Ep 89- What Happened When I Avoided Sugar & Ultra-Processed Foods For 30 Days

October 23, 2025

I walk you through my 30 day (and counting) experiment of avoiding processed sugar and ultra-processed foods. I share what motivated me, what got easier (and what surprised me), the results, and how this approach can help you stop binge eating.

You will learn…

• Why isolated sugar + added flavorings can confuse your body and fuel cravings

• What changes I observed in my weight, mood, anxiety, workouts, energy, and taste

• The lessons I’m taking away from The Craving Reset

What's up, confident Eaters. Today's episode is going to be a fun one where I'm gonna be sharing all that happened. When for the past 30, honestly, like 60 plus days. It's been a while that I've been doing this now, but I have been avoiding processed sugar as well as processed foods. Now I'm gonna talk a little bit about why I've done this and what changes I noticed as I went through the last 30 days without sugar and processed foods and how you can take these ideas and use it in your own journey when learning and helping yourself to stop binge eating.

Now if you wanna hear my full journey and the research on sugar and processed foods and how I really got through the last 30 days without them, you're gonna wanna make sure you join my craving Reset. This was a 30 day insider access into my transformation where I gave you daily audio drops with insights, tips tricks. It was so much fun. But we are coming to the end of it if you are listening to this live, but I've decided to allow you to purchase it even though we are done with the live component of it, you'll still have lifetime access to these 30 days of audios. So you could do this challenge and reset for yourself and your own time.

And I've also decided that I'm going to include in the free bonus one-on-one call that you get with me. I added in this one-on-one call to help anyone going through the craving reset implement their insights to their own life. So you and I will get on a 25 minute call together and I will give you support to make sure that not only did you learn something from the craving reset, but that you also implement it into your own life so you can eliminate your craving so you can stop binge eating.

So the link to join the Craving Reset will be in the show notes, and you can get the details there. If you are like, well, Amber, I'm just ready for a full six month transformation working with [00:02:00] you to stop binge eating. I want all of the lessons, I want all the worksheets, I want everything you have to offer.

That would be where you'd wanna join my full Confident Eater program. This is my signature six month program to stop binge eating and become a normal eater. If you join that program, you will automatically get the craving reset included, so that is also a fun bonus. If you want to book a free complimentary consultation call with me to learn more about the CON or program. You can do that as well.

So why did I choose to avoid sugar and processed foods in the first place over these past 30 plus days? I for a long time in my coaching practice and on this podcast have taught and eat everything in moderation approach, and it's worked for a lot of people, myself included. I could eat anything in moderation, but there's no denying that sugar and ultra processed foods do not have any necessarily positive health benefits from us.

I think about if you were smoking cigarettes and let's say [00:03:00] that you were able to moderate cigarettes, and you were able to have just one a week. You might still wanna quit cigarettes for good just because they don't really offer you any true long-term positive benefits, even if you could moderate it.

And that's how I started to think about sugar and processed foods, is that even if I could moderate them, and I didn't have a huge problem with 'em, I didn't really have a ton of cravings for 'em. I still wanted to improve my health. I've been dealing with a lot of gut issues the past couple of years. I've been on a journey to heal my acne holistically.

And so I know that avoiding sugar and processed foods can help with those things, but the other reason I decide to do this is because I came across new research that talked about why these isolated molecules of processed table sugar sucrose, as well as the added flavorings in our food, can contribute to confusion in our body about where nutrition is coming from.

If we taste something that has a lot of extra flavors in it, but not the nutrition that matches those flavors, it creates this situation where our body doesn't know how to source nutrition. So when you eat something like an orange and it tastes orangey, your body learns to connect that, oh, I'm getting vitamin C from the orange flavor.

But then you have something like an orange Jolly Rancher, and there's no actual orange nutrients in it. And what this says is it also creates intermittent reinforcement where sometimes we get the reward and sometimes we don't. And that makes something addictive.

 because of this mind blowing research that I've been doing that literally no one else has talked about, like I've said this so many times and you guys are probably like, oh my gosh, we get it. It's life changing. It's blown your mind. But I seriously am just like appalled that no one is talking about this.

