How to quit sugar - the ultimate guide

Introduction:

This is my first post on steemit and i, a health, fitness and nutrition enthusiats, named Max, born in beautiful Austria, famous as the home contry of Arnold Schwarzenegger, having many many years of experience and expertise in this field, want to bring my quality content from my website directly here to you guys and girls on steemit, so more people can profit from it. Anyway, lets get started:

Welcome to the ultimate quick guide on how to beat the addiction to sugar. Most people that did not yet acquired their desired body composition, have a very high chance to be, at least to some extent, addicted to sugar. If you now think: “Wait, I don’t eat any sugar and sweets at all”, please read on too, because all this addiction thing does not only apply to plain sugar itself, it applies to all forms of fast digested carbohydrates. So from hardcore sugar addicts who drink sugary sodas all day long, to quite healthy eating people who just eat a lot of grains and fruit, the facades of sugar addiction are as individual as the victims of the sugar industry and its lobby.

In this guide, you will learn how sugar addiction works, what’s its risks, what’s the benefits of kicking the habit, and how exactly you do that. In the next chapter, I want to explain how and why sugar makes you addicted, and how wheat makes it even worse. This is going to be a little scientific, but I will provide you with easy to understand explanations. If you don’t care about the science at all, you can skip it, but I think it is important to at least read through it once because it will make it easier for you to stop your sugar habit when you know how you got hooked in the first place.

One: Understanding the sugar addiction. How sugar addiction works.

The addiction to sugar is based on two underlying mechanisms. One is, that fructose, that makes about 50% of sugar (sucrose and other disaccharides) molecules, is sabotaging the appetite suppressing hormone leptin even more than other saccharides, which leads to the very unfortunate effect of a steady feeling of hunger. If you eat sugar several times a day, you will get more and more resistant to leptin (means it loses its effect on your brain), and you will want to eat again and again and again. The more sugar you eat, the more you need.

The second mechanism that makes sugary foods and other carbohydrates with high glycemic activity so irresistible is, that every time you eat simple carbohydrates, which are digested easily and fast, they enter the bloodstream rapidly and cause the release of high amounts of insulin in a short period of time. Some of you might have heard about this effect, and that it’s bad for your overall health, and too high insulin does nothing other than make you store body fat. But why does this effect also make you addicted? Because every time you experience these high insulin levels, your brain releases serotonin too. The reason for this is, that insulin makes the level of most amino acids in your brain drop, which makes one specific amino acid more likely to get into your brain. This amino acid is called tryptophan. It is also found in bananas and chocolate and is the reason why eating these two foods makes more happy than others. In the end, tryptophan is converted into 5-hydroxytryptophan, which is then converted to serotonin, the hormone that makes you happy. Plus, as if this wasn’t already enough, insulin itself raises leptin. So every time the insulin gets high, the leptin does too, which leads to further resistance, which leads to even more hunger.

So now you can see, sugar has two very tricky ways to make you want more. But this is not yet all. There is one special food that has extra addicting potential. Grains, especially nowadays wheat. These foods contain a substance called gliadin. Gliadin is part of what is well known as gluten. Modern wheat is very high in gluten and therefore also gliadin. And what gliadin does is very uncool. It’s acting like an opiate. It is actually binding to opiate receptors in the brain, but it does not make you relaxed, kills pain, or makes you feel good in any other way. No, this one just stimulates appetite. Quite a lot. According to Dr. William Davis, It creates the urge to eat up to 440 calories more every day. Which is almost a chocolate bar. That means 3080 calories a week, which is more than most people’s calorie needs on a very active day. So in the end, you eat the calories for 8 days in just 7, which of course leads to weight gain.

Two: The risks of sugar addiction, how sugar makes you fat, and the benefits of stopping.

In this chapter, I want to give a brief overview of the downsides of sugar addiction. The side effects of the drug, and which benefits you get from quitting sugar and wheat. As you might know, sugar does not only make addicted, and makes you fat if you overdo it, it’s also very harmful to your whole body. Research shows that high leptin levels lead to higher rate of inflammation throughout the body, and this could also, in the worst case, lead to cancer. But of course, that’s not all, it can bring your insulin insensitivity to a sphere where you need to shoot extra insulin, a condition we all know as diabetes type two. But this is still not enough, excessive sugar consumption can lead to high blood pressure, an increase of low-density cholesterol (the bad one), which can both lead to heart and other cardiovascular diseases and last but not least metabolic syndrome and liver damage.

