Origin Story: I Quit Sugar So Hard It Disgusts Me Now

I cut added sugar and junk food so hard that both disgust me now. I don’t mean I resist them heroically — I mean I physically can’t finish something too sweet or too fat. My taste changed sides. What used to read as “reward” now reads as “too much.”

Getting there wasn’t a program or a bet. It was a slow recalibration: fewer treats, then rarer treats, then treats that started tasting like what they are. Somewhere along the way the craving stopped being mine.

The problem flipped

Here’s what convinced me this was worth turning into an app: modern humans don’t have a sugar-and-fat scarcity problem anymore. We have the opposite one — it’s genuinely hard not to get too much. Sugar and fat are in the sauce, the bread, the “healthy” cereal bar, the office birthday, the checkout aisle. The environment says yes by default, so every single no has to come from you.

For most of human history, craving dense calories was a survival skill. The brain that grabs the rare ripe fruit wins. That brain is still in your head, running the same program, in a world where the fruit is everywhere, wrapped in plastic, and on sale.

You can’t uninstall that brain. But you can tame it — and taming starts with noticing.

One question, no judgment

That’s all No Treat Today asks: one evening question — too many treats today? — answered honestly. No calorie ledger, no forbidden-foods list, no shame spiral. Clean days earn you apes; rough days don’t take them away, because your streak never resets. The recalibration that took me years of improvising, the app turns into a gentle daily habit.

And the ape is deliberate. Quitting sugar means taming the inner monkey brain that still craves what used to be rare. Crush is an orangutan for a second reason too — deforestation for palm oil, the food industry’s favorite ingredient, is wiping out his kind. His full story is here.

I’m not promising you’ll end up disgusted by cake. I’m promising the direction: the more days Crush hears a happy answer, the quieter the monkey gets. Start with tonight’s question.