Seven years ago I stopped eating sugar. Not dramatically. Not as a resolution. Not to delete my curves.
I just stopped, and then I stayed there, and then at some point my body forgot what it had been so certain it constantly needed.
That forgetting is what interests me.
There’s a rather long tunnel you go through when you remove something your body has organized itself around.
Sugar. Spending. Scrolling. A person. The tunnel is disorienting in a specific way — not painful really, more like the low-grade vertigo of trying to stand still on moving ground. Your reference points are off. You feel vaguely wrong without being able to name why. And then, on the other side of it, something strange happens: the thing stops being interesting. You eat a bite of it at a party and you think, I don’t feel that good.
That’s it. No drama. Just a subtle recalibration.
What I’ve been thinking about is how rarely we talk about what recalibration like that makes possible. So I believe we miss the point of entering those tunnels.
I’m currently not eating carbs. I’ve done cycles of this before, but it was always for a quick fix. I would turn it into its own problem.
What I notice now — more than I did the first few times — is watching my body as a somatic document. Observing myself come down off something.
There’s a clarity that arrives.
Food tastes like something again. My hunger signals have texture and sound. I can feel what my body actually wants, which turns out to be a different thing entirely than what it was loudly insisting it wanted five weeks ago.
People find this unsettling. My not eating certain things or abstaining from media in seasons bothers them in a way that I find more interesting than the change itself. There’s something in that reaction — a kind of ambient guilt, or maybe threat — that tells me we all understand, somewhere underneath, that we’re organized around things that don’t actually satisfy us. And we’d rather not look at it directly.
I think about this a lot with men I coach and pornography. The images that are so available now — bodies that may or may not exist in real life, constructed for a particular kind of instant 2D pleasure — have a way of infecting desire at the source.
Not because desire is fragile, but because appetite is trainable.
What you consume consistently becomes your reference point for what you want. And if your reference point is a curated fiction created to keep you in a hormone loop, you will spend your relational life trying to eat something that was never food.
What would it look like to starve that? To go through the tunnel — the disorientation, the low-grade wrongness — and come out the other side? I think what you’d find is that desire is still there. That it didn’t go anywhere. It just got quieter than the noise.
Here’s what I’ve come to think: desire is only legible after starvation.
Not deprivation as punishment — not white-knuckling it — but the genuine willingness to stop feeding the thing that was never feeding you back, and to wait. To stay in the tunnel long enough for your reference points to shift.
When they do, things taste different. You’re not missing the sugar; you’re tasting the fruit. And the fruit is genuinely, surprisingly sweet.
This is the part that most therapeutic and somatic work skips past. There’s so much attention given to processing, to uncovering, to releasing. Very little to the question of what actually satisfies you — specifically, bodily, in real life. And so people do enormous amounts of inner work and still find themselves lonely in the same ways, drawn to the same unavailable structures, replaying the same past relationships like movies they’ve already seen. The daydream is always of something that happened or that could happen, not something that’s here.
I’ve done this too. Returned to a reconstructed memory of a person or a time and let it fill something that I wasn’t willing to admit was empty. The memory wasn’t satisfying. But it was familiar, and familiarity masquerades as satisfaction so convincingly.
What I know now is that the void is information.
I’m not satisfied is not a problem to be solved by remembering or imagining something better. It’s an arrow pointing toward desire.
Toward the real question, which is: what do I actually want? What would actually fill this?
When you’ve lived in one domain long enough on the other side of that starvation — when you’ve let real desire organize you — something shifts in your influence with other people. You’re not hungry in the way that makes you grab. You’re not performing satisfaction. You’re just actually, quietly, full. And that fullness is magnetic in a way that need never is.
I don’t think this is complicated.
I think it’s slow.
The tunnel takes as long as it takes. But what’s on the other side of it is desire you can actually trust — desire that’s yours, that’s legible, that points somewhere real.
That’s worth the disorientation.
I write primarily to support my small business, christinaelaine.com
I am a somatic coach, writer, and curriculum creator writing about the interior life of modern relating, weekly on Medium & Substack. I also host interviews on YouTube.