Regarding body fat storage, sugar is a big problem too. The higher the insulin level, the higher the amount of excessive carbohydrates that will turn directly into body fat, and the lower the rate of fat burnt during physical activity. This means that you even burn less fat while working out if your insulin levels are high from eating sugar stuff before your workout. But not only that, what counts even more, is the fact that a calorie is not a calorie. You might be shocked if you didn’t ever hear of this, but today, Dr. Lustigs findings are state of the art in nutrition science. I’ll explain very short:

Fiber: Calories that are bound to fiber are not absorbed as good as others.
Protein: Protein needs a lot of energy for digestion. Twice as much as carbohydrates. Plus, it makes you feel full much longer than any other food.
Fructose: Normal table sugar (sucrose) consists of equal parts of glucose and fructose. While the glucose is used for brain and muscles to give them energy, fructose does not. In the liver, similar to alcohol (ethanol), it is metabolized to some kind of fat, that does nothing else as to damage your liver and make you fat.

So as you can see, the list of risks and side effects of sugar addiction is very long. So if you stop, you will not only lose body fat but also get back the freedom of being not dependent on a substance that does harm you a lot. You will feel overall healthier, fitter, more relaxed and as good as never before (I promise you!). Another good effect that comes with quitting sugar is, that your bowel will work better again and you will feel less bloated. Plus, for most people, also, your skin will be positively influenced by stopping the vicious cycle that sugar puts you in. But the most important benefit will be fat loss and the feeling of freedom. Very similar to that of smokers quitting smoking. Now, that you know what you can gain – and lose 😉 if you stop eating ridiculous amounts of sugar every day, we can move on to the next chapter, that will describe how you can stop your addiction quite easily.

Three: How to quit sugar and beat the addiction forever.

This is the most important part of this guide. Now it’s time to take action. But before anything else, I want to make you realize, that our bodies do not require carbohydrates at all. So don’t be afraid of what is coming now. Because I don’t want to leave you in the dark about why this is true, here’s a little explanation. If we choose to have carbohydrates in our diets, or body uses them as a primary source of energy production. Because most of us eat too many carbohydrates, the glycogen storages in muscles and liver are full, people who don’t do sport tend to gain too much body fat. We have to take note, that carbohydrates stay in our system for days if we don’t use them up by heavy physical exercise. If we now eat more carbohydrates than we can store, right, we gain fat. So for most people today. There is absolutely NO necessity to eat as many carbohydrates every day like many of us do. Actually, there is no reason for anyone to eat carbohydrates many times a day, not even very active people. Once a day after sports, to restore muscle glycogen would be sufficient. But now, what happens if we stop eating carbohydrates totally. Isn’t this bad for you? NO, this is just what the sugar industry and their lobby are trying to sell to us. It is absolutely not. Low carb diets have shown lots of health benefits, even if you stick with them for years or your whole life. But how can you have energy without carbohydrates? From fat. And protein, but mainly from fat. If your body does not have any carbohydrate anymore, he starts producing glucose and substances called “ketone bodies” from fat you eat (and excessive body fat, that’s why low carb diets work so well), and turns it into energy.

Now, that you know you don’t have to worry about not eating carbohydrates might be unhealthy, I want to give you an overview of how you are going to quit the easy way, and then I will go into more detail on specific foods and other tips. Now you might ask yourself why I can teach you how to quit? The answer is very simple: Because I did it myself and helped many of my friends do it too. And they all succeeded. From my personal experience quitting sugar is pretty easy. I stopped smoking before, and believe me, that was a whole different story. But of course, we are all different and individual, so it might get a little hard for you, especially in the first week. If your addiction to sugar is very severe, you can experience mood swings, cravings, feeling weak, impaired concentration, and so on, but all these withdrawal symptoms will decrease after the first week and will be totally gone within the four weeks. For most people, only the first week is a bit hard and it already starts getting easy in the second. At the one month mark, it will not be any effort to not eat sugar anymore, that’s why this is the time to re-introduce some carbs again. Anyway, you can trust me, I have seen it many times, and everyone can do it, so you will succeed too, and in the end, quitting won’t be a big deal.

The first four weeks of your quitting regime, you should be very careful with the choice of your foods. To get you off the drug, you need to absolutely stay away from it for around four weeks. After that, you can slowly re-incorporate some of the foods that should be avoided in the first weeks. The real bad ones are the ones to stay away from the long term. But if you are not addicted to sugar anymore, this will not be difficult. And of course quitting doesn’t mean you can never ever eat sweets again, in fact, you can eat them from time to time, but not on a daily basis. And you will see, that you will not have any urge to eat them anyway, so staying away from them is very easy.

