"Fake cookies", i.e. sugar free cookies with artificial sweetener, are great

(Write-up longer than necessary because I'm not spending enough effort making it short)

I like sweets, but if I have too much sugar I get short-term addicted. I.e. I get sugar cravings, and my mood is worse. I can get over it (and have done so many times) by avoiding sweets for a few days but it's unpleasant.

In the past my main strategy was to avoid getting into the addicted state, by not having enough sweets to trigger it. I can have some, just not too much. Eating fruits also helps, since this some what satisfy the craving without reinforcing it. I.e, if I have sweets, it's easer to stop and less likely to trigger the addiction, if I end the "meal" with a fruit.

This hasn't been enough of a problem for me to put much agency into solving it. Or maybe it's more correct to say that it's only been a noticeable problem at times when I don't have spare agency to throw at it. E.g. if I'm feeling down for other reasons, it would be nice to use sweets as mood enhancer, but also if I'm already down then don't want to have to add dealing with sugar cravings on top of what else is going on. In this situation, me being prone to sugar addiction, becomes a noticeable problem, but I'm also not in a state where I'm great at thinking about solutions.

Recently I got into sugar craving state, and I was also down for unrelated reasons, and really did not have the spare spoons to deal with it. So I decided to try "fake cookies". For some reason they don't sell them in the local stores, here but you can get them on amazon. And it just worked. Fake cookies satisfy the addiction without reinforcing it.

It's a bit embarrassing that I hadn't tried this before. I think the reason is a mix of some naturalistic fallacy, and that things I tasted previously that contains artificial sweetener where not tasty. Also, I didn't actually expect it to work, but I still should have tried.

Things that I've tasted before that contains artificial sweetener, where either too sweet (e.g. sugar free soda), or tasted weird and artificial (e.g. flavored protein prouder). Turns out both of these issues are avoidable. The solution to too sweet, is just less sweetener (I assume), and probably the weird, artificial taste had nothing to do with the artificial sweetener, but was due to some other ingredient. I had expected the fake cookies to be too sweet (not because you can't have then less sweet, but because I expected the market to not cater to my preferences). Still, I should just have tried some, and when I finally did (sort of by accident, a bit prior to the main anecdote), it turned out they where actually just good.

I had expected artificial sweeteners to be equally addictive as real sugar. But as mentioned above, I'd gotten my self temporarily sugar addicted, and I really did not want to have to will power my self out of it, so I gave fake cookies a try, and it just worked.