This article is written by a student writer from the Her Campus at McGill chapter.

My initial thought when I first heard about the Fed Up Challenge was, “A sugar free diet for 10 days shouldn’t be that hard.” 10 days seemed like a very short time to call anything a “challenge” and it sounded so easy. Just cut out all the desserts, right? Well, not exactly.

What does no sugar mean? According to the challenge, you cannot eat sugar or anything that is listed under its different names. Considering that sugar has 56 different names, it is quite challenging to get around them all. No sugar free yogurts, no honey: basically nothing that tastes sweet, apart from fruits.

One of the biggest challenges for me was the “no carbs” part. Carbs are turned into sugar in the body and the speed at which they do this is called their “glycemic index”. “White” carbs have a higher glycemic index compared to whole wheat and that’s why they are cut out from the diet in the Fed Up Challenge. Being a student that relies on pasta to survive, I skipped that part of the challenge and stuck to the no sugar part.

Day 1: The One Where I Went Grocery Shopping

If there is one piece of advice I can give you, it’s that you should be prepared to read a lot of ingredients lists. On a normal day, grocery shopping takes me around 30 minutes to do. This time it was close to an hour. Who knew it would be so hard to find bread that doesn’t have sugar added? At the end of the day, I left the grocery store with bags full of mostly fresh produce and dreams about the first cupcake I will eat after all of this is over.

Day 2: The One Where I Ate Fries For Dinner

I love fries. I can imagine a world without pizza, without hamburgers and even without chocolate as long as I have fries. Since I had a big midterm the next day, I wanted to opt for a very quick dinner, which for me is usually frozen chicken and fries. As soon as I opened the freezer and checked the chicken, I saw that it had sugar at the top of the list. I checked the frozen fish and again, sugar was listed in 3 different forms. I was getting a little “hangry”, so I gave up and just made frozen fries for dinner. It was a sad dinner, yes. Do I regret it? Not at all.

Day 3: The One Where I Discovered No Sugar Does Not Equal Healthy Eating

After the fries incident, I thought about how many things without sugar are actually unhealthy. Very unfortunately, fries and pasta are far from being healthy foods. Which brings me to my second piece of advice; don’t expect to lose a million pounds at the end of 10 days. First of all, it’s only 10 days. Second of all, you could eat fried chicken all day, everyday, and still not break any of the rules, which believe me will result in a lot of happiness but no weight loss at all.

Day 4: The One Where I Wanted To Cry At Second Cup

The one place at McGill you can expect to find me is the Second Cup in the Stewart Biology Building. It’s well known that I have dibs on the last turkey brie sandwich, and I spend most of my money and time between classes there. Oh, and I do love their chai latte. Before doing this challenge, I always assumed that it would have 3-4 g of sugar at most. One visit to the Second Cup website and I discovered it had a whopping 30 g of sugar. The World Health Organization sets the maximum daily intake of sugar at 25 g. With one small cup of coffee, you are exceeding the limit by 5 g.

This sad discovery led me to find the next best thing: flavored coffee beans. They’re basically coffee beans with infused flavors. I have to admit that you can’t really taste the flavor, but the smell is there for sure. Add a little cream and you’re good to go.

Days 5,6,7: The Ones Where I Had The Weirdest Cravings

On day 5, I wanted to eat nice, white, fluffy bread so much that I was about to leave class and run home. Then came the pasta and the potato cravings. As you may have noticed, all of these are either made with white flour, or are white starches. Both of which get turned into sugar in the body. These three days were my withdrawal period. My body wanted or needed sugar so much that it wasn’t necessarily the sweets that it was looking for.

Another thing I have experienced in this period was fatigue. Since I wasn’t sleeping as much as I should, I can’t pin it down on just the lack of sugar, but it certainly played a role. The little pick-me-ups of chocolate, granola bars and many others snacks containing sugar weren’t there to supply me with energy anymore. So, I did the next best thing: I took a lot of naps.

Days 8,9,10: The Ones Where I Finally Got The Hang Of It

By the end of day 7, I was feeling a lot more energetic. I didn’t need to take naps anymore and I wasn’t really craving any sweets. Maybe it was out of the sheer excitement of being able to eat whatever I wanted again in a couple of days, but I was definitely feeling much better than before.

Day 11: The One Where I Was Free

The challenge had ended the day before; so I woke up with a big smile on my face, ready to go into the kitchen and basically eat anything that had sugar in it. As I was having my morning coffee, I ate a couple of chocolate pretzels and had a couple of more at lunch as well. They didn’t feel like they were too sweet, which was something that some participants of the challenge had experienced. What it did, however, was give me the worst headache I had experienced in a while. Call me a masochist, but just to make sure it was the sugar, I ate a couple more after I had started to feel better. The headache came back and I had to lie down for the rest of the day.

The Verdict

First and foremost, I want to say that if I did this challenge, so can you. Considering it’s only 10 days, it’s not that hard to complete and there are options to tweak the challenge to suit your busy academic life.

The challenge taught me a lot about what sugar does to my body, but it still hasn’t convinced me that going sugar free for a lifetime is plausible, or necessary. The best lesson I learned out of this experience is that being informed and moderating sugar intakes are difficult in the beginning, but not because of the reasons you think. It’s more about what’s available to you than self control. Drinks, bread, processed food…they all contain sugar, and avoiding them, unfortunately, proved to be the real challenge for me and for many people participating in the challenge. After you get the hang of it and know what to avoid, you certainly gain a new perspective about the way you eat and how you can improve it.

Images obtained from and sources:

http://giphy.com/gifs/friends-joey-foods-Xp6B1Awr1KEBG

http://giphy.com/gifs/food-friends-cake-O0nUBf5wmYDxC

http://giphy.com/gifs/funny-friends-quotes-7fxdmsZalQKn6

http://giphy.com/gifs/tv-series-friends-phoebe-and-ross-know-how-to-do-i…

http://phoebe-buffay.tumblr.com/post/90945028494/i-take-a-girl-out-she-c…

http://sweetshortandsarcastic.blogspot.ca/

http://weheartit.com/entry/group/26623969

https://thereadingfangirl.files.wordpress.com/2014/07/joey-confused.gif

http://fedupmovie.com/

http://www.thekitchensnob.com/fed-up-challenge/

http://www.secondcup.com/menu/beverages/chai-tea-latte