The foods to absolutely avoid are: Sugar in all its forms (more on that later), and for the first 4 weeks, any carbohydrate sources except vegetables (but no high starchy ones, such as potatoes and sweet potatoes). Basically, you will follow a low carb diet for the first four weeks. Just in case you don’t know what a low carb diet is: A low-carb diet means a diet which consists mainly of fiber, protein and fat, which in other words means only vegetables, meat, fish and seafood, eggs, cheese, very little milk, some nuts, no pasta, no pizza, no rice, no sweets, no potatoes, no bread, no beer, very little wine, no sugar in any drinks, and in this case also very little fruit for the first four weeks. If you are now worried, that you cannot eat anything, I can tell you, you don’t need to worry. Look up all the delicious thousands of recipes for low carb diets, you can find so many of them, online, for free, that in the end, you will rather have a hard time to choose which one to choose, cause they are all so damn good. There are even loads of recipes for delicious cakes and cookies, you can do them all low carb and still have a mouthwatering experience. If you really like it sweet, you can even add sweeteners like stevia. And yes, by the way, of course, you can drink zero sugar diet sodas too. At this point, I could give you complex meal plans like many others, expensive programs do, but I believe that this is not necessary at all and does make things more complicated than it’s helpful. So you can become creative yourself or just find those recipes that fit your taste, with those ingredients you can get in your grocery store around the corner, so I think it’s easier for you to buy the foods and cook whatever you like. If you don’t know what you are going to cook then, take a look at But now to the core of the first weeks. The one and only, most important thing, that many people try to run away from, and then fail, because they thought it’s not that important. Trust me, it is. This:

!! At this stage there is one rule, that is so important that there is nothing else that comes close to it: READ THE LABELS, or let’s better say: read the nutrition facts and list of ingredients of every single thing you eat. And be the most honest with yourself you can be. !!

Only by doing so, you can be sure you can eat something, without having the drug again. So look very closely for added sugar (or any of its synonyms). In the beginning, it can be very surprising where there’s hidden sugar, but after some time, you will get experienced and get a feeling for it where to take a closer look. Basically, you should not eat any processed food that has more than 1g of sugar in 100g. So you can still eat the sausages that have a little sugar in it. Of course, you can still eat any vegetable that has more than 1g sugar of 100g, like for example tomatoes, that have around 4g of sugar per 100g. You can also eat tomato sauce of course although it’s processed, but it still doesn’t contain anything else than tomatoes. In the end of the day, also, if you eat a lot of veggies like that, you will still end up somewhere between 20 and 40g of sugar a day, which is totally fine, and cannot be avoided in a healthy diet anyway. Otherwise, the only thing you would be allowed to eat is meat and cheese. And of course, you should not do that. Talking about cheese. There is some kind of cheese that has around 4g of sugar (lactose) in it. Cream cheese. You can eat some, you can also have some milk in your coffee if you like it, but, please don’t overdo it with lactose. For example, if you drink a 1l (33.8 oz) pack of milk a day, that’s 50g of lactose already. This is, especially in conjunction with the other sugars you are going to get from vegetables, way too much sugar a day. Anyway, as a general rule, everything that has up to 5g of carbohydrates other than added sugars(!) per 100g is allowed. If it’s vegetables, go for it. Eat as many vegetables as you want.

A special place in the foods allowed to eat, even during the first weeks, has nuts. Nuts are very healthy as they are high in fiber and polyunsaturated fats (omega-3 and omega-6). Although I encourage you to eat them, when it comes to nuts and low carb dieting, there are some points to be a little careful about. While most nuts contain only around 15g of carbohydrates per 100g, and you can eat them without any regrets, some contain quite a lot. Almonds contain a little more, namely 22g, so you can still eat them. Then, pistachios, for example, contain about 28g, cashews 33g, and chestnuts even 46g. You know what to do with this information, right? Just do not binge on cashews and chestnuts in the first four weeks and you will be fine. 😉

Before I want to give you a list of what to not eat (a list of what to eat would be too long, so everything that’s not on the list and shouldn’t be avoided because of previously mentioned reasons, can be eaten without worries), i want you to take note, that, especially in those first four weeks, in which you should not eat fruits, you should eat fresh, raw vegetables as well as cooked ones, because some vitamins are very sensitive to heat, while other antioxidants can be absorbed better when they are cooked.

