Week 2 has been fantastic so far. After tasting the cinnamon tisane we made in week 1 and learning about its potential medicinal properties for treating diabetes, I became interested in how it could affect my own experience of taste. About a year ago, I became obsessed with a movie called That Sugar Film, an Australian documentary in which a man who doesn’t consume sugar decided to embark on a “sugar binge” á la Supersize Me. However, in That Sugar Film, instead of eating exclusively foods unusually high in sugar, he simply ate the average Australian diet and consumed the expected, even healthy amount of sugar each day, and put on an enormous amount of weight, and did serious damage to his health.
After seeing that film, I decided to stop eating sugar for a month, and other than losing weight, feeling more energetic, and feeling hungry less often, I also found that my experience of the flavor of sweetness was at a much lower threshold than before. In fact, I hardly needed half a teaspoon of sugar for my tea to taste sweet, as opposed to the usual two I put in.
This week, instead of eating sugar, I treated my craving for sweetness with cinnamon stick tisane and observed the difference.
I felt more energetic, slept better, shed about a pound, lost a lot of bloat in my face and belly, and when I ended the experiment, I didn’t crave sugar as much or need as much to satisfy the urge.
To be sure, some of these results could definitely be the placebo effect. I wanted the experiment to yield results, so maybe it did, and it was by no means conducted under scientific conditions. However, I find it good for myself to do something of a “reset” of my sugar tolerance from time to time by going without it for a while, and this was an effective way to do that. Plus, cinnamon is delicious!