There’s nothing new about fad diets.
Every year, some fitness guru climbs out of the woodwork and promises that they – and they alone – have all of the answers you need to not only lose a tremendous amount of weight in a hurry but also look, feel, and function better than you ever have. That they – and they alone – have the Fountain of Youth to reset your biological clock, beat Father Time, and get you to your physical prime no matter how many flips of the calendar you’ve already seen.
And every year later another guru climbs to the top of the pile, promising the same exact benefits with a new and re-jiggered approach that everyone flocks to after abandoning the diet of yesteryear. It’s a vicious cycle that shows absolutely zero sign of slowing down, but that doesn’t mean that you have to stay on the ride any longer.
If you are sick and tired of getting swindled by these modern-day snake oil salesman peddling the latest pseudoscience while promising you the moody and the stars when it comes to results like so many others, and instead want to be able to take advantage of a real deal of effective dietary approach that melts fat, it builds muscle, and improves your health – all at the same time! – Then you really only have to do one thing and one thing only:
Abandon sugar.
It’s Time to Really Think About the Amount of Sugar You Eat on a Regular Basis
Year after year, we discover more and more research, more and more studies, and more and more science that shows just how dangerous, disastrous, and even potentially deadly sugar is when it’s consumed by humans in large quantities.
And if you have any question at all as to whether or not we as a modern society are consuming large quantities of sugar on a routine basis, just pay attention to the amount of people you see buying 2 L bottle after 2 L bottle of soda the next time that you are at the grocery store.
The odds are pretty good that you’ve snuck a bottle or two into your grocery cart in the last month, too.
Processed sugar (quite a bit different from the all-natural sugar and we as humans have been consuming ever since we first popped up on this planet) is a relatively new human invention and it’s one that has been crippling our health ever since we first started fooling around with it.
Sure, it’s tough to argue against how tasty sugary products can be (after all, if sugar wasn’t delicious we all wouldn’t be eating as much of it as we are able to on a routine basis), but that doesn’t mean that it isn’t destroying our body from the inside out.
Process sugar has been clinically and definitively proven to:
- Provide supercharged fuel for cancer cells and free radicals that were to destroy your health from the inside out
- Dramatically impair the life-saving and critical function of white blood cells throughout the body
- Rapidly increase the amount of fat that you’re carrying around on a daily basis
- Make it a real challenge for your body to produce leptin, an incredibly important compound that regulates appetite
- Slows down the transfer between amino acids and your muscles, slowing down recovery, prolonging injury, and increasing inflammation
- Jack up the potential for type II diabetes in the human body, one of the most devastating and potentially deadly conditions we deal with in our modern world
… And that’s just the tip of the iceberg!
As we highlighted above, it’s not important for you to give up ALL sugar or even to give up all of the processed sugar out there. Natural sugar like the sugars that you’ll get out of fruits, honey, maple syrup, and other natural foods can be consumed in moderation without any real trouble, and even sneaking a little bit of sugar in your coffee or enjoying a soda every now and again isn’t going to kill you.
But moderation is the name of the game, and if you’re going to improve your body dramatically it starts off the lot easier to kick all of it to the curb (or as much as possible) before building in new healthy habits after you lay down a rock-solid foundation to work off of.
Here’s How You Can Start Cutting Back on Sugar Today
Cutting back on sugar – especially if you have a bona fide sweet tooth – is going to be one of the most challenging tasks you undertake, and this is doubly true if you’ve never really disciplined yourself as far as what you put into your body is concerned.
But that doesn’t mean that it is impossible, or that it doesn’t become easier and easier over time until it is just about effortless.
It all starts the same way that you would go about eating an elephant – just take it one bite at a time.
The very first thing you’ll need to do is give yourself a “sugar audit”.
You need to take a close look at all of the foods that you eat on a regular basis (without making any changes whatsoever). Set aside a single week – starting on Sunday – where you simply document all of the foods that you eat, recording the foods and the quantity of food in a little journal.
Don’t make any changes to your standard diet but instead just kind of go with the flow, as the most important thing we are doing right here is working to really capture a snapshot of the amount of sugar that we are consuming on a routine basis more than anything else.
After all, if you don’t know where you are right now you’ll never be able to create an action plan to get you where you want to go.
