What this article will show you is the state of the art about a no-sugar or no “food that act like sugars” (mostly grains) diet and how you can optimize your training and running (or cycling) by sticking to a no-carb diet most of the time. What you will learn is that (at least according to conventional wisdom) is that you have to include some sort of carbohydrate to keep your exercise intensity high.

Recovery

Let’s start at the end, your recovery. The most efficient way to recover from a long exercise bout is to first replace glycogen and then protein. Research has shown that muscles uptake of glycogen is most efficiently 20-30 minutes following exercise. In order to replace this glycogen, you need to eat some form of sugar. This can come in the form of fruits and fruit juices, but fructose (the sugar mostly found in fruit) is not as efficient as glucose so consider a recovery formula (I like the one from Vega).

After you have replaced the glycogen then you should move on to protein. During an hour-long training season, you have lost some protein and you should focus on eating protein to provide your muscles with the building blocks it needs for repair. There is good evidence that eating a diet without sugar or the foods that act like sugar most of the time is helpful at shortening recovery. So, 20 minutes following your exercise you should eat some form of protein like eggs or meat (I like Chili). What you are doing in this phase is giving your body what it needs to function well.

Exercise

In order to understand what you should be eating during exercise, you need to understand what your body considers fuel. When you are at rest, you body will generally use free-floating fats (fatty acids) as energy and this is true when you start to exercise as well. As you increase your exercise intensity, your body will switch from blood fats to using muscle fats called intermuscular triglycerides (IMT). These are the main source of energy to run your muscles. As you further increase intensity, this is when your body will start to use glycogen (this is the form of quick sugar storage in your muscles and liver).

When you get to around 65 percent of your maximum intensity (VO2 max) this is when your body is using about 1/2 glycogen and 1/2 IMT. Things really change when you start exercising at 85 percent of your maximum or above, this is when glycogen becomes the dominant fuel. The body chooses glycogen at this point because it takes less oxygen to burn glycogen than those IMT.

You have probably experienced this if you have ever forgotten to take enough sugar during very intense exercise. As your glycogen depletes, you have to switch to burning body fat, this means you have to slow down because your body is using more oxygen. This isn’t quite bonking, but you feel like everything is uphill.

Review

So to review: if you are exercising slowly, then you don’t need glycogen or sugar; your body has enough fuel to get you around. You also don’t need sugar if you exercise intensely until you run out of glycogen (for most people this is around 1 hour of exercise). When you are exercising at a high intensity for a long time is when you need to keep a constant stream of sugar in your body. Most books will say that you need around 300 calories of sugar per hour for running something like a marathon or longer. If you run longer than a marathon, then you also need to think about consuming some protein.

There is also another trick you should know about that benefits the low-sugar athlete. Most athletes only focus on replacing glycogen, but you can improve your performance by increasing your intermuscular

So while most athletes focus on replacing glycogen, you can increase your efficiency by storing more intermuscular triglycerides (IMT) and this comes from eating low or no sugar and exercising at a high intensity. Yes, this means doing speed work.

I find that eating any sugars tends to make you crave more sugars (I call it the sugar magnet), but if you can focus on using sugar for recovery and using it for only the longest of your runs then being a low-sugar athlete has many benefits.

The last thing I want to say is that what you have read here is the conventional wisdom and researchers only look for what they believe to be normal. It may very well be that not using sugar right after exercise or during long runs may work, but it hasn’t been really tested.

For now, check out The Paleo Diet for Athletes for more information about a low-glycemic diet for athletes.

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Does eating sugar give you a headache? The sugar headache, otherwise known as the Holliday Headache (because we eat so much sugar on Easter, Halloween, Christmas and other holidays) has a lot in common with a hangover headache but it strikes any time year when we overdo sugar.

While most have experienced a sugar headache at some time in their lives it is not well known in medical circles. It might even surprise you to learn that the exact causes of all headaches are a bit of a mystery. Migraines and cluster headaches are thought to be vascular (having to do with blood flow) but how blood changes create a headache is unknown; the same is true of the sugar headache.

