12 Jul Why Sugar Cravings Keep Winning (And Why It Isn’t Your Willpower)

It’s late. You’re watching TV. You’ve had a nice meal. But as you unwind, your thoughts start drifting to the chocolate in the fridge. Or the biscuits in the cupboard. Or the crisps.

And you realise the voice is back. The one that turns up around this time every evening.

You know where this is going. You want to be good. You really want to. But the voice gets strong, and it’s so hard to resist. These foods are so nice. You’ve had a tough day. Maybe you deserve it. And you can always start again tomorrow.

If you’ve got type 2 diabetes or prediabetes, this can become a vicious cycle. The one big habit that derails you, and keeps derailing you, for weeks and months and years. The mental fight is real.

So this post has one job. To ask you a question:

Who said cravings were permanent?

Because if you’re in a battle with your own head, there are ways of winning that don’t involve willpower of steel. Not the kind of self-control that only works when life is going perfectly, on the days you’re not exhausted, the family aren’t difficult, and nobody has left a birthday cake on the kitchen counter.

Life isn’t like that. And any strategy that only works when life cooperates was never really a strategy at all.

A confession, before we go any further

I’m Dr Nerys Frater. I’m an NHS GP in West Wales, and for the past decade I’ve been helping people reverse their diabetes and keep those results for the long term. I even have a postgraduate qualification in obesity and weight management.

And I used to battle sugar cravings every single evening. Chocolate was my vice.

I didn’t think I had a problem. I genuinely didn’t. I thought that was just life. That’s just how evenings feel. You’ve eaten enough, you know you’ve eaten enough, and yet something still pulls at you. So you negotiate with yourself. Sometimes you win, sometimes you don’t. I thought that was normal.

And then I got pregnant. If I thought the evening cravings were bad before, pregnancy took it to a completely different level. The chocolate cravings were relentless, and honestly, I gave in. Regularly. I was exhausted, and chocolate was irresistible.

What I didn’t know was that, towards the end, I’d developed gestational diabetes. Me. A GP.

And in that moment, something clicked that no amount of medical training had managed to. This wasn’t about knowing better. I knew better. I’m literally trained in this. This was about biology. My biology, doing exactly what biology does when it’s been pushed too far for too long.

And if it could happen to me, knowing everything I know, what chance did my patients have with the advice I’d been giving them?

Who decided the daily battle was just “normal”?

So let me ask you something. Who told you the cravings were permanent? Who decided that the negotiating, the being good, the not being good, the starting again on Monday, was simply what this feels like?

Who said the people who reverse diabetes are the ones with willpower of steel? The ones who meal prep every Sunday, never eat out, and sit at Christmas dinner with a plate of salad while everyone else has roast potatoes?

I’ve worked with hundreds of people over ten years. Real people, with real lives, real families and real birthday cakes. And the ones who see the biggest results are not the ones with the most willpower. Not even close.

We’ve been playing with the wrong rulebook

Here’s the blind spot nobody talks about. When a strategy isn’t working, the answer is never to try harder with the same strategy. The answer is to change the strategy.

And the strategy almost everyone reaches for with type 2 diabetes, eat less, move more, cut out sugar, follow the diet, be consistent, track everything, was never designed for an exhausted pancreas. It was designed for short-term weight loss.

Using it to treat diabetes is like learning the rules of draughts and then sitting down to play chess. It doesn’t matter how fast or how determined you are. If the rules are wrong, you keep losing.

Where the glucose is actually hiding

This is the bit I find genuinely fascinating. We spend so much time talking about calories, about eating less, about points and syns and tracking, and almost no time at all talking about glucose. Specifically, where glucose is hiding.

Because here’s what I find extraordinary. A completely standard, apparently healthy day of eating, wholemeal toast for breakfast, a sandwich at lunch, pasta for dinner, no added sugar, no biscuits, no obvious treats, can still contain the equivalent of over thirty teaspoons of sugar.