After you have taken the time to record all of that information for a single week it then becomes time to find out about the nutritional information of the foods that you have been eating. You’ll want to use any of the available sources to do exactly that (including online nutritional calculators) to get an idea of the volume of sugar that you are consuming without even really realizing what you’re doing.
The odds are really, really good that you’ll be shocked at the amount of sugar you are putting into your body, a number that you wouldn’t have ever thought you were even close to before you did this little experiment.
But that’s okay. We are just looking to get our hands on some raw data here, giving us a jumping off point that lets us create an action plan from here on out to give us the results that we are ideally after.
Eliminate Every Source of Sugar You Can from Your Home Completely
The next step in preparing yourself for a low sugar diet is to completely gut your pantry, you have fridge, and your freezer of as many sources of processed sugar as you possibly can.
This purge isn’t going to be a lot of fun – especially if you have that sweet tooth that we mentioned above – and it may even be a little bit pricey if you don’t decide to give these sugary foods a way to someone that you know or someone that you care about.
It is, however, absolutely necessary.
There is a general rule are about going on a brand-new diet, and it’s a lot like the law of gravity. It you’re fearful, unavoidable, and so accurate that you could set your clock by it.
You see, if you have ANY kind of “junk food” in your home you’re going to inevitably eat as much of it as you are able to. Our self-determination, discipline, and willpower is always being taxed, and if you have those kinds of sugary snacks around the odds are good you are going to dive right in even though you know it’s going to derail your progress.
A deep clean is going to eliminate temptation altogether. It’s going to give you a fresh slate and foundation to work off of, and from there it’s going to be a lot easier to get your body and your health reset.
Start Cooking Your Own Meals
If you eat out at restaurants a lot or eat a lot of take-out or fast food you’re going to be pumping a tremendous amount of sugar into your body without even realizing that you’re doing so.
By making the switch to cooking your own meals you have the ability to eliminate as much sugar has you like from your daily meals, and that means that you are back in the driver seat of the fuel that you pump into your body.
Taking control like this makes it a lot easier to not only understand what’s happening in your body but also why. When you’re in control like this you are able to adjust on the fly, finding new ways (and new foods) to enjoy your meal time while adding quite a bit of a variety to the mix as well.
It becomes a lot simpler to eat healthy when you are in the driver seat, and it’s also a lot cheaper as well. You’ll be amazed at just how inexpensive fresh fruit, fresh vegetables, and fresh sources of protein are when you do all of the “heavy lifting” as far as cooking and preparation is concerned.
Fall in Love with Fruit When Your Sweet Tooth Starts Flaring Up
Instead of plowing through a bowl of ice cream, crushing a dish of candy, or digging into some donuts when your sweet tooth starts to flare-up choose instead to give yourself that quick sugar effects with all natural sources of sugar in the form of fruit.
Fresh fruit, berries, apples, bananas, and more are all going to help you kick your sweet tooth monkey to the curb, and they’re also going to provide you with a much health friendlier source of sugar than processed stuff ever could. You can also go with fruit juice (the real stuff without any sugar added), fruit roll ups that you make yourself, or dehydrated fruit – all of these are great snacks that you can use to take the edge of when you’re getting ready for your low sugar diet.
In the same vein, you’re going to want to give up though sugary drinks that you’ve probably been diving into for years and years now.
Water, tea, and all-natural fruit juice are all worthy alternatives to soda pop, energy drinks, and sugary coffees and should be consumed on a regular basis. If you can, you’ll want to tend towards water more than anything else. Those other options have a little bit of sugar in, and if you’re trying to cut back it’s always a good idea to cut a lot more out and then add a little bit back in as opposed to swapping one source of sugar out for another.
Don’t Diet – Change Your Lifestyle
At the end of the day, the very last thing that you want to get suckered into is over go changing your diet or picking up a new dietary approach.
Eating a new diet implies that you are eventually going to be able to go back to the ways that you used to eat once you achieve the kinds of results you’re after. That’s just not the way that your body works, and it’s important to understand this right off the rip.
What you want to do instead is embrace a new lifestyle change as far as how you eat and what you eat is concerned. This is the only way to really locking the permanent beneficial results that a low sugar eating lifestyle has to offer, and it’s the best way to make sure that you don’t fall back into bad habits (especially after you finally achieve the kind of weight loss and health boosting results you’ve been after in the first place).
Best of luck going forward, you’re going to crush it!
