What Can You Do When You Can’t Seem to Stop Eating Sweets and Sugar?

Bad advice to avoid when it comes to cutting down sugar

Kaki Okumura
4 min readMay 7, 2021

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Illustrations by Kaki Okumura

I love sweet things. I love chocolate, ice cream, cakes, cookies, and desserts just as much as the next person. And while I tout a healthy lifestyle, I am adamant in the belief that fruit is not a replacement for ice cream, cakes, or cookies.

But that doesn’t mean there is no joy in fruit.

Bad advice to avoid when it comes to cutting down sugar

If you search “How to cut down on sugar” on Google, many listicles will come up, with many of them sharing similar advice —

“Swap your cookies for orange slices!”

“Eat frozen bananas instead of ice cream!”

“Baked sweet potato is just as good as cake!”

Yet it would be hard to have a cup of banana nice cream and believe it to be equivalent to a cup of Ben and Jerry’s Half Baked ice cream — they just aren’t the same. In fact, choosing to have fruit over ice cream for dessert is often treated like a sacrifice in the United States.

While this kind of advice is well-meaning, it makes the fatal mistake of framing a healthy choice as a choice of deprivation. But while…

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Kaki Okumura

Born in Dallas, raised in New York and Tokyo. I care about helping others learn to live a better, healthier life. My site: www.kakikata.space 🌱