Nine months ago I quit sugar to see if that would help my chronic sinus congestion (it did). I had a killer headache for about two weeks, then I was fine. After my pants started falling down I noticed I'd lost a ton of weight. I lost 25 pounds and I still eat a ton of carbs.

That's interesting - I have chronic congestion. How much sugar did you eat before you quit? What did "quitting" mean to you? (Just no sweets/cakes/biscuits, or did you go more extreme - no chinese food!?)

I didn't think it was that much ... per day maybe couple of cookies, or a chocolate croissant, or hot chocolate. But almost always some kind of treat everyday. When I quit my nose cleared up in about 5 days, but the sinus headaches lasted another two weeks. That's when I knew something weird was going on.

If I have almost any dessert now I'll have a sinus headache the next day. I can get away with a teaspoon of honey in the morning and that's about it. Berries are ok but I'm still not sure about fruit (bananas are definitely not ok). But I can eat good bread three times a day and I'm fine.

Thanks for the information. I'm definitely going to try this.

Yeah, I lost a ton of weight too. Felt great. Just wish I could have stuck to it.

Did you guys just drop sugar (i.e. sugar, honey, cake, biscuits, candy etc), all high-GI carbs or all carbs?

Just sugar for me, carbs were fine (although I wasn't eating very many high GI carbs anyway)

Until December 2013 I drank about 300 calories of soda per day. I also ate a good amount of candy. I have never had a weight problem in my life but at my yearly physical I found my triglycerides were 248 when they should be below 150.

I immediately stopped drinking soda, replacing it with water and unsweetened green tea. The first two weeks were rough, constantly craving a soda. Then it stopped and almost all the cravings were gone.

In my annual physical in December 2014 my triglycerides were 107. The only change I made in that year was to stop consuming soda/candy/desserts. Not consuming refined sugar was never a diet for me though; it was more of a permanent lifestyle change. I can't imagine having a soda now.

If you ever decide to try again, try replacing sugary snacks with meaty ones. Want a cookie? Eat a pepperoni stick. Want a slice of cake? Have some cheese. Fatty foods keep you satiated so the whole idea of sugar seem repulsive.

I have tried both strict Paleo and the keto diet, and not found this to be true in practice

Too bad... For me it was. First couple of weeks were challenging (with free pizza at work, donuts at coffee shops), but around week 3 I completely lost all cravings of sugar or starch.

Fun fact: one of the strongest withdrawals I have experienced was sugary drinks. To make matter worse it was just the middle of summer and drink of cold coke seemed to be a blessing. So I went to the store, bought a 6-pack of sugar-free semi-keto-friendly Coke, put it in the fridge and never took it back. Just the fact that I could get it whenever I want seemed to help :)

Your comment actually made me doubt myself so I looked up the correct plural form form anecdote: it's anecdotes or anecdota. But I saw that most probably you made a well-placed pun on the quip "The plural of anecdota is not data", commonly attributed to the economist Roger Brinner (http://msgboard.snopes.com/cgi-bin/ultimatebb.cgi?ubb=get_to...).

"Anecdata" is a commonly-used colloquialism in fora like these (i.e. around people who are comfortable commonly using the word "data").

Caffeine? Got rid of it too or not?

A few times, and using decaf coffee + caffeine pills, and then decreasing the dose of the caffeine pills - it's pretty pain free.

I have mostly settled on a triple-espresso in the morning and then a cup of tea at lunchtime as a reasonable and effective dosing that I don't think is causing me sleep or health problems.

That wasn't mentioned, so why would you ask that?

Coffee has similar withdrawal symptoms as sugar: huge headaches, cravings, and feeling like shit for two weeks. I'd say alcohol is way easier to quit for example.

On what basis? Alcohol withdrawal is pretty bad (life threatening).

Try this for starters: https://www.google.com/search?q=substance+withdrawal+compari...

Mostly personal experience :) I have stopped drinking alcohol for a year, coffee a couple times for few weeks at a time, and sugar for couple days at most. Never tried smoking though.

IMO drinking both coffee and alcohol casually leads more easily to a coffee addiction, but without you noticing.

there's a long road between "giving up drinking" and lethal DT's.

First you'd have to motivate why a person should quit to begin with. I haven't seen any indication that being addicting is bad in itself.

> I haven't seen any indication that being addicting is bad in itself.

Per se, unnecessary dependence is simply inconvenient. This is a big part of why I never got into drinking coffee: I'd see friends and family who (for some reason or another) wouldn't be able to get their morning coffee on a given day and how shitty they would feel that morning. I don't like the lack of flexibility inherent in having a dependency on anything. I've always been a big fan of getting enough sleep (even throughout high school and college), so I never had occasion to get hooked in the first place.

To be clear, it's very possible that they find the benefits of routine caffeine consumption to be entirely worth the downside of dependence (particularly given how ubiquitous access is on an average day). My comment, and my experience, just provides a motivation (albeit a fairly minor one) for avoiding dependence per se.

could you elaborate how did you get into >mindful eating ?

I read this book:

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Beyond-Chocolate-yo-yo-dieting-weigh...

Aimed at middle-aged British women, but it was a good book.