So I'm gonna be the one who's talking about it. And we'll continue to talk about it till the day I die because I'm so passionate about helping people stop binge eating, achieve their healthiest, happiest life.

So anyways, for those reasons, I decided to avoid prostitutes and sugar. Now you'll notice I'm using this word of avoid versus eliminate, and that is intentional. It's really hard to. Completely avoid sugar and processed foods in today's modern world, Like it's everywhere. So I am avoiding them simply because I cannot eliminate them completely, but also because I'm not gonna be perfect and sometimes we're gonna mess up a little bit, especially when I have been used to having sugar and processed foods in my life for pretty much my entire life.

So it is a big change to make.

And when I'm saying sugar and processed foods, I'll define that down a little bit more of what I specifically did. I didn't do any added processed sugar, meaning like white sucrose, but I did have honey maple syrup, real fruit, because those things, even though something like honey is higher in sugar because it has the flavor associated with it, are body's able to regulate it more and it actually gets nutrition from it, which can help us feel more satisfied because part of our cravings come from not getting enough nutrition.

Only 1% of Americans get their daily recommended vitamins and minerals. And if you take away supplements, that goes down to closer to 0%, a very small percentage. So because of that, we're so nutrient and deprived that of course we're gonna be craving all these extra processed foods, not because they have nutrition in them, but because the flavorings that have been added to processed food trick our body into thinking that they're more nutritious than they actually are.

So how I defined processed foods then is really any food with an additive that I couldn't recognize if this additive did not exist a hundred years ago. It was not made for our body to consume. Humans, survive for thousands and thousands of years without ever taking a vitamin a supplement. Having these crazy machines that isolate molecules and flavorings to add to our foods.

And so because of that, we can get all of our necessary nutrients with just food alone

and be much healthier because of it too. So that is why I went through this whole process and why I'm going to continue to avoid sugar in processed foods. Now, I might still have some sugar in moderation sometimes, and that's a skill that I can teach you to do too. But you'll understand when I go through my lessons that I've learned throughout this process too,

I just don't even want it that much anymore, that I truly have eliminated all my cravings for it, and I just don't desire it. So it doesn't even feel like something that's hard or something that I'm trying to do, or something that I have to white knuckle my way through and willpower my way through. It felt fairly easy to do all of this, so why would I not stick with it when feels good, it's easy, it's fun, and it makes me feel amazing.

Okay, so the results that I created by avoiding sugar and processed food for 30 days. Are as follows. first, I don't really weigh myself anymore simply because it's not that exciting for me since I'm always about the same five pound range and have been that way for the past five years, since I've stopped binge eating.

So I didn't weigh myself during this, experiment. If you do the 30 day craving reset, you're welcome to weigh yourself and see what you notice. One thing you can look forward to when you stop binge eating is you don't have to worry about buying new clothes all the time. You don't have to worry about what the scale says because the scale just stays the same.

It's pretty great.

But one thing I did notice is that I felt really strong in the gym this month, and maybe that's because I also work with a personal trainer, and so my training regimen has, Been improving, but I've also started eating meat during these 30 days because of the impact that supplementation has on our body when we take vitamins and supplements that don't have any flavor associated with it.

So you just take like a multivitamin pill, versus taking meat that has meat flavor and then gives you the vitamin B12. That also makes it so our taste buds start to associate whatever food we're eating. With the vitamins. So for example, if I took my vitamin B12 every morning with oatmeal, my brain thinks that oatmeal has B12 in it, which it doesn't.

So it also leads to confusion with our cravings and how our body sources its nutrition. maybe I was feeling stronger too, because I've included in more meat. I was vegetarian for 10 years and I talk about this in depth in the craving reset too, about why stop being vegetarian and the research behind supplementation.

But part of it too could be my cells were functioning better, they were healthier, and therefore were able to help me move better and feel stronger and repair my body better than when I was eating more sugar and breasted foods.

A really fun thing that I noticed is significantly less anxiety from not eating these foods significantly less, and I wouldn't say was full depression, but feeling less sad too. And one of the days I had. Pad tie with my family, and it was like a frozen pad tie, and I looked later and I had a lot of added sugar in it, and oh my gosh, I was so irritable the rest of the day.

