myself for making those calls and for getting it done. I'm kind of in the same boat as Ash and Steph as well that I am and Matt because I do feel very proud of myself. I'm fine, it's fine. I am proud of myself because I also feel like that this entire month I have definitely reached for definitely more fruit, more vegetables. My snacking habits have changed completely because instead of engorging myself on an entire bag of Oreos, I've had to transition over to a bag of grapes, which...

And Kai wasn't alone. All of our snacking habits had drastically changed over the course of this month for the better and in very surprising ways. I, for one, had an old friend come knocking back on my stomach's door. I gotta say, Steph and I went to the grocery store last night knowing that today was the last day, right? So like, we knew that we were done and we didn't have to get more sugar-free stuff, but we got a lot more sugar-free stuff. And not only that, when it comes to the snacking, I'

m like, oh, what can I get? I went with the salted macadamia nuts. Whoa! I did. Yeah, I'm like, you know what? We did an episode on those. They're very healthy for you. Run it back! World of macadamia. It was a weird episode. You got us. But you got us. And I like macadamia nuts now. If you're lost, make sure you checked out the episode that we did over on macadamia nuts and healthy fats. But when it came to snack cravings, I think Ash ultimately had us all beat. We traveled recently for like, a

ll of the shooting that we were doing out of the state. And in the airport, I was trying to find some kind of snack, something sweet, and legitimately, I had the thought, wow, an apple would smack right now. It's so true! And I was like, oh my gosh, look at me go! I'm craving fruit! It's amazing! And the discoveries didn't stop there. I, for one, have been intolerant to fructose for a long time. If I had a large amount of fruit in anyone's sitting, it was generally bad news for my tummy. During

this month, though, I've been able to have fruits and manage them just fine. It was shocking. Especially because in researching it afterwards, all I could find was that fructose intolerance doesn't normally just go away. But I suppose the fact that I was leaning away from free sugars and instead leaning into good, healthier sugars, it allowed my body to recalibrate itself, slowly absorbing those sugars into my system, causing less of a rumbling in my tummy. But before we were able to finally dig

into the doughnuts, there was one last question I had to ask. You know, Santi didn't do this, by the way. He didn't? No, he did not. Why did Santi not do this? He went on his honeymoon during this and lived his best life eating sushi in Japan while we sat here and suffered. Santi, that's why you only had 83 HP, Santi. This is exactly why. Whoa! Wow! Wow! Kai is getting it all out. That's the lore. And that's not a theory. Santi's not gonna be happy about that one. But I think what was most note

worthy here was that we all planned to try and continue doing some version of this diet moving forward. Just, you know, a more sustainable version. There's probably, like, a better balance to strike here of removing everything off the table and going full in on sweets. I'm sure that, as with everything, it's about moderation. But I think it's shown that we can do it, and I think one of the things that's gonna be really helpful moving forward, and I know I'm gonna personally implement, is like, h

ey, there's the one day out of the week where I'm like, okay, having my dessert day. And then that's, I know that's to look forward to, I know that's it, but I know the rest of the week that I'm fine without it. I think that's one of my lessons. I'm also happy to know that I am able to balance out, I now know how to balance this all out in a much more productive and healthy way than just tearing up a dozen of donuts. So, with all the post-mortem wrapped up, it was time to do some Dunkin' Munchin

'. Cheers. Bing bing bing. Yeah, I'm good, I think. Do I want more? I don't think I do. It's interesting. It isn't as satisfying as I was hoping. Oh, man. We've ruined sugar for all of us. Truly a sad day. We've ruined dessert for ourselves. But the science behind it actually surprised me. You see, our taste buds, like every other part of our body, follow a certain life cycle. In their case, it's approximately 10 days. Meaning, slightly after 10 days, you've essentially reset your taste buds. An

d if in those 10 days you haven't introduced them to more sugar, well then they become accustomed to the lower levels that they received, like the fruits that we were eating. And therefore, they develop a new, lower threshold. Not only that, but our brains also become recalibrated to new levels of dopamine because they're not constantly being flooded with new sugary snacks. So when we all took a bite out of the donuts, which tend to hover between 15 and 20 grams of sugar, our now more sensitive

taste buds were actually overloaded and received a lower intensity of sweetness than what we were used to. It sort of just got to a point where the new taste buds were like, yeah, that's enough, we get it, which left us with dissatisfaction and a craving for fruit. The sugar that our bodies had now become accustomed to. On that note though, despite our taste buds not really feeling the donuts, the same could not be said about our bodies. About half an hour after eating the donut, I was feeling l

ike I had electricity surging through my veins. It felt a lot like the Flash, ready to speed through like a lightning bolt. Once my body actually started digesting that giant influx of sugar and that massive dopamine jolt hit my brain, it felt like I could take on the world for about five minutes. At which point, my stomach just started to hurt. After I stopped being able to feel the sugar coursing through my fingertips, all I felt was the donut just sitting there like a rock in my gut. It wasn'

t fun at all, and all I wanted was just a big old bite of a carrot. So there you have it, my friends. After everything we went through, all we tasted was an abundance of sugar that honestly left us putting the donuts down after a couple of bites. Also, we all got a stomachache after a couple of minutes. We'd looked forward to that moment for so long, and disappointment. But you know what wasn't disappointing? There's something amazing about taking control over what you eat, analyzing your snacki

ng habits, making informed decisions about what you're putting in your body. Because at the end of the day, reclaiming control over your life, that's probably the sweetest reward of them all. But hey, that's just a theory. A Food Theory! Bon appétit!