--- title: "I Quit Refined Sugar Completely. My Blood Sugar Stabilised and 55 Kilos Came Off." url: "https://dietitians.io/insight/i-quit-refined-sugar-completely-my-blood-sugar-stabilised-and-55-kilos-came-off/" author: "Lilach Bullock" published: "2026-09-25" updated: "2026-09-25" --- # I Quit Refined Sugar Completely. My Blood Sugar Stabilised and 55 Kilos Came Off. ### **The diagnosis** Three years ago I sat in my doctor's office when he said the words. Type 2 diabetes. I am not a dietitian and never have been. I am the patient in this story, the one who had to get up out of that chair, drive home, and decide what to do with the rest of the afternoon. Nobody hands you a plan on the way out. You get a leaflet, a follow-up card, and a vague sense that everything you have eaten for forty years is suddenly up for negotiation. ### **Why cutting down never worked for me** I had tried cutting down before, long before any diagnosis forced the issue. A smaller slice instead of a whole one, one biscuit instead of three, sugar in tea but not in coffee, that kind of bargaining. It never held for more than a few days, because moderation always left a door open somewhere, and I would find a reason to walk back through it by Thursday. Weekends became the exception. Then the exception became most days again, and I was back where I started with less patience for another attempt. ### **The decision to go to zero** I made one decision that changed everything. I quit refined sugar completely, not cut down, not just on weekends, completely. For me that meant the processed stuff. Chocolate, the biscuit tin, cake, sugar stirred into tea, anything where sugar had been added rather than sugar that was already part of a whole food. I did not cut fruit. I did not go low carb or cut out bread entirely. That was never the fight I was having, and turning it into one would have given me another reason to quit by week two. Written down like that it sounds extreme, and I think it is. But the extreme version was the only one that held for me. Moderation had given me an escape hatch every single time I tried it. Zero closed it, because there was nothing left to negotiate over. ### **The first six weeks** I am a self-described chocolate addict, and the first six weeks were grim. I am not going to pretend they were anything else. There were evenings I stood in the kitchen wanting something sweet so badly it felt physical, and instead of solving it the way I always had, I had to sit with the feeling and let it pass on its own. Nothing about what followed was quick either. The weight came off slowly, over months and then years, with no shortcuts and no single dramatic before and after photo. In the end I lost 55 kilos. ### **The 3pm slump and the brain fog** I did not track my HbA1c numbers along the way, so I have no chart to put in front of you. What I can tell you is what changed in my body and in my days once the sugar was gone. The 3pm slump disappeared, which surprised me more than anything else. For years I had blamed that afternoon crash on age, on being busy, on not sleeping well, and it turned out most of it was sugar. The brain fog lifted too, the kind where you reread the same email three times and still cannot answer it. These days I front-load protein at breakfast, eggs or yoghurt before anything else, and what used to be a two-hour afternoon crash runs about twenty minutes now. My blood sugar began to stabilise once those first hard weeks were behind me. I walk, lift weights, hike and now run, none of which I could have said about myself three years ago. ### **Working with a dietitian to make it stick** I work with a dietitian, and have for a good part of these three years, to make the change stick rather than just to start it. Knowing what to eat and building a life around that for years are two different problems. She is the qualified one in that relationship, not me. My part was sitting in that first appointment, and then getting up and deciding what to do with the rest of the afternoon. --- [Lilach Bullock](https://www.lilachbullock.com) is an AI implementation consultant and fractional CMO with 21 years in marketing. She helps business owners put AI to work across content, SEO, social media, email marketing, automation and lead generation. Her work has been featured in Forbes, the BBC, The Times, The Guardian, The Telegraph, WIRED, HuffPost and the Content Marketing Institute, and she has worked with Twitter, IBM, Dropbox, monday.com, Hootsuite and Greenpeace. Forbes named her a Top 20 Social Media Power Influencer worldwide. Based in Israel, she works with US, UK and international clients.