I felt so anxious. I felt like I was lashing out at people for no reason, and it was all in connection just because I had, it was only like 15 grams of added sugar too, which is a lot for pad Thai, but not that much for the average American who's eating. 50, 60, 70, 80, 90, a hundred grams of added sugar a day like really up there.

And so I just imagine how many of you would feel so much happier and less anxious and more calm throughout the day? Like I feel like I'm just on this nice, easy wave that's just floating through the ocean. I don't feel anxious. I don't feel sad, of course I still get human emotions, but it's been to such a lesser degree.

I've been so much more energized, especially in the afternoons. I don't get a sugar crash anymore. I don't feel like I need to lay down after lunch. I don't feel like I can't focus at work. That has probably been the biggest thing I've noticed is with my mood and my energy again, how stable and how great they both feel.

I usually didn't need an afternoon snack, and I wouldn't say before I snacked all the time, but maybe half and half. Half the days I would have an afternoon snack. Half the days I wouldn't. But throughout these past 30 days, I effortlessly could work through the hours of two to 5:00 PM without a single thought of wanting to eat more.

I also was fuller for longer. My meals lasted me more hours. So I didn't want to eat vegetables. Started tasting really sweet. This was a fun one. I made this vegetable soup last night,with beets and carrots and onions, which I guess are like on the sweeter side for vegetables. And I also put the beet greens in there.

It tasted like I literally added honey in this, and I did not. It was just from the sweetness of those vegetables alone. There was no sugar added to it whatsoever, but I was like. I almost had to stop eating the soup because I felt so satisfied by the sweetness of it. It was craziness, like how many times have you eaten a vegetable and said, wow, this is so sweet.

I also had an experience a couple weeks ago where I went hiking with a girlfriend and I pulled out my chopped red pepper, and same thing, the red pepper tasted as sweet as like an applewood almost because my. Taste buds have reset themselves so much throughout this time that now everything that's from the natural world just tastes sweeter and better than I could have ever imagined, so fun, and I've also been really loving fruit even more than I ever have.

On the opposite of this another really cool thing was sweets have tasted really gross. So the couple of times throughout this experiment. In the last few months, 'cause again, officially I did 30 days, but I've really been doing this for a couple months in my own time too. But anytime I have experimented with having in something sweet, it tastes overly sweet, almost so instantly that I don't want it. but I also notice how when I have something like an Oreo, for example, that's sweet, but also has a ton of additional additives and flavorings, how my brain tells me to eat more and I know how to sit with my urges and my cravings, that's a core skill I teach.

So it's never a problem, but it is just interesting to see how my brain responds and says, Ooh, this is really good. You should keep eating more. The reason it's telling me it tastes really good and I should keep eating more is because it's perceiving that Oreo has a high level of nutrition based on all the added flavorings in it, when it does not.

So sometimes it would taste good in the beginning, but then it would get gross really quickly. But the biggest thing this happened with was with chocolate, and I love chocolate, I would say, but not so much anymore. Pretty much any brain of chocolate that I already had at home that I tried, I literally would put it in my mouth and I would make the like, ugh, like icky face if you're watching this, that I just like, it just blew my mind honestly, that I could put a piece of chocolate in my mouth and have it taste gross.

And I just started realizing like one, how low quality. Majority of chocolates are, and I did think about buying chocolate from the store that didn't have, any added processed sugar, like whether that's like a hundred percent dark chocolate, which if it's actually bitter, a hundred percent dark chocolate or 99%.

However they classify it, the very, very high amounts of dark chocolate.

Or looking for chocolate that had coconut sugar in it, or that was possibly sweetened with honey or maple syrup because these or are more honest substances that aren't chemically engineered to hijack our taste buds in the way that processed white table sugar does. But what was funny is every time I went to the grocery store, I forgot to get chocolate.

Like I didn't necessarily put it on my grocery list because I was kinda like, oh, if I want it, I'll go stop by and get it. But I just didn't even think about it. I just walked right past it and it didn't even occur to me that I was gonna go buy some that was, lower in sugars, used a different sugar to eat.

So I just haven't even had chocolate really the past month, aside from the few times that I've like taste tested it. And been like, what is this? This is so gross.