I view the sugar headache as a toxicity or dehydration event and while it might be an annoyance it could also be the sign of something more dangerous. Let’s look at dehydration ad toxicity and see how they might cause a headache.

Sugar Dehydration

Dehydration is a common way to get a headache and sugar can lead to dehydration. Eating too much sugar dehydrates your body in two ways.

• Dilution: When you eat too much sugar, your body has to dilute that sugar to keep it from harming your body. This means that water is being pulled from all parts of your body to balance the large amount of sugar in your blood stream. While this water-pulling effect happens all over the body, it is your head that suffers the most.

• Urination: One of the ways that your body has of getting rid of excess sugar is to dump it in your urine. This is especially true of diabetics, who have to go to the bathroom a lot.

Toxicity

The other way to think about sugar is to consider it a toxic event. While your body runs on glucose (a simple sugar) it was never meant to have a ton of simple sugars running around in the blood. If you look to nature, you would find that there are almost no foods that contain the high amount of sugar you would find in a soda or piece of cake. If natural foods do contain a high amount of sugar it is often bound up and hard to get to (like in a sugar cane). The only way to get a large amount of sugar into your body is to have that sugar processed before you put it in your mouth. Processed sugar or processed grains both act like sugar in your body and this is toxic to the very blood cells that carry the sugar throughout the body. (I explain this at length in my book Sugarettes).

Something Worse?

Sugar headaches can also be a warning. If you get sugar headaches often, you might just be diabetic or pre-diabetic. The best way to find out if you are diabetic is to go and see your doctor and have them run some blood tests, but here are the typical symptoms of diabetes:

• Excessive urination: As I mentioned above, sugar acts like a diuretic and will spill sugar and water into the urine. Having to urinate a lot is often one of the first signs of diabetes.
• Excessive thirst: Since diabetics are losing a lot of water (see above), they are often thirsty all the time.
• Excessive hunger: Everyone has periods of time when they are hungry, but diabetics are hungry all the time (with strong cravings for carbohydrates, sweets and sugar). This is one of the strange things about diabetics: They have a lot of sugar in their bodies, but it is not being used by the cells so they are hungry all the time.

Sugar Headache

The reasons why sugar gives you a headache are many and not readily understood. But you don’t have to wait for a reason to stop the pain in your head.

You can stop your sugar headaches and give sugar the boot by trying my 30 Sugar Free Days Program. During the program, you will learn about foods that act like sugar and what you can do about your cravings. Make sure you understand that sugar is doing more harm to your body than just giving you a sugar headache, take this opportunity to learn from your headache that you shouldn’t be putting large amounts of sugar in your mouth and you need to make a change.

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Metabolic syndrome is not really a disease but a syndrome and what I would call a “pre-disease” or a condition that you get before you get really sick. Metabolic syndrome is also known as syndrome X, or metabolic syndrome X, or even insulin resistance syndrome.

There are four primary symptoms of metabolic syndrome: central obesity, insulin resistance, hypertension, dyslipidemia (all explained below). Having metabolic syndrome brings with it a risk for other diseases (mostly heart disease, stroke, and type-2 diabetes) and the potential for a shortened life.

The most important thing to know about metabolic syndrome, though, is that it acts like a canary in a coal mine warning you that you are at risk for much worse things to come (that is, if you don’t stop it in its tracks). The good news is that you can change what you are doing right now and avoid much of the pain that comes with having diabetes or heart disease.

Symptoms of Metabolic Syndrome

How do you know if you have metabolic syndrome? While the definitions for metabolic syndrome change from medical group to medical group, most groups agree on the following definition for the syndrome:

• Central Obesity: Central obesity (see picture on this page) is where most of the fat that you carry is about your center or stomach. The other major way to carry extra weight is considered pear shape (where excess fat surrounds the waist) and is not associated with metabolic syndrome. Waist measurements usually determine central obesity with measurements of over 40 inches (102 cm) for men or over 35 inches (88 cm) for women.