Thirty teaspoons. And nobody added a single one.

Not because anyone sugared anything. Because that’s what those foods become once they’re in your blood.

And every one of those thirty teaspoons is work for your pancreas. Every one is asking that exhausted, burnt-out, never-complaining organ to respond, to release insulin, to manage the load. While you’re doing everything right. While you’re being good. While you’re wondering why the blood test won’t move.

Your blood test isn’t moving because, without realising it, you’re eating vast amounts of glucose. The foods that are low in calories are not necessarily low in glucose. Quite often, they’re the reverse.

Why willpower never stood a chance

And here’s the part I find most interesting of all: the cravings themselves.

I hear this constantly. “I know what I should be doing. I just can’t seem to stop the cravings. I’m fine all day, and then something takes over in the evening.”

That evening pull, that feeling of something taking over, doesn’t have to be there at all. It’s your blood glucose dropping after your last meal. Your brain reads that drop as an emergency, and fires a signal so powerful, so ancient, so hardwired into your survival instincts, that willpower doesn’t stand a chance against it.

You cannot outthink a biological alarm system. But you can change the conditions that trigger it. And that, right there, is the game. Not restriction. Not resistance. Not being stronger than the signal. Changing the signal.

This is what I call the sugar rollercoaster. Once you understand you’re on it, once you can actually see the ride, you can choose to get off.

Want me to show you the foods doing this?

In my free live session I show you, specifically and practically, which foods are keeping your blood sugar elevated and what to do about them in a way that fits your real life. You can register for the next Reset Event here.

The first rule: don’t fight the craving, change what’s causing it

Let me finish my story. After my son was born, I made a decision. I wasn’t going back to the way things were. So I started asking different questions.

Not how do I eat less to lose weight. Not how do I resist more. Not where do I find more willpower. But: what does my pancreas actually need?

And within days, not weeks, not months, my blood sugar normalised. Then some things I wasn’t expecting started to happen. The afternoon exhaustion I’d accepted as just me, from way before pregnancy, gone. The up-and-down energy I didn’t even realise I had, gone.

And that evening voice, the one that knew exactly where the chocolate was, the one that had shown up every single evening for years, got quieter. Much quieter. The alarm had stopped going off. Not because I got stronger. Because I removed the trigger.

I hadn’t realised how tired I was until I stopped being tired. I hadn’t realised how much mental energy was going into that daily negotiation until it simply wasn’t there anymore. I didn’t become a different person or find discipline I never had. I just finally understood the game I was playing. And when you understand the game, everything gets easier.

So here’s the first rule. Don’t fight the cravings. Change what’s causing them. Rest your pancreas. Reduce the glucose load. And watch what happens.

It doesn’t matter how long ago you were diagnosed

This is the reframe I want to leave you with. It doesn’t matter how long ago you had your diagnosis. I’ve seen this work for people who were told ten years ago that this was just their life now.

It is not just their life now. And every evening you’ve given in to the voice was not a failure of character. It was an alarm doing its job. Switch off the alarm, and the whole thing gets quieter.

Save this: the shift in a nutshell

• Cravings aren’t a willpower problem. They’re a biological alarm triggered by falling blood glucose
• “Eat less, move more” was built for short-term weight loss, not for an exhausted pancreas
• A “healthy” day can still flood your blood with the equivalent of thirty-plus teaspoons of sugar
• Low in calories does not mean low in glucose. Often it’s the opposite
• You can’t outthink the alarm, but you can change the conditions that set it off
• The first rule: don’t fight the craving, reduce the glucose load and rest your pancreas

Come and learn the rules of the game

I run a free live session, and I’d love you to be there. We cover the exact foods keeping your blood sugar elevated, the strategy that works when nothing else has, and you can ask me anything. Hundreds of people join each time, and being in a room with others carrying the same frustrations tends to matter more than people expect. You can register for the next Reset Event here.

Watch the full video on YouTube to learn more: