Ivy: 'I Quit Sugar, and lost 23 kilos'

In her late twenties, Ivy found herself regularly consuming a family-sized block of Cadbury chocolate a day and four or five slices of toast and jam for lunch. She was addicted to sugar and it was making her sick. But now, after completing a program with I Quit Sugar, Ivy has changed. She shares her story below.

I always battled my weight.

It was always up and down. Not by much, as I was never obese, but I always carried a stubborn 3-10 kilos extra.

I knew how to diet it off, but I never knew how to keep it off. I’m sure it sounds familiar to many of you, in particular woman.

I would turn to food if I was happy, sad, angry, stressed, depressed, tired or just celebrating life.

I went on to have kids, and whatever hormonal issues and food intolerances I had before pregnancy seemed to escalate with each new baby. After my third baby I got quite ill, experiencing burning stomach-pain two hours after eating, with seemingly no explanation.

Ultrasounds, gastroscopy, specialists, Chinese medicine and herbs – nothing worked.

I was also very overweight, the biggest I’d ever been. Unlike with the twins, I couldn’t just “breast-feed the weight off”, and the cycle of gut-pain, being overweight and miserable, fatigued and exhausted saw me spiralling into a sugar-binging mess. I was easily eating a family-sized block of Cadbury a day. And quite often I would eat 4-5 pieces of toast with jam for lunch just because I was eating for comfort.

I was sugar-dependant.

But the binging and sugar-addiction affected my sleep and I sensed the unfamiliar feeling of anxiety hitting me at night.

Quitting sugar and processed carbs on the 8-Week Program saw me losing a lot of excess weight.

But it also cleared up my skin, upped my energy-levels to better than I was in my teens (I ate huge amounts of sugar through soft drinks and juices as a teenager!), helped me clear myself of an intestinal Candida-overgrowth issue, restored my deep sleep, and helped me feel alive and well after more than a decade of feeling very sluggish and forever tired and fatigued.

I’ve gone from 86 kilos down to a much healthier 63kg.

I have taken many additional steps to restoring my health, but I believe quitting sugar was the biggest step I did in order to recover. Best of all, I feel that I might have broken the dubious tradition of Type 2 Diabetes that runs on my maternal side of my family.