• Insulin resistance: Insulin resistance is where the cells of your body are resistant to insulin. Diabetes is a condition where the cells are very resistant to insulin, but there are all sorts of grades of insulin resistance before diabetes. Usually people start out somewhat insulin resistant and then it gets worse as times progresses. Insulin resistance can be measured by a fasting glucose more than 100 mg/dL (or you are taking blood sugar medications). Read more about insulin resistance here: Insulin Resistance

• Dyslipidemia:  Dyslipidemia is a state where your blood fats are either too high or too low. You are familiar with many of these blood fats such as cholesterol and triglycerides. Dyslipidemia in metabolic syndrome usually is defined as having high triglycerides (over 150 mg/dL) and a low HDL cholesterol (less than 40 mg/dL for men and less than 50 mg/dL for women).

• Hypertension: Hypertension or high blood pressure greater than 130 systolic (top number) and 90 diastolic (bottom number).

What Can You do About Metabolic Syndrome?

If you are wondering what you can do about metabolic syndrome, the answer is a lot! While you might be looking for a pill that you can take, that is not your answer. The only way to change metabolic syndrome is to change what you are eating and how much you are exercising.

Here is my plan for stopping metabolic syndrome:

• Stop eating sugar: Okay, I know this is easier said than done, but you have to kick your sugar habit. I have a plan for kicking sugar (and foods that act like sugar) and you can take a look at it here: 30 Sugar Free Days.

• Exercise: You need to get at least 20 minutes, but more like 40 minutes of intense exercise in a day. Pick something like biking, swimming, running or other consistent exercise and practice it every day.

• Eat More Vegetables: Every chance you get you should put something fresh into your mouth. Find a way to incorporate vegetables into every meal you eat (yes, even breakfast).

Metabolic syndrome may seem like a one-way dead end street to heart disease and diabetes, but it doesn’t have to be that way. Change what you are doing today and you can change who you are (and maybe how long you are going to live).

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Insulin resistance is a modern day problem that is the result of eating modern day foods. What insulin resistance means is that the cells in your body are resistant to insulin. While this may not sound like a big deal, it is. The more insulin resistant your cells become, the high your blood sugar rises (and your body hates high blood sugar). Let’s take a look at just how insulin resistance happens in your body.

How Insulin Resistance Forms

If your blood sugar shoots up high occasionally, there is really no problem. The problem comes when your blood sugar is high over a long period of time or high blood sugar happens every day. To understand this, you have to understand what is happening in the cells of your body.

The cells in your body only want so much sugar; they just want enough sugar to do their jobs. When there is constantly too much insulin and too much sugar in the blood stream (like when you eat sugar at every meal) the only response that the cells have is to remove the doorways (receptors) from the outside of the cell. This process is called down-regulation of receptors. When insulin receptors disappear throughout the body, it creates a whole-body effect called “insulin resistance,” meaning the cells of the body become “resistant” to insulin.

Let’s take a look at what happens to the cell when the body removes receptors, in the following diagram the yellow represents the cell and the blue thingies are the receptors.

A cell goes from having this many receptors (normal):

To having, say, this many:

Now, this is a bit tricky to understand, but imagine if all the cells in your body began to respond to too much sugar by removing their insulin receptors. If every cell in the body removed its receptors, the doorways to sugar, what would happen? The end result would be that you’d have more sugar in your blood.

Why?

Remember that insulin used to be able to push sugar out of the blood stream and put it into the cells. The cells, though, are now getting rid of receptors because there is too much sugar around most of the time. The cells are becoming resistant to insulin. So, even though there is sugar in the blood stream and a lot of insulin, the sugar has no where to go because the cells won’t allow it in. So, now, where does the sugar go? It stays in the blood stream.

