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!

I recently wrote about how sugar could be making you fat, read the article here. Now I want to talk about how sugar could be making you sick.

Most people acknowledge sugar is bad for you but few really understand how bad it actually is.

One thing you need to know is that you cannot eat sugar without causing a rise in insulin.

Here is a list of problems that have been associated with consuming sugar and the rise in insulin associated with it. I will not go into too much detail as I would be writing for days, but here is a summary:

* Sugar blocks the amount of vitamin C absorbed into our white blood cells. Vitamin C is essential to a healthy immune system.

* Sugar is devoid of any vitamins and minerals so it enters our bodies and robs essential vitamins and minerals from our muscles, bones, brains and other tissues.

*1 molecule of Sugar requires 56 molecules of magnesium to be metabolised which will lead to a magnesium defficiency. Magnesium defficiency is related to high blood pressure, heart attacks, strokes and neurological problems.

* Consuming sugar will cause a sudden and dramatic release of insulin into the body. Over time this constant elevation of insulin levels will lead to insulin resistance or Type II diabetes.

* Insulin helps to store magnesium. If you become insulin resistant, your ability to store magnesium will be compromised leading to the magnesium defficiency and it’s related health problems listed above. Mainly high blood pressure.

* Insulin resistance is a factor in osteoporosis. Insulin helps control growth hormone, testosterone and progesterone. If these hormones are reduced, bone building is reduced and osteoporosis is a concern.

* Insulin resistance causes elevated levels of triglycerides. This is a major factor in heart disease and stroke. Most people think fat is the problem, but if we think about it, we all know this isn’t the case. Here’s a simple test; Do you or someone close to you have high cholesterol? Do you or they eat a high fat diet or high carbohydrate/sugar diet? The proof of the pudding lies in the eating. Literally! In the 80’s there was a push to cut down on our fat intake in order to reduce heart attacks. This fat replaced with an increase in sugar for flavour in our foods. This has led us to an increase in heart attackes, cardiovascular disease, obesity and metabolic syndrome. 

Yet, they still push the low fat theory for reducing heart disease etc. In what other place would you ever find a theory that causes the exact opposite of what it is meant to yet we still listen to it and believe it and die by it?

* Insulin resistance plays a major role in depression, fatigue and moodiness.

* Sugar is bad for your gut flora. It encourages the growth of parasites, worms, fungus and candida.

* Insulin plays a large part in cancer. I’m not going too deep into this one, but I have done my research and so should you for such an important issue. All of us know somebody who had been affected by cancer, but there are ways to help reduce your risk and killing your sugar consumption is the best place to start. Kill the sugar or let it kill you.

* Sugar makes you fat.

The American Diabetic Association lists sugar in the top 3 causes of degenerative disease.

I think we all need to take the idea of quitting sugar seriously.

I think we need a sugarholics anonymous!

What if everytime you ate a chocolate bar you had a heart attack. Woud you eat a chocolate bar again?

What if everytime you drank a cocktail you immediately got a serious illness die to your weakened immune system. Would you have 5 cocktails next Saturday night?

What if everytime you ate a bag of potato chips you suffered a stroke. Would you pick them as a snack again.

What if everytime you drank a bottle of fruit juice or soft drink you went into a state of depression? Would you choose it over water next time?

Sugar is killing us slowly. So slowly we don’t even notice it. Until it’s too late or as most people will say, just bad luck….

Is Sugar making you fat?

ABSOLUTELY!

There are so may reasons not to eat sugar that I am going to break this down into 2 entries. This first one will talk about weight loss. The next one about how sugar is responsible for a whole range of health problems. To view this article, enter here.

Firstly, let me ask you this question:

Are you overweight or at the very least, can’t shift the muffin tops?

Now let me ask you:

Do you eat a high fat diet?

or

Do you eat a high carbohydrate diet?

I personally don’t know anyone who eats a high fat diet. It is so hard these days with half the supermarket filled with low fat everything.

I personally do know lots of people who eat high sugar diets and this is why people are fat! If eating a low fat diet made you lose weight, then why so many fat people? Am I wrong? Think about your own diet.

When we eat/drink sugar or a food that turns into sugar, that sugar is delivered into our blood stream. This results in high blood sugar levels. Your body does not like high blood sugar levels, so it releases insulin from the pancreas. The insulin pulls the sugar out of the blood stream and delivers it to your muscles and liver and anything left over is stored as fat. There’s one more critical factor here. When there is insulin circulating in your system, your fat cells are immobilized. So when you eat sugar, you can bet that you won’t be burning any fat for up to 6 hours.

How does that sound? Eat sugar and don’t burn any fat for hours. Does that sound like something you want happening in your body?

I think it is funny when somebody tells me they love eating sweets and that it isn’t a big deal. They feel that so long as they are not eating loads of fat then they are fine. What a mistake. That sugar is converted to fat very quickly!

I do however understand that sugar is highly addictive and so should you.

Here are a few questions to determine whether you might be addicted to sugar:

Do you use sweets as a reward?

Do you eat sweets when you feel down or stressed?

Do you eat sweets even when you’re not hungry?

Have you said you are going to give up sweets but find yourself eating them a few days later?

Do you make jokes about how you just love eating sweets and don’t have an interest in cutting back?

Do you take a small bite of something sweet and then can’t resist eating the whole thing?

Do you ever binge on sweets?

What do you think, are you possibly addicted to the sweet stuff?

There are a whole range of problems that sugar can cause in the body and I will go through that soon, but for now, I only have one very, very important thing to say to all of you;

STOP EATING SUGAR OR FOODS THAT TURN INTO SUGAR AND START LOSING WEIGHT NOW!

What do I mean by foods that turn into sugar?

I am basically referring to the glycemic index. The glycemic index refers to how quickly a food turns into sugar in your body. The higher the ranking, the quicker it turns into sugar. Eating low glycemic foods are the best. Bear in mind that only carbohydrates are on the glycemic index because they are what turn into sugar. By carbohydrates, I am referring to anything from chocolate cake to carrots, weetbix to grapes, lollipops to strawberries. They all have different rankings and turn into sugar at different rates. You might be surprised at some of the findings. I recommend buying a glycemic book with charts or find a good webpage with charts on it to help you make wise choices.

Here is a little tip; When eating carbohydrates, try eating some fat and protein with them. This will slow the affect on the blood sugar levels as the body has to process everything together and isn’t just converting the carbs to sugar. Combining the fat and protein with the sugar dulls out the affect to some degree.

For example, combine your fruit with nuts, choose whole fruit over fruit juice, have protein on whole grain sandwiches.

Lastly, I just want to say again STOP EATING SUGAR OR FOODS THAT TURN INTO SUGAR AND START LOSING WEIGHT NOW!

If you think I may be wrong then I encourage you to stop eating sugar or foods that turn into sugar for 30 days and see what happens. What have you got to lose other than your gut?

To view my article on how sugar could be making you sick, enter here.