Dietary and nutritional content reviewed by Jasmin Gorostiza, DT, DM, DSS, CFPP.️
Can it be done? Is it really possible to exclude sugar from our diet? Yes, it’s possible but it’s not that easy.
If we really want to be healthy, get rid of the sugar. In the long run, the benefits of a no sugar or minimal sugar lifestyle will be all worth it.
In her article, Victoria Lambert describes sugar as the sweet poison that’s ruining everybody’s health. Well, she’s absolutely right.
Unfortunately, a lot of people just can’t seem to take this sweet poison out of their diet. It just tastes so good.
It’s strange. Everybody knows the unhealthy effects of this sweet poison on the body but it’s still not eliminated from the everyday foods we find in the grocery stores.
Sad to say, sugar will never disappear. So if we really want to be on a healthy diet, we would have to be the one to exclude sugar from our diet. Here are the 5 surefire ways to exclude sugar from our diet.
5. Maintain A New Way of Eating
This is a way of eating, not a temporary diet. That means once we cut out these sugary, carb-rich foods, we’ll continue eating this way for the rest of our life. If we only eat this way temporarily and eventually go back to our old ways of eating, we can be certain that the addiction will rope us back in pretty quickly.
4. Reduce Hidden Sugars
Dressings, sauces, and condiments may seem to merely add some flavor to our food, but they often add sugars that can work against our weight-loss goals. A small amount of some condiments can add whole grams of sugar to our meal.
3. Drastically Reduce Carbs
Eating too many carbohydrates is like putting ourself on a roller coaster; our blood sugar zooms up shortly after we eat, then goes crashing down after a short time. Before we know it, we’re hungry because our body quickly digested the food; we’re craving more, and so the ups and downs continue. There is a way to get off of the roller-coaster ride and take control: reduce our intake of any carbohydrates that we abuse, and by abuse, we mean eating them not necessarily because we need them due to hunger, but because we want them to feel normal and to avoid the awful feelings associated with the withdrawal syndrome.
2. Eliminate Junk Foods
It’s important to identify the sources of unnecessary sugars in our diet and cut them out. This means we’ll have to cut sweet foods like cakes, cookies, candy bars, and ice cream as well as savory and salty foods like chips, popcorn, and pretzels, all of which are classic examples of junk food. This even includes seemingly healthy items like most granola bars, energy bars, fruit bars, caramel-laced rice cakes, and buttery crackers.
1. Eliminate Sugary Beverages
If a person is a big drinker of sugary beverages, this can be a tough one, and going cold turkey is a person’s best bet. This is because they are not a part of our new way of eating, and it’s not suggested that we allow even small amounts of them into our diet. They have no value, other than giving us pleasure, which we’ll be getting elsewhere from now on. A person has to make a list of all the sugary beverages he or she drinks and then create a plan for substitutes so he or she doesn’t feel tempted to cheat.
Eliminating sugar from our diet is not one of the easiest things we can ever do in our lifetime. Almost everything tastes amazing with sugar. For the sake of good health, we just have to do it.
The good news is that we can eliminate sugar from our diet in just 2 months. This is according to Dr. Nicole Avena.
Dr. Nicole Avena is also the one who came up with the list above. You can read her full article here at MindBodyGreen.com