But you also have to remember, more sugar in the blood stream creates what? The answer is more sugar in the blood stream leads to more insulin. When your body becomes insulin resistant, the next time you eat a meal, you have a higher amount of sugar in your blood because the cells are refusing to take on that sugar. So, more sugar in the blood stream means that the body will now release more insulin. Do you see the vicious cycle that is starting to develop? More insulin circulating in the body will eventually lead to fewer receptors on cells, which will lead to more sugar in the blood, and more insulin, and fewer receptors and…you get the idea.

Cells will eventually look like this as they get rid of even more receptors:

Now you understand how insulin resistance can develop from eating a high amount of sugar every day. The association between eating sugars and the creation of insulin resistance is, however, far from being a proven phenomenon in human beings. Animal studies demonstrate a relationship between eating sugars and foods that act like sugar and the development of insulin resistance,[i]^,[ii] but the medical community is far from convinced. Like much of the scientific study on sugar and health, much more research is needed.

Over Time

Okay. Let’s see if we can pull this all together. Watch what happens over time, not to the individual cell, but in the whole body. The following chart shows how blood sugar and insulin react to each other and how insulin resistance builds over time when you are consuming sugar foods. (click on the image below to see full size).

What happens over time with insulin resistance is that the body can no longer produce enough insulin and, eventually, insulin production fails. When the body can no longer produce enough insulin or the cells have become resistant to insulin, your body is no longer able to keep blood sugar within a narrow range. This is called diabetes, a situation where the blood sugar is very high.

What Can You Do?

There is a lot that you can do to avoid insulin resistance, the chief among these is to stop eating sugar and foods that act like sugar. I have program called the 30 Sugar Free Days Program where you can join with other people who are giving sugar the boot.

Besides stopping the sugar feast, you can exercise, lower the amount of saturated fat in your diet and eat as many vegetables as you can. Insulin resistance is not a death sentence, but a wake-up call. There is a lot you can do to stop and reverse insulin resistance, but you have to get moving today.

[ii] Daly M: Sugars, insulin sensitivity, and the postprandial state. Am J Clin Nutr. 2003 Oct;78(4):865S-872S.

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Want to know how many calories you should eat to lose weight? The answer is simple: If You Want to Lose Weight, Calories Don’t Matter. You might be a bit surprised by that answer (especially when doctors, nutritionists, and government agencies all have suggestions for how many calories you should eat if you want to lose weight). The truth is simple: your body is not a calorimeter. What is a calorimeter? It is the machine that food scientists use to determine how many calories food contains (see picture on this page). The problems with using a machine to decide the value of food are many, but the biggest problem is that a calorimeter has no storage device (the way that you do).

What is a Calorie?

The first thing you need to know is what a calorie is. Here is the definition: A calorie is the energy needed to increase the temperature of 1 gram of water by 1 °C. If you are wondering what that has to do with how much you should eat to lose weight, you are not alone. Food scientists stick an apple in the calorimeter and measure how much energy it produces when they burn it and that (supposedly) tells them how much energy you get from eating that apple. Scientists will tell you that a calorimeter is a good substitution for what happens in the body (but don’t you believe it).

Most people would say that a calorie is the amount of energy that is stored in the food that we eat (and, basically, that is correct), but not the whole story.

If you take the common scientific wisdom about calories as truth, then you would say that everything that you eat has energy in it and that certain foods contain more energy than others. But that doesn’t have anything to do with weight loss. In order to lose weight, you have to focus on which foods you are eating, not how many calories the foods have.

Calories in Calorie out is Bunk

In order to lose weight (food scientists suggest) you have to burn more calories than you take in, but what they forget is what happens to calories that you cannot use right away and there are ways to change what you are storing and what you are not.

You want to store calories? That is easy just keep your blood sugar high.

