Powerful ideas from top nonfiction
Try Blinkist to get the key ideas from 5,500+ bestselling nonfiction titles and podcasts. Listen or read in just 15 minutes.
Start your free trial
Blink 3 of 8 - The 5 AM Club
by Robin Sharma
Listen to the Intro
Breaking Up With Sugar summary
Molly Carmel
A Plan to Divorce the Diets, Drop the Pounds and Live Your Best Life
3.7 (123 ratings)
21 mins
6 key ideas
Audio & text
What is Breaking Up With Sugar about?
What’s it about?
Breaking Up With Sugar (2019) is an empathetic, no-nonsense take on food addiction and unhealthy relationships with sugar and grain flour. Author Molly Carmel tells her story of struggling with obesity and gives readers actionable tips on how to get their relationship with sugar under control, once and for all.
About the Author
About the author
Molly Carmel is the founder of a New York City food addiction clinic, The Beacon. Formerly obese, Carmel is a veteran of dozens of fad diets that worked – for a while, at least, until they didn’t. Over the years, she’s helped hundreds of people work through their addiction to sugar, and develop a healthier, long-lasting relationship with food.
Table of Contents
Breaking Up With Sugar
summarized in 6 key ideas
Audio & text in the Blinkist app
Key idea 1 of 6
You might be a sugar addict and not even know it.
The author began her problematic relationship with sugar when she lost her father at a young age. Comfort wasn’t always immediately available, but sugar was always there for her. But as she began to rely on sugar for emotional support more and more, her weight began increasing. At age 11, she was the youngest person at Weight Watchers. By the time she started graduate school, her weight reached 325 pounds and her health had begun to be severely impacted.
For a long time, she thought that fat, or genetics, or leptin, or whatever the latest pseudoscience said, was her problem. Anything but sugar. She even thought she was the problem.
The key message here is: You might be a sugar addict and not even know it.
Like the author, your relationship with sugar might be influenced by emotional factors. What’s more, this dependence might be years in the making. In the author’s case, when the medical community first started talking about sugar addiction, she instantly recognized it as exactly the thing she’d struggled with her whole life. She decided to finally end her problematic relationship with sugar and, for the most part, she hasn’t touched it since.
It’s not just the author, though – or you for that matter. Our relationship with sugar has been complicated since childhood. We celebrate life’s big moments with sugar – birthdays, for example, and weddings – and little ones too, like ice cream on a hot summer day. It’s not going to be an easy relationship to get out of.
But the truth is, sugar isn’t only making you miserable – it’s killing you. Sugar impacts your brain in the same way alcohol, cocaine, and opiates do. On sugar, your brain gets flooded with the feel-good chemical dopamine, which then leaves you wanting more. When rats go through sugar withdrawal, they experience symptoms like teeth chattering, tremors, and depression. Even worse, when dropped into a body of water, rats which are going through sugar withdrawal are less likely to try and climb out. They’ve lost their will to survive.
To make matters worse, it’s not just sugar that does this. It’s also grain flour, which your body reacts to in the same way as it does to sugar. This is probably hard to hear. But if you’re like the author, you’re an addict. Facing hard truths is the first step to recovery.
Want to see all full key ideas from Breaking Up With Sugar?
Key ideas in Breaking Up With Sugar
More knowledge in less time
Read or listen
Get the key ideas from nonfiction bestsellers in minutes, not hours.
Find your next read
Get book lists curated by experts and personalized recommendations.
Shortcasts New
We’ve teamed up with podcast creators to bring you key insights from podcasts.
Who should read Breaking Up With Sugar
Who’s it for?
- Anyone who knows, deep down, their relationship with sugar is unhealthy
- People who avoid social gatherings so others won’t judge them for eating
- Veterans of yo-yo diets
Categories with Breaking Up With Sugar
Books like Breaking Up With Sugar
What our members say
Sven O.
It's highly addictive to get core insights on personally relevant topics without repetition or triviality. Added to that the apps ability to suggest kindred interests opens up a foundation of knowledge.
Thi Viet Quynh N.
Great app. Good selection of book summaries you can read or listen to while commuting. Instead of scrolling through your social media news feed, this is a much better way to spend your spare time in my opinion.
Jonathan A.
Life changing. The concept of being able to grasp a book's main point in such a short time truly opens multiple opportunities to grow every area of your life at a faster rate.
Renee D.
Great app. Addicting. Perfect for wait times, morning coffee, evening before bed. Extremely well written, thorough, easy to use.
Start growing with Blinkist now
25 Million
Downloads on all platforms
4.7 Stars
Average ratings on iOS and Google Play
91%
Of Blinkist members create a better reading habit*
*Based on survey data from Blinkist customers