I just finished eating a crispy chicken sandwich and French fries. I wouldn’t say I’m proud of this meal. I'm generally a pretty healthy eater, though I do occasionally indulge. I am relatively conscious of what I put into my body. I’m a college student, so I’d be lying if I said I never eat fast food and I never drink soda. For the most part, however, I make a point to eat a balanced diet. I’ve read a lot of articles about what’s good for you and what’s bad and I try to stray away from bad fats and carbohydrates. I try to drink at least two liters of water a day and I make a valiant effort to work out at least three times a week. I have an average body type. I could afford to lose a few pounds, but I am in shape and have no major health issues.

I was raised by a mother who insisted we eat a fruit or vegetable with every meal, no matter how much we protested or cried. She made us home cooked dinners most every night, except Sundays when we would go out after church. She would send us out into the backyard to burn off some steam and get some exercise, rain or snow or shine. Today, she runs anywhere from three to five miles a day and eats a vegan diet. She knows her young adult children are human and expects us to eat like pigs here and there, but makes sure to keep teaching us how to take care of ourselves. That’s why the other week, she told me to watch That Sugar Film, a documentary from Australian filmmaker Damon Gameau.

I promised her I would watch when I finished my homework. I was weary after a stressful week of midterm exams and really just wanted to curl up and watch Gilmore Girls, but my mom means everything to me and making her happy is truly my first priority in life. She had told me I had to watch; it would change the way I thought about food forever. I trust my mom’s judgment more than anyone else’s, but as a student currently studying abroad in Europe, a vegan diet and tracking everything I eat isn’t exactly feasible. But regardless, I shut my books, opened my laptop, and curled up in bed to watch a movie I thought would just be like Forks Over Knives, telling me how everything I was doing was wrong.

The movie starts by introducing you to the incredibly personable, charming, and handsome narrator and creator, Damon Gameau. He and his pregnant girlfriend are incredibly health conscious individuals who follow a strict clean eating diet. Damon, however, was not always this way—he, too, was a pizza-scarfing, soda-guzzling fiend back in the day. Nevertheless, with a baby soon to make its debut into this world filled with so many different channels of information on what to eat and drink and exercise to lose weight and look good, Damon is curious as to how what we eat actually makes a difference. He departs on a quest to eat the Australian daily average amount of sugar consumed everyday for sixty days: forty tablespoons. And he doesn’t intend to consume it through foods we quintessentially consider sugary—he intends to consume it by eating foods we consider “healthy.”

He eats yogurt and smoothies and even teriyaki chicken and announces, with every meal, the amount of hidden sugars in each plate. I was floored. Teriyaki stir fry is deceptively one of the most high sugar meals you can eat and for the past twenty-one years, I've been telling myself it's one of the better meals I can eat. At one point, he eats forty spoons of table sugar in the place of meals to demonstrate just how many sugar forty tablespoons really is. It’s such a powerful film and it really works in sharing its message because Gameau is willing to immerse himself so fully into the journey at hand. He doesn’t just spew statistics at you and show you a bunch of interviews with corporate bigwigs. He shows you a harsh reality by subjecting himself to practical torture.

His health suffers immensely over the course of the sixty days. He gains a dangerous kind of weight that inhibits his organ function and his teeth are damaged and his energy levels plummet. He looks puffy and tired. He is irritable and anxious and slowly loses the charismatic charm that sucked you in at the onset of the film. All this is the result of eating foods we consider to be healthy.

Throughout the course of the movie, he consults various physicians and psychiatrists to not only check that he is not actually at risk of death, but to get their input on the sugar addiction epidemic taking over the world. None of them have anything good to say about it. Gameau goes to America and meets an Alabama dentist who travels around the state in a mobile home to bring much needed dental help to those who can’t afford it. Damon witnesses as an eighteen-year-old boy has all of his teeth removed as the result of drinking liters of Mountain Dew everyday from a young age onward. He is eighteen years old. He is a child.

The film concludes with Damon returning to his old eating habits and ultimately, restoring his health. Regardless of the conclusion, however, I couldn’t help but feel for the man who put himself in grave danger to show the world just how bad sugar is. You can’t imagine anything that good could hurt you, but it really, really can.

I shut my laptop and called my mom immediately because I had to filter through what I had just watched. I was horrified and fascinated and suddenly so eager to make a change—though that is hard when you are in Europe and most cheap, convenient options involved a carbohydrate of some sort. I had no idea that the reason, probably, why I have this pooch no amount of crunches can combat is because of sugar—because it collects in fat stores in your midsection and makes you that puffy, bloated zombie we see all over the world. I didn’t realize that my irritability might be due to more than Mother Nature’s hellish monthly visit. It never occurred to me that was alarmingly low energy levels might be because of something other than a jilted sleep schedule.

My parents do not eat refined sugars, and didn’t even before this film. When I spoke with my mom about the film, she got real about the process of sugar suspension: “Getting off sugar is brutal. Take your head, unscrew it, and bash it against a brick wall for three days. I don’t want to go back because of the memory of the headaches getting off it.” The honesty from someone I know and trust only make reality all the less sweet. The reason that extreme physical reaction occurs is because sugar is a drug and we, as a world, are addicted. We crave that sweet kick of energy after eating a high-sugar meal.

The truth of the matter is that we aren’t all just going to make a sudden switch to never eating sugar again, but it would make a huge difference it we could start to lean that way. Sure, there’s nothing quite like birthday cake piled high with frosting, an ice cold Coke in the summertime, and a spoonful of sugar helps the medicine go down—but the truth is always hard to swallow.