Beat Sugar Cravings.....

Today's post:  Thursday, 1-26-2017

In some ways there are two basics for permanent fat loss.

1.  Stop routinely ingesting the things that reliably fatten you.

Then you stop making the problem worse!

2.  Boost your metabolism so you burn more calories twenty-four hours a day.

Over time that will remove your excess fat.

People who succeed at anything we now know take consistent action and keep doing it;

-- and they use what Reverend Bob Schuler called “experimental persistence”: They not only keep at things until they get the results they want, they take action and test things; they scrap the things that fail but learn from what happens, they look for new things to try and try them, they put in the time as a priority increasing their abilities and trying again. 

A new book describing this is called “Grit.” 

Use that on these two actions and you can lose fat and keep it off!

The post this time is on the first thing:

1.  Stop routinely ingesting the things that reliably fatten you.

Then you stop making the problem worse!

The post next week will be on the second thing:

2.  Boost your metabolism so you burn more calories twenty-four hours a day.

Over time that will remove your excess fat.

a) To stop routinely ingesting the things that reliably fatten you, it helps to apply grit to doing so.

One fat loss expert who delivers results is Mike Matthews.

He wrote a piece on how to beat sugar cravings that highlights exactly how to do this.

After Mike’s piece, I also list several ways to do this that either make it easier or even more effective.

This can help you start out faster and get more results over time.

Here’s Mike:

https://legionathletics.com/sugar-withdrawal/

".... in the case of sugar, studies show that they [sugars] fail this litmus test of addictive substances.

"People don’t build up a “sugar tolerance.”

They don’t have to keep eating more and more to achieve the same pleasurable effects.

They don’t physically and psychologically suffer if you stop eating it.

Scientifically speaking, depriving yourself of sugar is no different than depriving yourself of any of life’s little pleasures.

It can be disappointing and less immediately gratifying, but let’s not mistake that for the type of physical or mental distress that drug addicts experience.

This, then, brings us to the heart of the matter: personal responsibility.

Some people like to play the victim. They’d rather blame someone or something for their problems and shortcomings, rather than own up to the consequences of their choices and actions.

They’re not just weak-minded and weak-willed, they’re “addicted.” It’s not their fault.

This is a pathetic way to live.

No matter what you’re facing in life, once you surrender your sense of personal accountability, all is lost. It’s your only lifeline, the only leverage you really have to lift yourself out of the muck.

So, does a low-sugar diet result in less food-induced pleasure than a sugar-rich one?

Sure.

And can that make it harder to follow?

Sure.

If you haven’t been able to do it, don’t go looking for a scapegoat, chemical or otherwise.

Just look in the mirror, and ask yourself if you really want to be the type of person that can’t even control what they eat. That can be conquered by a clutch of carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen atoms.

And if you’re thinking that I just “don’t get it,” you’re wrong.

I like sugar as much as the next person, but I value my health, productivity, and happiness more, and so I limit my sugar intake.

What a concept.

You can do it, too.

It might require throwing away all those tasty treats in the pantry, learning to drink water and like foods that aren’t sickeningly sweet, and even falling off the wagon a few times, but so long as you refuse to go looking for excuses to fail, you’ll make it.

The Bottom Line on Sugar Withdrawal

Too many people eat far too much sugar, and find it far too hard to stop.

This has given rise to the idea that sugar is addictive, like drugs, and that the reason it’s so hard to quit is it can produce legitimate withdrawal symptoms.

Stories like these are music to millions of people’s ears, because it absolves them of their dietary sins. They can breathe a resigned sigh of relief, because it’s just faulty brain chemistry that’s to blame, not their flabby willpower.

It’s also a lie. 

Research shows that while eating sugar is pleasurable, it doesn’t impact our physiology nearly as significantly as addictive drugs like cocaine and heroin.

The bottom line is comparing sugar to hard drugs is like comparing creatine to steroids. They’re in the same universe, but are galaxies apart.

So, if you’re currently struggling to reduce your sugar intake, don’t buy into the siren song of sugar addiction and victimhood.

You’re choosing to eat it because it makes you feel good, and you can just as easily choose not to eat it, and look elsewhere for a pick-me-up.”

b)  Did you know there are several ways to make this work better and a LOT easier to do?

If Mike’s approach sounds a bit more than you can do because you DO experience strong cravings and you have no clue how to turn them off,

      you CAN do it anyway with a bit of knowhow and leverage!

*Soft drinks both regular and diet do NOT turn off hunger when you drink them. But regular soft drinks ADD calories. 

Both cause a spike in blood sugar which then falls.  Then your body puts out insulin which drives calories into your fat and locks it there AND you then get rebound hunger for sugary foods!

This fattens reliably AND causes cravings for sugary foods that you would NOT have had if you had drunk chilled water or coffee with coconut oil or whole milk from cows fed only grass.

Let me repeat that:  You drink something that makes you fat without turning off your hunger, THEN, you get a craving for sweets you would NOT have had if you didn’t drink the soft drink to begin with!

This effect may be greater for the artificial sweeteners in the diet soft drinks or they may cause worse cravings.  By actual test, they are MORE fattening than regular soft drinks, so they likely do both.

Let me repeat that:  You drink something that you think might have no fattening effects, THEN you get a stronger craving for sweets you would NOT have had if you didn’t drink the diet soft drink to begin with.