Next, I wanted to touch on a few lessons that I've learned from the last 30 days on not eating sugar and processed foods and avoiding them. The first lesson is that, doing this felt a million gazillion times different than the last time I went sugar free. back February, 2019, I convinced me and three of my besties to go sugar free.

So we eliminated processed white sugar, that was the main thing, and we didn't do honey or maple syrup, but I was still having fake sugars. Like I allowed myself to have protein bars and like I had some sugar free chocolates And when I did that, I felt so restricted. I remember I would google food porn and I would watch people eating sugar and they would just obsess over it.

It like brought me this weird sort of pleasure from just like watching others eat sugar. I started baking for my family and had them eat the sugary things even though I wasn't. Almost to like watch them eat it. I was secretly planning of like, when could I eat sugar again? And I would still try to get my sugar fixed from these sugar free things or protein bars, or just overeating on some of these more hyper processed foods, which protein bars are.

And [00:16:00] so it was an interesting experiment because at the time I was like, clearly sugar's the problem, so I'm gonna cut out sugar, which I was partially right about, but I didn't have the full understanding of what was actually going on with our food and with my brain and the psychology behind it, which is a big difference now as well, where I have an understanding around how these molecules are at play in our body.

But while I was sugar free last time, I was still overeating. I was still eating way past fullness. I was still overeating, like I said, on protein bars, and when I weighed myself at the end of those 30 days, I had actually gained weight, which was so confusing to me because I thought that clearly if I cut out sugar, which is the thing I binge on the most, I'll finally lose the weight.

Didn't happen. I still gained weight, which shows you that you can still gain weight even if you're not eating sugar, which is why there's other key skills that we need to learn. But the core understanding that I missed out on here, on those prior 30 days that I did a couple years ago was I didn't have the understanding that it's not the sugar itself that is bad, and I really want you to understand this too.

Sugar exists naturally. In many different forms in the environment, we have sweet receptor taste buds on our tongue for a reason. Our body did not just put taste, but receptors that can taste sweet on our tongue just because we're made to eat sweet stuff.

Cats, on the other hand, cats cannot taste sweet things. Because there's no nutritional need for them. That's not what cats function best on, but we do, which means we're meant to eat things like fruit and maple syrup and honey. Those things exist naturally in the world, and our body's meant to process those.

But the problem with sugar is the fact that it's an isolated molecule that is extremely separated from the actual source of sugar cane. If you were to just bite into a sugar cane, it wouldn't be that big of a problem either. But the problem with sugar is that it deceives our body about what's coming in.

Sugar just strengthens the flavor of other foods and makes us think we're getting more of that nutritious food when we're not. So in my prior 30 days going sugar free. I didn't quite find the full culprit of the problem. And artificial sweeteners, even if it's stevia, even if it's a monk fruit, these healthier ones are a huge problem if you are binge eating because that is signaling to your body that sweetness is coming in, and that means carbs are coming in, but there is no sweetness or carbs actually in these fake sugars.

And what this does is your body will recalibrate and think, okay, if that sweet face tasting stevia didn't give me any carbs or sugar, I must need an even stronger sugar taste. So your taste buds recalibrate. And so then the next time you're eating something like a strawberry, you're not gonna feel satisfied because it's not gonna taste sweet enough to you.

You're gonna need something even sweeter. You're going to eat a piece of cake and it's not gonna feel sweet enough. You're gonna need [00:19:00] more of the cake.

So I didn't know about natural flavors. I didn't know about artificial flavors. I didn't know about all these other ingredients that are added to our foods and how they confuse our body. And that is the core of the problem, is that these isolated molecules trick, lie, deceive, and manipulate our taste buds to make us think we're eating something more nutritious than we are. So this time around everything felt so much more different than the first time I did the 30 days sugar free. And a lot of that too had to come. Yes, from this understanding, but also from the emotion beneath why I was doing this.

In the past I was doing this out of hate for my body. I hated that I had gained so much weight. I hated that I was binge eating and fear. I was so afraid of food. I was so afraid of continuing to binge. I was so afraid of not having control versus now what I was doing was from this place of love for myself and excitement. I genuinely was really excited to do this experiment, and I did it from this place of love, for my health of my wellbeing.

