by Stephanie Nale, LMT
I don’t know about you, but I sure do love my sweets. It seems to be very rare to find someone who doesn’t crave them in some capacity, especially now during the holiday season. All those delicious sweets are filled with delicious sugar, and sugar has the ability to make us feel good. And when you’re tired of buying and wrapping all those gifts and stressed from all those long lines you waited in to get said gifts, feeling good is important.
Here’s the catch: in today’s world, the majority of our society satisfies its sweet tooth with some form of refined sugar, which, unfortunately, is in just about everything. Unlike the more naturally occurring sugars found in many fruits and vegetables, this kind of sugar has no nutritional value – no vitamins, no minerals, no fiber – which leads to more difficult digestion that can actually deplete the body of essential enzymes needed for normal digestion.
Furthermore, when this kind of sugar enters the body, our blood sugar levels rise extremely fast – giving us that familiar and delicious “sugar high” feeling – but then they also drop extremely fast not long after. This brings about those not-so-desirable lethargic and depressed feelings that you may also be familiar with.
So what is a person to do? Fortunately, there are several more natural forms of sugar available to us, namely those found in a variety of vegetables and most fruits. In fact, that’s how our ancestors were able to satisfy their sweet cravings – through the produce they grew. As mentioned, these natural sugars typically have an abundance of vitamins, minerals, and fiber to help us digest them easier, as well as being able to leave us nutritionally satisfied – something no amount of refined sugar is able to do.
Most of us are already familiar with the sweet flavors that can be found in many fruits (such as apples, oranges, raspberries, and pineapples), but not many of us think about sweet vegetables – many of which can be found at your local health food store or farmer’s market.
You may also notice that many of these are root vegetables (carrots, onions, sweet potatoes, radishes, etc) that grow in the ground. Believe it or not, including these in your diet can actually help you feel more grounded in everyday life, and combat that spacey feeling that can also sometimes come with a big serving of sugar!
The trick to all of this is to think about adding in some of these vegetables to your diet, rather than taking out the less healthy foods with more refined sugar. This concept is called “crowding out”, and is often much more manageable than simply focusing on eliminating certain foods. The idea is that the more healthy and nutritionally dense foods you eat, the less you’ll be hungry for the unhealthy foods.
So what do you think? Maybe some delicious, sweet, grounding veggies instead of another helping of pumpkin pie? Try it out!