I'm a Hungry Hungry Man

Recently I've decided to give up refined sugar to some degree. The reasons for this decision are, in no particular order:

1) I tend to eat sugar to excess when I do eat it.
2) After I eat sugar to excess, my brain becomes rather useless and manifests some weird conditioned tendencies.
3) I am becoming very fat.

I'd like to think that the first two reasons would suffice, and I will say honestly that on a conscious level, I came to the decision to give up sugar after eating an entire box of Samoas and then spending the entire bus ride home from work trying (and failing) to remember the name of my Kindergarten teacher (Mrs. Manlowitz.) However, I should also confess that I've come to this realization or something like it before, when I weighed significantly less, and the realization had no effect on my actual behavior.

But regardless of the real root motive, I'm off the white stuff, and the results are for the most part good. I am much more able to concentrate, and my brain seems to be doing mostly what I tell it to do, which is a nice change. However, there is one aspect of sugar withdrawal that is really not fair at all - intense hunger.

The cravings themselves I can handle - like when I walk into the front kitchen at work and someone has left a box of brownies on the microwave for everyone to eat and my hand physically detaches from my arm and assaults the brownie box like a kamikaze pilot. I merely wait for the hand to loop around towards my head and duck out of the way, and the brownie crashes against the wall and crumbles into a delectable pile of brownie crumbs on the kitchen floor.

But in addition to the cravings, I'm also unable to feel full no matter what I eat (unless, presumably, I break down and eat some sugar, which I have not yet done.). I know from experience that this effect will start to go away in a week or so, but that doesn't really help while I'm experiencing it.

I know this isn't the sort of thing that I normally blog about, but as you have probably experienced, Dear Reader, when one is hungry, truly hungry, it is difficult to think about anything else. As the story goes, ask a hungry man what two plus two is, and he will answer you, his mouth watering:

Four loaves of bread!