How to Overcome Sugar Addiction
Sweet Tooth
My Westerdahl (SWE)
M.Sc Industrial Engineering, Manager in the IT-sector, Columnist @ LCHFingenjoren.se
My Westerdahl is a former sugar addict who managed to take control over the addiction through optimized nutrition and mental training. In 2010, My had a weight of 170 kg (375 pounds), poor grades and was struggling with deep depression. By changing her diet and way of thinking, My manage to lose 95 kilos (210 pounds), graduated as a Master of Science and regained her energy. Her story has been featured in numerous magazines and online articles.
Sweet Tooth, a former sugar addict, shares her powerful personal journey
Addiction is a strength if you learn to handle it; it is a power for self-realization. When you take the energy from your drug and put it toward something that gives you purpose, like your career or family, your life will be wonderful.
Summary
- Sugar addiction is a chronic brain disease, not a lack of willpower, requiring an abstinence-based approach similar to treatment for alcoholism or other chemical dependencies. - A low-carb, high-fat diet provides the necessary baseline for recovery by removing glucose and stabilizing blood sugar, which helps eliminate physical cravings and hunger. - Identifying triggers beyond food—including emotions like anger or loneliness and specific environmental cues—is essential for managing psychological cravings and preventing relapse. - Long-term recovery depends on human connection and bonding; replacing isolation with healthy relationships helps address the underlying psychological needs that fuel addictive behaviors. - Success requires strict planning and preparation to navigate a society that constantly promotes sugar, ensuring one always has strategies or "first aid kits" to maintain abstinence.
Article
How To Overcome Sugar Addiction: Insights Into Recovery, Keto & The Power Of Connection
At Biohacker Summit 2017 Stockholm, My Westerdahl Reframed Obesity As A Brain Battle Rather Than A Failure Of Will
On 19 May 2017, at Biohacker Summit 2017 Stockholm in Stockholm, Sweden, the speaker Sweet Tooth, introduced in her talk through the lived experience of My Westerdahl, delivered a message that cut sharply against the grain of mainstream diet culture. Sugar addiction, she argued, was not a matter of weak character, poor discipline or moral collapse. It was a chronic disorder of the brain’s reward system, one that traditional dieting had repeatedly failed to address.
Westerdahl, a Swedish columnist, low-carb advocate and manager in the IT sector, spoke with the force of someone who had survived the thing she was describing. Once weighing around 170kg, battling depression, poor health and academic collapse, she said she had found recovery not through calorie counting or surgery, but through abstinence, nutritional restructuring and a profound reorientation of her life.
“The disease of being overweight isn't in the stomach; it is in the brain,” she said.
A Life Measured In Failed Diets, Cravings And Shame
Westerdahl’s account began in childhood, when food had already become something more than nourishment. Raised far from the fast-food ecosystems often blamed for obesity, she described herself instead as a child with what she called a “sensitive brain”, one drawn instinctively to bread, pasta, rice and sugar. Dieting began early. So did the shame.
By adolescence, the pattern had hardened. There were repeated attempts at Weight Watchers, meal replacement powders and low-fat regimes that reflected the nutritional dogmas of the 1990s. Each effort produced the same result: short-term loss, followed by overpowering cravings, relapse and weight regain.
The consequences were not merely physical. Her grades deteriorated. Bullying intensified. Isolation deepened. The addiction, as she described it, colonised attention itself. Food was no longer a pleasure or a habit. It was the organising principle of daily life.
The Moment Everything Broke
The turning point arrived in January 2010, when she stepped on a scale and received not a number but an error message. Her body exceeded the device’s upper limit.
It was, in her telling, the moment abstraction ended. Obesity was no longer an issue to be managed someday. It had become a confrontation with death. Doctors warned of catastrophic health consequences and suggested gastric bypass surgery. Having “tried everything”, she agreed.
But before the operation came a dinner at her parents’ house. They had lost weight. The meal was rich, fatty and absent of the starches that had long anchored conventional eating. No potatoes. No calorie rituals. Instead, cream, cauliflower and the beginnings of a new idea.
That was her introduction to low-carb, high-fat eating.
Bacon, Butter And The End Of Constant Hunger
What Westerdahl described next was not a miracle in the simplistic sense. The first days, she said, were brutal, marked by headaches, cold sweats and the physical misery of withdrawal. But after roughly 10 days, something shifted. Energy returned. Hunger quietened. Cravings loosened their grip.
Within a year, she said, she had lost 40kg. Her asthma improved. Her academic life, once derailed, surged back. Eventually she would lose 95kg, complete a Master of Science degree and build a career of unusual momentum.
“Finally, my war was over and I had won,” she said. “My victory was spelled low carb, high fat; my victory was spelled bacon and butter.”
