I enjoyed my wilderness diet profusely and could feel its positive impact on my overall wellbeing quickly. Yet there was this one food related thing that kept defeating me both physically and mentally from the start to an end – sugar cravings.
I craved sugar in the wilderness more than anything and was dying to have something sweet in my mouth often. Prunes and almond butter did satisfy this craving, but being domino foods, I found it incredibly difficult to stick with proper rationing. I only had limited supply of both and knew I couldn’t have more than one prune and one spoon of almond butter after each meal if I were to avoid running out prematurely. I could not do it.
Domino foods are very treacherous. You start with one, and must have another. The sensation they leave in your mouth makes you want to continue and that power can trick you into breaking any pact you made with yourself. As a result, I unintentionally depleted my valuable sweet tooth resources long before completion of my three months long withdrawal. It taught me how desperately addicted to sweets I was.
After 3 month in the wilderness, and knowing I wanted to do this again for at least a year, I realized that my biggest challenge of all will be to overcome craving for sweets. I would never in a thousand years fathom sweets as a possible holdback. If you asked me prior to my three months in the wilderness what I thought were gonna be the toughest challenges to overcome, sweets would have never even appeared on that list if I’d made it a hundred points long.
Now that I look back at my hermit experience, I’m surprised to realize that none of what common sense would dictate as the most probable causes of concern, such as solitude, deprivation, harshness of the environment, or similar were able to defeat me. At the end of the day, it was the most unlikely thing I would never give a second thought to that did me in.
Out in the civilized world, you’re never too far away from a vending machine or a place selling Snickers bars, or cookies, or carbonated beverages, or ice cream, or cheese cakes. With all these goodies available on every corner, satisfying sugar cravings takes zero effort so one doesn’t even realize how deeply addicted to sugary things we get.
It takes complete withdrawal with no chance of getting an easy sugar fix to realize the extent of this addiction. I learned it the hard way and found three month not long enough to have the sugar cravings overcome. As of right not, sugar cravings remain the most difficult to admit and find a solution to holdback I’ll be faced with on my upcoming long term wilderness experience.