I have sweet teeth. Yes, plural.

My need for sweet stuff surpasses that of a normal person. I have to have it.

Thanks to a childhood filled with candy, fizzy drinks, milkshakes, ice-cream and chocolate - I ate icing sugar out of a cup, people - I have grown up, while my tastebuds remained six years old; presumably preserved by my sugar-coated diet.

To this day, I can't handle eating a meal without dessert to finish it off. I always have room for the sweet - and most of the time, I spend the meal fantastising about the sugar waiting for me on the other side.

I hate coffee, but I buy novelty drinks from Starbucks just for that hit of syrup - hell, my favorite chicken marinade is honey soy.

While all of that sounds really great, it doesn't do great things to my health.

Those sweet teeth I mentioned before? They were decorated with silver fillings when they were still baby teeth. I got a second chance with my adult set, but I went ahead and destroyed those too, with another two fillings by the time I was 20, and a butterscotch lolly incident resulting in a root canal at age 23.

So, it's safe to say sugar hasn't been kind to my teeth, and I know I must have been quite the handful as a child, all jacked up on Mountain Dew and the like, but it's not still affecting me like that now, is it?

Stop Being Crap: What is your sweet tooth doing to you?

I'd never thought about giving up sugar before.

Sugar is one of the first ingredients in all my favorite things - so it didn't seem viable without a resulting food depression.

But recently, someone pointed me to the fact that, even though it doesn't make me climb the walls like it did when I was a kid, sugar is still a stimulant, an inflammatory that you don't need in your body. Those refined, white crystals have no benefit, only badness. And I eat a crapload of it.

So, I thought, even though it's amazing, so, so amazing; if it's doing bad things to me, I need to know about it.

However, I'd never be able to feel the affects of an individual serving in my usual candy haze.

I figured the only way to find out was to give it up.

It has been 40 days since I last knowingly consumed refined sugar.

I've done my darndest.

I've cut out all my faves (cake, chocolate, ice-cream, and so much other stuff - it's in freaking everything) and I've stuck to products that only contained natural, whole sugars, like fruit sugars or evaporated cane juice (sugar, before it goes through the refining process and loses the little goodness it has). But I've even tried to minimize the amount of those sugars too.

It was hard at first, figuring everything out, but I'm well and truly into the groove, and I think I can safely say my refined sugar intake has dropped by like, 99%. Even though I made that figure up it's probably accurate. It probably is though.

So, time to find out - does sugar have an affect on me?

Didn't have my cake or eat it either.

There were a few things I expected when I went cold turkey on sugar.

• Cravings - I figured my body would be crying out for the sugar I denied it, my mind dwelling on cookies and cake. Didn't happen.
• Being tired - I thought taking sugar away would result in an almighty crash after a two-decade high. Nope.
• Being fainty - My blood pressure can be a little low (kinda common for young ladies) and I was expecting my body to fail without sweets to keep my blood sugar levels up, and keep me vertical. Nada.

I was amazed. It started to seem like my body didn't really need sugar at all. It wasn't giving me any indication that something was missing, or it wasn't coping. I was fine.

Who'da thought.

And now, for the real experiment.

Since my body was coping so well without sugar, I thought it was time to find out what it does to me when I do have it.

And I knew I couldn't be half-assed about this. I pulled out the big guns, with a Willy Wonka Blueberry Laffy Taffy, with a total 27g of glorious, refined sugar, a bit of fat, salt, and not much else.

The perfect test.

I ate the taffy. The entire thing. And I waited.

10 minutes later: I felt a headache coming on.

15 minutes in: The headache has turned into a hangover-esque nausea, complete with throbbing temples.

20 minutes in: My head feels like its going to explode. This was a really bad idea.

25 minutes in: Holy shit. There's a party in my brain and everyone is invited. 

30 minutes in: I'm freaking out here. I can't sit still. My heart is pumping like crazy, and I'm shaking.

35 minutes in: I have been reduced to something akin to an eight year-old girl in the Barbie section of a department store with a blank check.

2 hours later: I'm tired. I'm in a weird mood. I'm restless, and it's really hard for me to hold a conversation, so I go home to sleep it off.

It seems I had quite a trip.

The verdict: is refined sugar really a bad guy?

Argh. It kinda seems like it. But it's soooo good. Dammit.

Pretty gutted I reacted as badly as I did to the taffy, I gotta say. It opened my eyes up to what sugar is capable of doing to me, and it'd be hard to go back to eating it regularly with that in mind.

As sad as it is to end my life-long love affair with refined sugar, there are plenty of alternatives out there to make life a little sweeter, keeping things a little healthier in the process.

I think I'll get to a point where I indulge very rarely, and only for very special occasions (like the baking of mum's apple pie) but amazingly, I feel quite confident about giving it up. I was super suprised at how easy it was to remove from my diet, with my tastebuds barely registering a difference.

My teeth probably noticed the difference though. I just wish I'd done this before the root canal!