When your blood sugar is high, three things happen:

• No conversion of fat into energy: Since your body has enough energy running around your blood (in the form of glucose) it will not covert fats into energy. It takes energy to change fat into glucose and almost no energy to store fat as fat.
• No conversion of fructose into energy: In a strange twist, it seems easier for the body to store fructose (a sugar) as fat than it is to change it into energy (glucose). So that soda that is high in fructose goes straight to your hips.
• Fat storage increases: High sugar means high insulin (the hormone that controls sugar) and high insulin means that you will start to store fat.

As you can see, storing calories is easy when your blood sugar is high and the opposite is also true (keeping your blood sugar low means that you are not storing calories).

How Many Calories Should you Eat?

I know you grew up with the idea of calories and are used to thinking about them when you want to lose weight, but here is where you have to change your mind. Instead of thinking how many calories should you eat to lose weight you need to start thinking about what kind of foods you need to eat to lose weight. The beauty of this approach is amazing; you no longer have to count calories and you can eat as much as you want (just pick the right foods).

Here are the basic steps of good weight loss:

• Keep sugar out of your life (this means you also have to avoid the foods that act like sugar).
• Eat plenty of fruits and vegetables: While you might have to watch that you are not eating too many starchy vegetables and sweet fruits, vegetables and fruits are the basis of a good diet.
• Exercise: Yes, you have to get out and move your buns around to lose some weight.
• Avoid dairy: Dairy foods are a common food allergens and tend to pack on the pounds. Try a week without and dairy foods (cheese, milk, yogurt…) and see what happens to your weight.
• Limit meat: Meat should be an occasional meal and not an everyday (or everymeal) food. Try eating meat on the weekends only or avoid it altogether until your weight stabilizes.

Remember, if you want to lose weight, you have to stop saying “how many calories should I eat to lose weight?” and start saying “what foods should I eat to lose weight?”

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Most weight loss success stories sound pretty much the same. The stories all tell of people losing incredible amounts of weight in short periods of time using some new and crazy diet. But the question you really want to ask is: Did the Weight Stay Off? Everyone reading this page has probably lost weight (maybe even a lot of weight), but the reason why you are here today is because you are looking for a weight loss success story where people take weight off and they actually keep it off. Let’s face it, the only weight loss success story you really want to hear about is yours.

What Works and What doesn’t

After reviewing and experimenting with hundreds of diets in thousands of people, I can tell you something that may surprise you: All Diets Work. From Akins, to South Beach, The Hollywood Diet, The Cabbage Soup Diet, Master Cleanse, yes, even the Grapefruit diet… they all work.

The question is which of these diets work in the long term? Which of these diets can people lose weight and keep it off?

I have two standards for deciding if a diet works in the long term.

• The first is can people actually do the diet long term? When I ask this question of the above diets, most fail. It is hard to eat only bacon and butter (so Atkins and South Beach are out), likewise Master Cleanse, Cabbage and Grapefruit diets can only be done short term. And as far as I can figure out, the Hollywood diet is just a “sell you another product” diet and no one has the money to keep doing that very long.

• The second question I ask is: are you healthier on the diet? Once again, Atkins and South Beach are the first to drop off because eating nothing but high fat and protein foods will do nothing for your longevity. Each of the other diets (Cabbage, Master and Grapefruit) all appear to be healthier, but they are unsustainable.

What’s Left?

After much experimenting I can tell you that the only long term weight loss success stories come from people who make a life change, they change the way that they are eating and living their lives. They realize that their weight gain is a product of the environment that they live in and that going on a short-term diet does nothing because as soon as they are off the diet and back to eating what they normally eat, the weight comes right back. The problem with weight gain is the way that we live our lives and our lives have to change if we are going to lose weight.

Here are the elements of that life change:

• Exercise: A successful diet is one that starts with exercise. It doesn’t have to be anything too strenuous at first, but you do have to commit time to your effort (at least 30-40 minutes a day).
• Vegetables: You have to eat more fruits and vegetables. I suggest eating around 80 to 90 percent of your diet as fruits and vegetables. If that sounds like a lot, it is. Make changes slowly and add as many fruits and vegetables into your diet as possible.
• Fat and Protein: I think humans are designed to eat protein, just not as much as we do. I think that eating meat should be a once-a-week activity and not an every-meal activity.
• Sugar: You got to kick sugar and the foods that act like sugar. Check out my program for kicking sugar: 30 Sugar Free Days.
• Diary: Dairy foods are the worst foods you can eat if you want to lose weight. Drop the dairy and drop the weight.

