After my recent posts on how sugar is making you fat and sick, I had a lot of people asking me what they should eat, if they are trying to eliminate sugar from their diet. It sounded like some people may be taking it to the extremes, so I am going to give you some sensible advice about how to minimise the affects of insulin on your body. These points below are easy to follow ways to help reduce the sugar in your diet.
1) Eliminate as much refined sugar form your diet as possible.
What does that mean? Don’t eat any cakes, lollies, jellies, ice-cream, chocolate, etc, etc, etc. If you simply must eat this garbage then limit it to once per week. That is somewhat acceptable.
2) When eating carbohydrates, choose low glycemic carbohydrates.
What does that mean? Low glycemic carbohydrates will not cause the sudden rise in blood sugar levels thus triggering the release of insulin. To find out whether a food is low or high glycemic, try this link, they have a fairly substantial database of foods,www.glycemicindex.com
3) Limit fruit to 2 pieces per day and when you eat a piece of fruit, eat some nuts with it.
The fat and protein in the nuts will help to mellow out the affects of the sugar.
4) Try to base your lunch and dinner around salad and/or veggies with protein.
Most people base their lunch and dinner around starch such as pasta, rince, potato etc. It doesn’t take long to change your habits to eat more veggies and salad. Not only is this beneficial in reducing the amount of starch you are eating, but it drmatically increases your vitamin and mineral intake form the veggies and we all know how beneficial it is to be getting all those natural vitamins and minerals!
5) Don’t think of sweetened yogurt as a health food.
Sweetened yogurt contains on average 15g sugar per 100g, some more, some slightly less. Not much different from ice cream! Natural yogurt is a different story, with around 5 or 6 grams of sugar per 100g.
6) If you are really craving a dessert and you must have it, choose ice cream.
As mentioned above, it can have anywhere from 15 to 30g sugar per 100g. A typical block of chocolate will have 60g sugar per 100g.
7) If you are having dairy, choose full fat.
Why? 2 reasons;
a) Most low fat products have has more sugar added to make up for the lack of flavour when fat is removed.
b) When you don’t have any fat present, the affects of the sugar on you rblood sugar is more dramatic. Fat will help to mellow out the spike in the blood sugar.
8 ) Don’t have sugar in your coffee or tea.
Add up how much sugar you put in your caffeine and you’ll be surprised.
9) Never ever drink soft drinks.
They are just empty sugar calories.
It really doesn’t take that long to change your tastebuds and reduce the amount of sugar in your diet. Try it for 30 days and see how you feel. Other than being thinner and healthier, I bet you won’t crave it as much either!