Love for having energy throughout the day. Love for reducing inflammation in my body. Love for healing my gut health, which meant I didn't feel restricted and deprived. I didn't wanna quit at any point during the past couple months. Not one Part of me was like, I can't wait for this to be over because I'm loving myself through it and I love my reasons for doing it.

So my next lesson that I learned from these 30 days was how important fruit was. I ate so much fruit during this time, yet I felt so light and energized. I never got a sugar crash from it. I felt amazing. And yet unfortunately, in our diet obsessed society, People have been demonizing all the wrong things. People demonize bananas, people demonize apples. They probably demonize every other fruit out there. But again, the reason that fruit isn't a big problem is because it's not an isolated molecule of sugar. It's contained within this whole fruit that has all of the necessary fiber and nutrients and things that pair with the sugar that makes it so our body processes it in a healthy way.

Sometimes I just wanted the taste of something sweet, like after a meal. I want a little something sweet and that wasn't a problem. I would just have three strawberries and move on. I felt really satisfied when I was eating the fruit. So if you were doing an experiment like this too.

I highly, recommend having a lot of fruit on hand. It will really help ease you out of sugar withdrawals, which you can go through, especially if you're someone who's eating a lot of added sugar right now. And you might not even think, you might think, oh, I don't have that much added sugar, maybe just when I binge.

But it's in a lot of things every single day that we eat too. So if you start getting sugar withdrawals after you stop binge eating, having fruit on hand can definitely make it easier to have your body adjust to less sugar.

In the final lesson that I'm gonna share with you today is that the hardest part for me during this process was not trying to stick with it, trying to feel motivated to do it, because I created a process where I didn't have to feel motivated to do it. I just genuinely wanted to do it. But the hardest part for me was worrying about what other people were gonna think of me in this process.

I was so worried that people were gonna judge me for saying no to dessert or that people were going to question me when I said, Hey, could we get more vegetables for dinner? Can we add in this little bit more expensive but fresh sourdough bread?

And a lot of that was because I was scared that people were gonna judge me and think I was dieting. So I had to get very clear for myself on what I was doing, why I was doing it, and why I wanted to continue to do it. And telling myself that it's not a diet. Because it's something that feels good, and that's really the difference between something that is like diet culture versus just diet in the sense of it's a way of that you're eating.

I was vegetarian for 10 years and it never felt like a diet to me because it was something that I loved. So if you absolutely love what you're doing, it's not a diet. It only is a diet when you feel restricted and deprived from not giving yourself something that you perceive that you want. So because I no longer perceived that I wanted sugar anymore, it felt easy and I didn't feel deprived in any way or sort of form.

I also reminded myself that I was getting sugar and sweetness from all of these natural sources, so I wasn't deprived.

And one more lesson that I wanna add in is that life is not some joyless, miserable drag without sugar. That's what I first thought when I was playing around with these ideas and looking into this research, I thought, oh my gosh, but if I didn't have sugar. My life would just be horrible. It would be so devoid of pleasure, it'd be missing out on something really amazing.

But in fact, it has been pretty much completely the opposite. My life has been more filled with joy, excitement, love, and pleasure than it is ever been filled within my life. Because sugar in processed foods only take that away. They promise to give that bit. In the end, they never do give us true joy.

You might surprise yourself, especially if you have support through this. If you're just [00:24:00] going into this with okay, I'm gonna go on this diet for 30 days and cut out sugar like I used to do, it's not gonna work. But when you go into it with this new mindset and when you learn the research.

Around how these foods impact our body and how to change your brain psychologically in a way that you don't feel deprived and you decrease your desire for it, and it feels easy. You might surprise yourself about how much more you enjoy your life and how much better it is. and you don't have to cut it out completely if you don't want to. This is not me saying that you absolutely must cut out any sort of processed food with additives or sugar No, you don't have to. I can help you eat in moderation. That's what I've been helping people do for over five years.

But when you realize how easy it can be to not eat these foods, and as you start to not want them anymore and understand how your brain works around them, you'll find like a lot of my clients have the past couple months. How much. You enjoy avoiding these foods because of how much joy it gives you back in your life without them.

All right. That's all for today. Confident Eaters, have a fantastic week.