Remember, if you want to lose weight you are going to have to change the way that you are living. Your own personal weight loss success story comes from realizing where you are and where you want to be and making steps towards that every day.

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Have you ever wondered which is worse: fat or sugar?

You have probably heard that carbohydrates can lead to weight gain (and this might lead you to think that sugar is worse) but you may have also heard that fat can lead to weight gain (and this may lead you thinking fat is worse). With these two thoughts in your head you can find yourself bouncing from a low-fat diet to a low-carb diet and then back to a low-fat diet.

If you are feeling confused about which is worse (fat or sugar) you are not alone.

This debate has been going on for a long time and has created a truckload of books, none of which address the real issue. Here is the truth: both sugar and fat are bad for you and to make matters worse they often work together to lengthen your waistline and shorten your lifeline.

To understand why fat and sugar work against your health plan you first have to understand what goes on in your body when you eat each of these foods and then understand what happens when you combine them.

Fat to Fat

There are two reasons why fat adds to your weight.

The first is that fat is very energy dense. If you body decides to use the fat you eat as fuel then it only takes a little bit of fat to create a lot of energy. Unfortunately for all of us, our bodies rarely use the fat we eat as fuel (read on).

The second reason dietary fat lead to body fat is that changing food fat into energy takes energy.  In order to use fat as an energy source, your body has to change fat into glucose (the basic energy source in your body). Your body really doesn’t want to spend any energy it doesn’t have to spend changing fat into energy, so it is much simpler to just store that fat.

Sugar Equals Fat

Sugar is also turned into fat in your body because your body doesn’t like to waste energy. When you drink a soda, or eat something sugary, your body cannot possibly use all that sugar energy. Your body’s solution to extra sugar energy running around the body is to store it. This is why low-carb diets work, if you keep your blood sugar low then you also keep your body from converting blood sugar into body fat.

Remember that sugar itself is easy to turn into fat, but there are also foods that act like sugar that will just as easily be turned into fat.

The Double Whammy

To understand why both sugar and fat are bad (especially when they are combined) you have to put yourself in the position of being the energy tsar of your body. Imagine if it was your job to determine where you get energy for the whole body. Your job (as tsar) is to make sure that there is enough glucose running around in your blood to meet all your body’s needs.

Now that you are in charge of energy distribution, imagine what happens after you go to your favorite hamburger restaurant.

The first thing you are served at the restaurant is a soda. It takes only a few minutes after you drink that soda for your blood sugar to rise. If you are the energy tsar and are looking at the energy needs of the body then you are happy that you now how enough energy to run the whole body.

But here is what happens: you keep drinking that soda waiting for your food to arrive and now the as the energy tsar you have to start making choices. What do you do with that extra sugar? You are probably going to start storing it, but it gets even more complicated when you start to eat the rest of the meal.

Here comes fat from the hamburger, French fries and cheese you are eating. Is there any way that you are going to spend the energy to convert that fat into energy? No, you have more energy than you need because of the soda you drank earlier. If you are a smart energy tsar, you are going to simply store that fat as fat and then start storing the extra sugar (now from desert) as fat too.

Which is Worse, Fat or Sugar?

The question about which is worse (fat or sugar) is that they both cause us problems and especially when they are combined in a meal. The low-carb people got it half right and the low-fat people got it half right. If you want to lose weight, you need to find a diet plan that avoids both fats and sugars.