Things to not eat during the first four weeks of quitting:

• Sugar in any form and name
• Any type of grains and products made from it (bread for example)
• Any other type of carbohydrate other than those in vegetables, nuts and dairy
• Also no rice, quinoa, amaranth, corn and others
• Potatoes and anything made from it
• Fruits and dried fruits (for example raisins, prunes, dates)
• Any processed food that has more than 1g of added sugar
• Beer or other alcoholic drinks that are high in sugar (e.g. long drinks, cocktails)

This is quite tricky. The sugar industry uses so many synonyms for sugar, it’s hard to get them all, but here I’ll give you a list of the most common. As a simple trick, you can say, everything that has the words juice, syrup, nectar or sugar in it, or ends on “ose” is bad.
But there are some more:

• Agave nectar, barley malt, (blackstrap) molasses, buttered syrup, cane sugar, carob syrup, confectioner’s sugar, corn syrup, date sugar, dextran, dextrin, diastatic malt, ethyl maltol, florida crystals, fruit juice, galactose, glucose, golden syrup, (high-fructose) corn syrup, icing sugar, lactose, maltodextrin, maple syrup, muscovado, panocha, refiner’s syrup, sorghum syrup, barbados sugar, beet sugar, brown sugar, castor sugar, fructose, demerara sugar, dextrose, diatase, evaporated cane juice/syrup, fruit juice concentrate, golden sugar, grape sugar, honey, invert sugar, malt syrup, maltose, (organic) raw sugar, rice syrup, sucrose, saccharose, treacle, yellow sugar, xylose

After the first four weeks, you can start to add some little carbohydrates to your diet again. The level of carbohydrate intake might vary from personal choice, work, sports, or other physical activity. If you for example walk and stand a lot every day, you might eat up to a handful of good, slowly digested carbohydrate with low glycemic activity like brown rice or 100% whole grain bread, yams, plus one piece of fruit other than bananas, grapes, mango, figs and (water)melon a day. Best choice for fruits is berries. They have the lowest sugar and very high vitamins and other antioxidants. Same applies to people who do lots of sports or physically challenging work like construction work or carpeting. People who just sit their whole day do not even need carbs every day, but, of course, feel free to eat a little, as long as it is healthy carb sources. After these transition phase, you can eat more carbohydrates again. But better only if you really need them, for example if you are doing lots of sports and feel you need the energy. But try to keep it clean most of the time.

A very important thing to mention here, many people give up because of this, is, to not be discouraged or feel guilty by eating more fat, or more volume of food than you did before. First, the vegetable might look a lot, but they are so low in calories that you can not eat too much of them. Regarding fat, there is also absolutely no reason to worry about eating too much. You might eat a little more fat and protein, actually, you need it, cause you need to get the energy you formerly got from sugar, from somewhere else. But this does not mean that you are getting fat. Although fat has 9kcal per gram. Trust me, you will not get fat. You will lose fat. First, you can not eat so much fat as you can eat carbohydrates easily cause it will not taste good, and second, you can not because it will make you feel fuller than carbohydrates and not make you want more and more like sugar does. So please don’t worry. And if you really happen to not lose fat right from the beginning of quitting sugar, because you really eat so much more cause you miss your drug and compensate with other food, trust me, this will change automatically, and all in all, you will be less hungry after you beat the addiction. In the time you change your eating habits and stay away from sugar, please, at any point, you do not need to feel hungry at any time. You can eat all the foods that are allowed till you feel full. But of course, this is not an invitation to binge that you almost can’t keep it down. 😉

Basically, that’s it. As mentioned earlier, the first week might be a little difficult, but soon you will not have any urge to eat sweets or processed wheat anymore. After the first four weeks, you have already beaten your addiction. You will feel better, look better and keep losing body fat. All you have to do is to just stay on track to not relapse and get hooked again, but if you follow my advice to eat only a handful of good carbs every day for the next weeks, and then stay with this kind of diet, or even start eating more good carb sources, but stay away from sugar in the long run, the whole sugar problem will fade and you will finally reach the body composition you always wanted. Permanently. And in the course of time you even will be able to eat some little sugar from time to time, without falling back into addiction.

Congratulations that you made it to this point. Now take action! You can do it! 🙂

Sources:

Coyle, E. F., A. E. Jeukendrup, A. J. Wagenmakers and W. H. Saris (1997). “Fatty acid oxidation is directly regulated by carbohydrate metabolism during exercise.”
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/9277379.

Davis, William (2012). “Wheat is an opiate.” http://www.wheatbellyblog.com/2012/04/wheat-is-an-opiate.

R H Lustig, S Sen, J E Soberman and P A Velasquez-Mieyer (2004). “Obesity, leptin resistance, and the effects of insulin reduction.” http://www.nature.com/ijo/journal/v28/n10/full/0802753a.html