The line drew laughter, but the underlying point was serious. For people whose neurochemistry rendered sugar compulsive rather than optional, she argued, satiety mattered more than dietary orthodoxy. A ketogenic or near-ketogenic baseline, rich in fat and low in carbohydrates, was not a trend but a stabilising intervention.
Why Diet Culture Failed To Name The Disease
A central argument of the talk was that sugar addiction remained structurally invisible. Because it was not fully recognised, sufferers were shunted between systems unequipped to help them. First came diets. Then eating disorder treatment. Then, in some cases, bariatric surgery. Each step addressed behaviour or body size while missing the core mechanism: addiction.
Her comparison was stark. Asking a sugar addict to moderate intake, she suggested, was like asking an alcoholic to have just one glass of wine. The issue was not quantity alone. It was loss of control.
She described the classic symptoms in terms familiar from substance dependence: secrecy, obsession, escalating use, relapse, social and occupational damage, and the inability to stop despite consequences. What changed was only the socially accepted nature of the drug.
The Neurology Of Craving And The Myth Of Willpower
Westerdahl’s most forceful rejection was aimed at the idea that obesity, especially severe obesity, reflected laziness or moral weakness. In her telling, the language of willpower had done immense harm, trapping people in cycles of self-hatred while obscuring the reality of compulsive behaviour driven by dopamine and reinforcement.
The addict’s day, she said, often began with what she effectively described as a sugar hangover: dizziness, stomach pain, anxiety, cold sweats, vows of abstinence. By afternoon, the stress and craving would build again. Planning would begin. Then use. Then remorse. Then repetition.
This loop, she warned, could end not just in physical illness but in despair.
Recovery Needed More Than Keto
Yet nutrition alone, she said, was not enough. Keto might suppress biochemical cravings and create a workable baseline, but long-term recovery required understanding triggers and rebuilding life around abstinence.
That meant identifying not only food triggers but emotional ones: hunger, anger, loneliness and tiredness. It meant recognising situational cues, from television and coffee shops to social rituals built around cake and sweets. It meant refusing the fantasy that modern food environments were neutral.
She also advocated strict preparation. If public spaces, conferences and workplaces were saturated with sugary options, then recovery required planning for those environments rather than trusting spontaneity. Carrying safe food, avoiding sweeteners and relying on simple whole ingredients were, in her telling, not signs of extremism but of self-preservation.
The Radical Idea At The Heart Of The Talk: Connection
The emotional centre of the presentation arrived when Westerdahl turned to the “Rat Park” theory of addiction, popularised through the work of Bruce Alexander and later by writers such as Johann Hari. The argument was that addiction did not emerge only from chemical hooks, but from isolation, trauma and disconnection. Put bluntly, the opposite of addiction was not merely sobriety. It was connection.
For Westerdahl, this was not an abstract social theory. It was a practical tool. If people did not bond with one another, she suggested, they would bond with substances, objects or compulsive behaviours. Recovery therefore required not only abstinence from sugar but replacement of that relationship with healthier forms of attachment: friendship, support, accountability, shared purpose.
In this framework, social recovery was as necessary as nutritional recovery. The cage had to change, not just the substance.
What Freedom Looked Like
The power of Westerdahl’s talk lay in the way she connected abstinence to dignity. To live sugar-free, she said, was not simply to lose weight. It was to recover trust in oneself.
“When you live a sugar-free life, you gain self-esteem because you can finally trust yourself and keep the promises you make to yourself,” she said.
That recovery, as she framed it, extended into every sphere. Energy once consumed by obsession could be redirected into study, work, family and ambition. What had looked like compulsion could, if handled well, become intensity with purpose.
“I am no longer a slave to the drug; today I am free and I live a fantastic life,” she said.
A Hardline Message In A Sweet Society
There was little compromise in Westerdahl’s account. She rejected sweeteners. She avoided fruit. She spoke in the language of permanent vulnerability rather than moderation. For some, the absolutism may have sounded severe. But that severity was precisely her point. Recovery from addiction, as she understood it, could not be built on flirtation with triggers.
Her talk at Biohacker Summit 2017 Stockholm was ultimately less about diet than about naming a condition many still preferred to soften. She offered no easy cure, no universal prescription, no glossy wellness slogan. Instead, she proposed a harder truth: for some people, sugar was not indulgence but dependency, and freedom required rebuilding life around that fact.
If there was a single line that captured the spirit of the event, it was one she delivered with a mix of humour and gratitude, looking back on the low-carb intervention that changed her life.
“I just think of myself as a girl with a lot of luck who found the magic of bacon before death found me.”
Part of Biohacker Summit 2017 Stockholm