On Paying Attention

A personal essay about sugar, digestion, and what happens when you stop outsourcing your body

One of my favorite things on Instagram is watching someone answer a health question and before they say anything remotely useful, they pause to remind us:

“I’m not a doctor. Make sure you consult your doctor. This is just what works for me.”

Which is responsible. Necessary, even. And also super revealing.

Because underneath that disclaimer is something facinating: how eager we are to hand our bodies over to someone else. We want the answer. The protocol. The supplement stack. The morning routine that will quietly fix everything without asking too much of us.

We want the shortcut. Preferably delivered in under a minute.

I understand the impulse. I’ve lived there. But at some point, it became obvious that I wasn’t seeking guidance. I was outsourcing attention.

Here’s the unglamorous truth that isn’t marketable because it doesn’t scale well: there is no universal formula. No perfect system that removes you from the equation. If there is a “secret,” it’s painfully unglamorous.

It’s paying attention.

One of my favorite definitions of wellness is the quality or state of being healthy in body and mind, especially as the result of deliberate effort. Deliberate is the operative word. Deliberate means involved. It means curious. It means noticing patterns instead of collecting tips.

That curiosity became unavoidable for me after my diagnosis.

I know I didn’t cause my disease. I also know I helped create the conditions where it could take hold. Both truths can exist at the same time. Instead of asking, What did I do wrong? I started asking questions that were harder to avoid.

Why was I living the way I was living?
Why did running on empty feel normal?
And one that still makes me laugh: why did I crave sugar so intensely when my stomach was clearly waving a white flag?

Specifically, Sour Patch Watermelons. Anyone? I’m fairly certain I single-handedly convinced our office vending machine supplier they were a top seller.

That question cracked something open.

Because on the surface, craving sugar while your gut is inflamed makes no sense. You’d think your body would want something gentle. Broth. Rice. A vegetable with a moral compass. But the body is far more pragmatic than we give it credit for.

When digestion is compromised, nutrient absorption suffers. Sugar is fast. Efficient. Absorbed higher up in the digestive tract. Translation: it works when other things don’t. So the brain does exactly what it’s designed to do. It asks for immediate fuel.

There’s also the nervous system piece, which tends to get waved away as “stress” and left at that. Sugar increases dopamine and serotonin temporarily. It soothes. It takes the edge off. If your gut issues are intertwined with anxiety, inflammation, or chronic overdrive, sugar isn’t indulgence. It’s triage.

Relief without the repair.

And then there’s the microbiome, which still feels slightly rude in its honesty. Certain gut bacteria thrive on sugar. When they dominate, they don’t just hang out quietly. They send messages to the brain via the vagus nerve, nudging you toward what keeps them alive.

Some cravings aren’t personal. They’re political motivated with a bad moral compass.

Add unstable blood sugar to the mix, missed meals, under-eating protein or fat, and suddenly the cycle makes perfect sense. Dip. Crave. Relief. Crash. Repeat.

From the outside, it looks like a willpower problem. From the inside, it’s a feedback loop.

This is the moment where most wellness conversations veer into control. Discipline harder. Eliminate the thing. White-knuckle your way through it. But what struck me wasn’t how out of control my body was. It was how logical it was.

The body doesn’t communicate in words. It uses sensations. Patterns. Repetition. It whispers first. Then it nudges. Eventually, it raises its voice.

When the microbiome is imbalanced, cravings increase. Not because you’re broken, but because your internal ecosystem is under-resourced. Low diversity means fewer nutrients extracted from food. Energy drops. The body reaches for what works quickly. Inflammation interferes with serotonin production, so the brain looks for a temporary stabilizer.

Cue the cookie. Or the candy. Or whatever your version happens to be.

The most empowering realization for me wasn’t learning how to suppress cravings. It was realizing they weren’t a personal failing to begin with.

I wasn’t addicted to sugar, well, maybe I was but really I was responding intelligently to incomplete information from my own body.

When you support gut health, nervous system regulation, and microbial diversity, those signals change. You don’t have to fight them, the conversation just shifs. The cravings don’t need to be conquered. They simply stop being sent.

That’s what paying attention does.

No obsession. No optimization theater. You don’t have to turn your life into a science experiment. Just listening long enough to understand what’s actually being asked.

For years, I treated my body like something to manage. Something to fix. Something to override. It turns out, she was talking the whole time.

And the moment I stopped outsourcing the answers, I finally heard what she had to say, turns out, she’s pretty smart.