How to Help Your Body Recover After Eating Too Much Sugar: 5 Strategies
By: Beth RushManaging Editor at Body+Mind
Many things can make you feel yucky. Learning how to recover after eating too much sugar involves both a physical and psychological component. Knowing how it affects your body can help you make better decisions to nurture your health and provide motivation to fight cravings.
How does sugar affect your body, and why do you crave it so much if it is unhealthy? Why do you overindulge? How can you break the cycle and get back to feeling better? The strategies below can restore your sense of well-being more quickly and offer insight to prevent you from making sugar binges a regular occurrence.
The Health Risks of Eating Too Much Sugar
An occasional sugar overindulgence probably won’t result in long-term health consequences — but making it a habit can. Unfortunately, it’s all too easy to fall into an unhealthy trap, as sugar consumption prompts the release of feel-good neurotransmitters, including serotonin and dopamine.¹ Some researchers consider it as addictive as cocaine because of its effect on your brain.
Your body breaks down everything you eat into sugar, but digesting whole foods moderates its release into your bloodstream. Conversely, consuming refined sugar results in an immediate glucose spike, which disrupts your hormones and puts you at risk of the following health disorders.²
4 Health Risks of Eating Too Much Sugar:
1. Type 2 Diabetes
A high-sugar diet can spur insulin resistance, which develops into full-blown Type 2 diabetes in some patients. This condition results from elevated blood sugar levels when your pancreas can’t produce sufficient insulin to keep up with demand.³
Symptoms of Type 2 diabetes include:
- Increased thirst and urination
- Increased hunger
- Feeling tired
- Blurred vision
- Numbness or tingling in your feet or hands
- Slow wound healing
- Weight loss despite increased appetite
Type 2 diabetes can decrease your life span by as many as 14 years.⁴ It puts you at risk for other issues, such as heart and kidney disease. Fortunately, controlling your weight through a healthy diet can prevent it — including cutting back on sugar.
2. Weight Gain
Excess sugar consumption contributes to weight gain in multiple ways.
Although it isn’t innately high in calories, it often appears in foods laden with unhealthy fats, like baked goods. Furthermore, foods containing refined sugar are usually full of “empty” calories, meaning they lack the nutrition to keep you full for very long. Before you know it, you’re ready for another snack, which means scarfing down additional calories.
3. Fatty Liver
Even if you don’t drink alcohol, you can damage your liver. Sugar significantly increases the risk of developing fatty liver disease.⁵ Non-alcoholic fatty liver disease can worsen into cirrhosis or even cancer.
Fortunately, your liver has tremendous regenerative powers, and cutting back on your consumption today can decrease the danger.
4. Dental Caries
Dental caries or cavities can eventually destroy your teeth, and dental care is notoriously expensive. Prevention is the best cure, and nearly every parent cautions their child to avoid eating too much sugar to decrease the risk.
Hydration can also decrease your cavity risk, but avoid turning to sugary pops and fruit juices.⁶ Stick to plain water or flavor it with fruit or tea bags if the stuff flowing from your tap leaves you flat.
Symptoms of Excess Sugar Consumption
Eating too much sugar feels downright yucky, at least if you aren’t used to it. Immediately after consuming foods high in refined sugar, you experience a glucose spike.
This “reward” of increased energy feels terrific — until you come back down shortly afterward with a crash. The debilitating fatigue that accompanies this blood sugar shift often drives you to seek another snack.
Symptoms of Excess Sugar Consumption:
- High blood sugar
- Weight gain
- Acne
- Mood swings
- Gut issues
- Lack of energy
- Joint pain
- Craving more sugar
- Sleeping issues
Additionally, some people have immediate adverse reactions to excess sugar. For example, you might feel sweaty, especially through your facial “T” zone of the forehead, nose and chin.⁷ You could also experience unpleasant shakiness from the sudden rush.
How to Recover After Eating Too Much Sugar: 5 Strategies
Oops, you did it again, just like a Britney Spears tune. If you need to recover after eating too much sugar or want to slash your overall consumption, try these five tips.