Worse, each diet soft drink is slightly MORE fattening than a regular soft drink.  But because people think the opposite is the case, the people who drink diet soft drinks drink more of them.

Then, with each diet soft drink being MORE fattening than a regular soft drink AND drinking more of them, people who drink diet soft drinks reliably get fatter from doing so!

These things are true for foods sweetened with sugar or high fructose corn syrup or the same artificial sweeteners too.

They ALSO cause this rebound hunger driven cravings.

STOP DOING IT! 

If you do NOT ingest these things, you can control the cravings easily because you stop getting them!

* Other near addictive effects:

Our bodies like and get used to regular patterns.  They particularly get used to sugar surges and rebound sugar intake.  So, this can add to cravings for a few days after quitting these foods and drinks. 

But if you toss out the ones you have, don’t bring any more home, and stop getting them away from home, within those few days you no longer have cravings to fight!

That’s the point when using Mike Matthews’ advice kicks in.  Since these things fatten you, find other ways to make yourself feel better that don’t do this!

* No added reason to stop.  BUT there IS one!  In fact they are life threatening and there are a LOT of them.

If you aren’t fat or aren’t fat yet, you may believe that soft drinks and diet soft drinks are harmless and that they are normal and associated with good times.

So false it approaches comedy this is! Before 95 years ago no one had ever heard of soft drinks. 

It wasn’t normal for people to drink them because there were none.

Then the companies that made them found that they were inexpensive to make and sold some for enough money to make money doing it.

Then to help people who then had trouble getting enough to eat, the feedstocks for soft drinks were subsidized and TV marketing began to become effective.

And it was like a snowball rolling down hill.  The more money the soft drink makers made with this cheap but salable product by pretending it was a traditional thing to do to add to good times, the more they advertised and the more people believed this fiction.

They now know how fattening and harmful soft drinks are but THEY are addicted to the easy, large profits.

We now are beginning to know that soft drinks are as harmful to your health and in as many ways as smoking cigarettes.

Heavy use for decades has been shown to cause fatal fatty liver, fatal heart attacks, fatal strokes, crippling osteoarthritis and Alzheimer’s disease IN ADDITION to how incredibly fattening they are!

This was true for sugar sweetened soft drinks before.  We now know that with the free fructose in the high fructose corn syrup used in regular soft drinks this is about five to ten times worse.

The MS and cancers and harmful gut bacteria that artificial sweeteners cause are horrible for those who get them.  But that sounds safe since this can happen to only one in 10,000 people in s a given year in some cases.

But this leaves out the multiplier factor!  In 25 years that’s one in 4,000 people.  So if 50 million people drink soft drinks, that’s over 10,000 people.

Worse, the real risk is likely closer to one in 1,000. 

Why use a product that makes you even more fat and can cause you these harms too!

* The focus trick works! It’s proven to work and research shows it actually changes the part of the brain you use to decide!

This makes Mike Matthews’ method quite doable!

If you consider buying a soft drink or sugary treat or are offered one, you can focus on one of two things:

You can remember that you liked the taste of that thing in the past and would find it to taste good now.

OR:

You can remember it causes the cravings you hate and adds more of the fat you are trying to lose.

OR, you can remember drinking these can cause YOU to have a heart attack like your Dad did.

It’s quite simple really, at first, you can choose which of these to focus on.

If you choose the first focus, you’ll have trouble overcoming the craving IF you manage it.

Miraculously though, if you choose the second focus, you will have no craving at all or one you can easily dismiss.

Researchers studied people who did each one and found that the brains of people who focused on the taste fired up the eating enjoyment circuits while those who focused on unwanted and harmful consequences fired up their brains that think and enable self control.

*The way to completely beat a craving that you find you simply don’t succeed at overcoming otherwise.

Almond butter is a health supporting food.

It tastes slightly sweet despite having a zero glycemic index.  And between the fiber and good taste and the health OK monosaturated oil and the protein, it’s very filling.

So, I decided to allow myself a spoonful of it as a snack.

But I found it boosted my appetite and that once I had one, I’d find myself eating several spoonfuls.

Then I promptly gained 6 pounds!  And, it was clear that if I kept the almond butter in our home, I’d keep the 6 pounds!

So I hit on the solution.  I no longer bring almond butter home.  And on the rare occasions my wife gets some, I do NOT allow myself to have any.

This is an effective way for me to beat this craving that was not possible to control otherwise.

c) To make this step most effective, also use it on the other fatteners besides sugars, artificial sugars, and the soft drinks that contain them!

We now know that all hybrid wheat causes the same fattening and harmful effects as sugar and even as high fructose corn syrup.

Worse, this is even more the case for hybrid wheat refined into flour. 

This is a very similar story to soft drinks.  When the providers found that the horribly harmful hydrogenated oils could make their bread and baked goods keep forever on the shelf and both those oils and the wheat got subsidized, they found they had salable bread and baked goods that were cheap to make.

So, if you want to avoid cravings and serious health problems and making yourself fat, simply refuse to eat ANY food that contains hybrid wheat or hydrogenated oils.

Are asking yourself what CAN I eat if I have no bread or baked goods?

We just did that post day before yesterday:

Paleo AND Healthy Priority List...Tuesday, 1-24-2017

There are many versions of food “pyramids.”  This one is the LARGE list of foods compatible with good health and staying lean!