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Kelly Ripa has a new forward to a lifestyle change book that helped/maybe paid her. It’s called Get Off Your Sugar: Stress Eating to Strength Eating by Dr. Daryl Gioffre. It helps people quit eating sugar-rich foods by understanding how addictive it is and what it does to your body and substituting whole foods instead. It sounds practical, and Kelly said that it helped her beat her sugar addiction for good. She used to have a “sugar drawer,” I’m assuming at work, and was able to stop eating sugar by following Dr. Gioffre’s plan. I could relate to her story so much. People Magazine reports this:

Dr. Daryl Gioffre’s new book, Get Off Your Sugar,… focuses on adding nutrient-dense foods to one’s diet to help kick sugar addiction, as opposed to taking things away.

According to Ripa, she used to be addicted to sugar herself, but Dr. Gioffre’s program has “helped changed [her] life” over the past year.

“For years I had a candy drawer at home that I kept fully stocked and would dip into whenever I felt the faintest urge for sugar,” she writes. “I knew that sugar isn’t good for you, but I figured that everybody needed to have some kind of vice, right? What was so bad about rewarding myself with something sweet?”

“What I didn’t fully appreciate is just how addictive sugar truly is,” she says, adding that Dr. Gioffre told her that “sugar is eight times more addictive than cocaine.”

“That helped me feel better about having them, but I still didn’t know how I would prevent the cravings from happening in the first place,” Ripa says.

Ripa says that she previously did Dr. Gioffre’s alkaline cleanse to help remove acidic foods from her diet, which gave her “great results” that eliminated “some recurring aches and pains that I had chalked up to getting older.”

“I was so inspired, I got rid of the candy drawer,” she recalls. “If only my cravings had disappeared with it! Sadly, they didn’t. When life got super busy with work, or the kids, or both, the urge to eat jelly beans would come on so strong it took everything I had not to send my husband out to the deli to pick some up…”

Dr. Gioffre tells PEOPLE that the average American eats about 130 lbs. of sugar a year, which “creates its own self-perpetuating cycle of cravings, and because it’s so acidic, it makes your body work harder just to keep going.”

He recommends starting the day with green juice and incorporating more healthy fats like avocado to help kick the sugar habit.

“There’s actually an alternative to [stress eating] called strength eating,” he adds. “As you start to add more strength foods into your diet, it will begin to crowd out the stress foods. Strength eating is not based on deprivation — it’s based on adding to what you are already doing. You can’t choose not to eat, but you can choose what to eat. And once you begin to strength eat, big things start happening: Your energy increases. You lose weight. Your digestion improves. You sleep better. Cravings naturally go away, and your body just plain feels better.”

[From People]

Kelly also claimed that Dr. Gioffree “tested her biological age” and it was 35. Maybe that’s how he got her to write the forward to his book. I’m just doing my job and being snarky, but she bugs. She is really healthy though and I would never have guessed that she was a sugar addict. I hope people say the same about me, but I doubt it.

A few months ago, I got the Whole 30 book from the library. I know a lot of you swear by that plan but I get ragey at diets that make you give up entire food groups. If you cheat even a little with dairy or gluten it makes you start all over again. Instead of doing that, I vowed to cook more and eat more whole foods, which sounds similar to this book. I was able to do it somewhat and have been cooking and baking more, but I still regularly buy chocolate and ice cream and sometimes candy like jelly beans and Necco wafers (shut up I love them). I think this plan is doable for me and I’m really interested in it. However I haven’t made giving up sugar a resolution this year. Lately I feel accomplished just getting through the days, doing my work and getting a workout in. I don’t want to put more pressure on myself to give up my main vice, as Kelly said. I haven’t had a drink in four and a half years! Candy is minor, right?

A post shared by Kelly Ripa (@kellyripa)

A post shared by Kelly Ripa (@kellyripa)

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