5 Strategies How to Recover After Eating Too Much Sugar:
1. Clean the Slate
It’s harder to exercise self-control when you surround yourself with temptation. If you have bags of candy stashed all over your house, gather them up and donate them to a worthy cause or even sell them through a buyback program.⁸ If you have school-aged children, talk to their teacher — they might welcome donations to use as incentives.
2. Do a Little Detective Work
You wouldn’t expect a candy bar to be low in sugar. However, the sweet stuff can hide in sneaky ways on food labels. Pay attention to the ingredients and pass on those that contain the following:
- Beet sugar
- Corn syrup or high-fructose corn syrup
- Dehydrated cane juice
- Fructose
- Molasses
- Rice syrup
- Maltodextrin
- Polydextrose
There are over 60 different names for sugar on food labels. However, you don’t have to memorize them all. Instead, look for the section labeled “added sugars” on the first part of your label to determine how much the manufacturer included.⁹
3. Ease Up on “The Other Sugar”
Refined sugar isn’t the only thing that can spike your glucose. Bleached flour is nearly as bad because it lacks the fiber that whole grains have to moderate your blood sugar levels.¹⁰
Here, too, you must read labels carefully. Those that read “contains whole grain” may only contain a touch of the good stuff and plenty of the unhealthy flour. Instead, seek “100% whole grain” or “100% whole wheat.”
4. Hydrate
While water won’t flush the excess sugar out of your body, staying hydrated is crucial for kidney function. Excess sugar consumption that spirals into Type 2 diabetes puts you at a greater risk of damage to this organ, and it needs water to function properly.
Plus, staying hydrated results in a feeling of satiety that prevents unhealthy snacking.
TIP: To enhance your hydration you can add sea salt to your food or water, which contains natural minerals, and use Zaca’s chewables which supports water absorption.
5. Get Mindful
As you recover from eating too much sugar, take time to sit in meditation.
Ask yourself what drove you to overindulge. Was it a stress-induced binge on the heels of finishing a big project at work? If so, what healthier ways can you think of to celebrate and decompress? Did you cave into an irresistible dessert tray? If so, consider choosing a less tempting restaurant the next time you go out or decide on an alternative dessert, like a decaf coffee with a single dollop of whipped cream, before you go.
Consider implementing these strategies to recover better after eating too much sugar.
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SOURCES:
1. Sproat, Rachel. "Why Am I Craving Sugar?” UPMC Healthbeat. 15 March 2024. https://share.upmc.com/2024/03/why-am-i-craving-sugar/
2. “Eating for Hormonal Balance: How Cutting Back on Sugar Can Help. Times of India. 5 January 2024. https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/life-style/health-fitness/diet/eating-for-hormonal-balance-how-cutting-back-on-sugar-can-help/articleshow/106516726.cms
3. “Diabetes Type 2” MedlinePlus. N.d.
https://medlineplus.gov/diabetestype2.html
4. “Type 2 Diabetes Diagnosis at Age 30 Can Reduce Life Expectancy by Up to 14 Years.” University of Cambridge. 3 October 2023.
https://www.cam.ac.uk/research/news/type-2-diabetes-diagnosis-at-age-30-can-reduce-life-expectancy-by-up-to-14-years
5. Fletcher, Jenna. “Is Fatty Liver Disease Dangerous: What to Know.” Medical News Today. 24 July 2023. https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/is-fatty-liver-dangerous
6. Rush, Beth. “8 Dental Health Tips for a Sparkling Smile.” BodyMind. 22 February 2023. https://bodymind.com/8-dental-health-tips-for-a-sparkling-smile/
7. Go Ask Alice. “Why Does Eating Sugar Make Me Sweat?” Columbia Health. 12 January 2024. https://goaskalice.columbia.edu/answered-questions/why-does-eating-sugar-make-me-sweat
8. “What to Do With Leftover Halloween Candy.” NurtureLife. 10 October 2019. https://www.nurturelife.com/blog/7-ways-use-leftover-halloween-candy/
9. “How to Understand and Use the Nutrition Food Label.” FDA. 5 March 2024. https://www.fda.gov/food/nutrition-facts-label/how-understand-and-use-nutrition-facts-label
10. Barnes, Mia. “Here’s How Junk Food Affects Your Body.” BodyMind. 26 February 2021. https://bodymind.com/heres-how-junk-food-affects-your-body/
