There is no shortage of opinions about sugar on the internet. Every second article is either telling you it is slowly killing you or reassuring you that everything in moderation is fine. Nutrition discourse online has become its own kind of exhausting — everyone has a framework, a study, a strong feeling, and an unwavering confidence that theirs is the correct one.
This is not that. This is just what happened when one persistent headache pushed things far enough to actually do something about it.
The Part That Finally Made Me Pay Attention
For a while, the headaches were just background noise. Every two to three days, reliably, there one would be. Not debilitating — just present. Paracetamol would take the edge off and life would continue. Then at some point the paracetamol started being less useful than it used to be, which is the kind of thing that gets your attention.
Alongside the headaches: constant tiredness, the kind that sleep does not seem to fix. A low-grade moodiness. Difficulty focusing. The general sense of operating at about seventy percent for no particular reason.
None of these symptoms are dramatic. They are also, if you spend any time looking into it — and Reddit threads on the subject are genuinely illuminating — a fairly textbook description of what happens when your blood sugar is regularly spiking and crashing throughout the day. The headaches in particular kept coming up, mentioned again and again by people describing the same pattern.
Taking Stock of What Was Actually Going In
There is a version of this story where someone dramatically reckons with their diet. This is not quite that. But when the headaches became frequent enough to actually pay attention to, it was worth being honest about the sugar situation.
Tea with two sugars, multiple times a day. Chocolate — the good kind, the kind that is easy to justify. Sodas occasionally. And then the less obvious stuff: the added sugar hiding in sauces, in flavoured yoghurt, in things that do not taste particularly sweet but have it in the ingredients list anyway. It adds up faster than it seems like it should.
Working in tech means spending a lot of time in front of screens, which means a lot of small reaches for something easy. Sugar is, neurologically speaking, very good at being the thing you reach for. The dopamine hit is real, the energy spike is real, and the crash that follows is also real — it just tends to arrive quietly and get mistaken for something else.
The Decision, and the Rules
The plan was not ambitious. One week. Just to see. Not a full dietary overhaul, not a wellness challenge with a name — just removing added sugar for seven days and observing what happened.
The distinction that mattered most: natural sugar was fine. Fruit stayed. Nothing was being taken away that nature put there. The target was added sugar specifically — the stuff that appears in ingredients lists as sugar, glucose, high fructose corn syrup, maltose, dextrose, and approximately forty other aliases. If it was in a whole food, it was allowed. If it was added to something to make it more palatable, it was out.
The First Week, Honestly
Day one felt like nothing much. Perhaps mildly self-satisfied.
Day two was a different matter. A headache arrived — worse than the usual ones, if anything — alongside a fatigue that felt almost flu-like. This is apparently extremely common. The body, accustomed to regular sugar intake for quick energy, objects when the supply is suddenly reduced. Dopamine levels drop. The brain, which had been relying on those regular sugar hits to feel normal, registers their absence as a problem.
The logic that got through day two was simple: the headaches were already happening anyway. Whatever was coming could not be meaningfully worse than the baseline.
Days three through six were difficult in a duller way. Less acute pain, more general sluggishness. The body adapting to finding energy through other means. Cravings appeared at specific times — after meals, mid-afternoon — and were more habitual than physical. The hand reaching toward the biscuit tin on autopilot before the brain had even made a decision.
Then, somewhere around day seven or eight, something shifted. It is hard to describe precisely. Just a lifting. Less weight behind the eyes. Thoughts that moved more cleanly from one to the next. Energy that did not arrive in a spike and then abandon you two hours later. The brain fog that had become so familiar it had stopped being noticed was, quietly, gone.
What Two Months Actually Looks Like
The headaches became infrequent. Not gone entirely — two in the span of two months — but both on days where meals had been skipped due to a busy stretch at work. Which is its own kind of data point.
The mood stabilised. This one was unexpected. Not a dramatic personality shift, just less of that background irritability. Less of the inexplicable 3pm slump where everything feels slightly harder than it needs to be. More even, generally. The mood swings that had been unremarkable because they were so regular became noticeable only in their absence.
Weight dropped without doing anything else differently. Three kilograms over two months, without tracking food or changing exercise habits. The body, no longer managing constant blood sugar fluctuations, apparently found a more comfortable equilibrium on its own.
And the cravings — which felt significant in the first week — largely disappeared. Chocolate that used to feel necessary now just feels like a choice, which is a different thing entirely. The wanting is quieter. Sometimes absent.
The Bit Worth Being Honest About
This is not a recommendation. Bodies are different, situations are different, and the internet already has plenty of people telling everyone what they should be doing with their diets.
What it is, is a genuine account of what happened when one specific thing changed. The headaches were the original problem. Addressing the added sugar addressed the headaches. Everything else — the energy, the mood, the weight — came along as a consequence rather than a goal.
The two months also confirmed something that feels more broadly true: a lot of the things consumed regularly are consumed not because of any particular want but because the habit of reaching for them is so ingrained it bypasses the question of wanting entirely. Removing the option made that visible in a way that was, initially, slightly uncomfortable and then, gradually, quite freeing.
Two months in and still going. No firm endpoint in mind. Just curious, at this point, to see what the next two months look like.
Note: This is personal experience, not medical advice. If you’re dealing with persistent symptoms, a doctor is a much better resource than a blog post.
Almost Sunny 
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