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How do you feel these days? If you feel a bit sluggish, tired, bloated, fuzzy in the head, have headaches, belly aches, or just don’t feel right then it may be time for a sugar detox. Sugar is everywhere (even in foods you don’t suspect, see: Hidden Sugars) and it is hard work doing a sugar detox and avoiding the white stuff all together. But a sugar detox is well worth the effort if you want to lose a few pounds and get back to feeling like your old self again.

Why is Sugar a Problem?

Oh sugar, you cause so many problems, let me count the ways:

1. Addictive: As you might have guessed, sugar is addictive. But what you may not have guessed is just how addictive sugar can be. When scientists test rats addicted to sugar they find that the addiction to sugar is just as strong as other addictions (like cigarettes, alcohol and even hard drugs). If you doubt this, try staying away from all sugar for just one day and you will see what a powerful hold that white stuff has over you. When you do a sugar detox you have to battle your addictions.
2. Health Problems: While many people in the medical community think that eating even large amounts of sugar is no problem, research is now showing that sugar is at least partially responsible for diabetes, heart disease, obesity and maybe even some cancers.
3. Weight Gain: The more sugar you eat, the more you are going weigh. The reason for this is that your body doesn’t want to waste the energy that you eat. Your body only needs so much fuel and when you eat too much sugar it is going to store all that extra energy as fat. Most people who go on a sugar detox lose a lot of weight.
4. Hurts Your Brain: Sugar is responsible for that fuzzy thinking you get in the middle of the day and can lead to headaches, problems focusing and maybe even depression. (see: What Sugar Does to Your Brain)

How to do a Sugar Detox

Going on a sugar detox is easy, right? All you have to do is stop eating all sugar. Well… it is easy to say you should do a sugar detox but much harder to actually do.

There are two obstacles that you have to overcome when you do a sugar detox.

• The first is the addictive nature of sugar. The bad news about a sugar detox is that the cravings that come when you stop eating sugar are incredibly powerful. But here is the good news: it gets easier. It really gets easier if you have support from friends and family. Most people who go through a sugar detox find that the first few days are hard and then they feel better than they have in a while.

• The second is that kicking sugar alone is not enough, you also have to stop eating the foods that act like sugar. The reason for this is that many foods you eat raise your blood sugar more than eating table sugar; so to truly detox from sugar you have to avoid the foods that act like sugar to (see: Foods that act Like Sugar).

I have created a program called the 30 Sugar Free Days Program that will help you with your sugar detox. The program includes daily e-mails and has a group on Facebook for the support that you need. The program is designed to help you stay away from both sugar and the foods that act like sugar.

Yes, a sugar detox is not easy, but it is well worth the effort and you will feel better than you have in a while once you given sugar a kick out the door.

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This question comes across my desk quite often: which is better, a low-carb or a high-carb diet? Because I am so squarely against sugar and foods that act like sugar people assume that I’m automatically in the low-carb diet group. It is almost as if people think that there are only two ways lose weight, you either go with the low-carb (and high fat and protein) crowd, or you go with high-carb (and low fat and protein) crowd. Both of these groups miss the point altogether. Of the two, I would have to say that the high-carb believers have it the most wrong. Humans are not meant to eat grains or sugar in any large amount (if at all). Yes, it is carbohydrates (sugars and foods that act like sugar) that add to your waistline, but that doesn’t mean that the bulk of the rest of your diet should be fat and protein.

What the Low-Carb Lovers Get Right

The low-carb crowd understands that eating carbohydrates adds to our weight. There is no doubt about the connection between eating sugars and foods that act like sugar and the fact that as we eat these simple sugars they get added to our waistlines in the form of fat.

The reasons why the body stores excess sugar are many:

• The first has to do with our basic energy needs. Your body runs on glucose and is the major energy source for all of the cells in your body. Your liver makes the decision of what to do with the energy in your body. But when you are eating sugars and foods that act like sugar all the time your liver has no need to (say) use fat as an energy source because it has all of its energy needs already met. It also means that your body will not convert other sugars (such as fructose) into energy because it is easier to store fructose as fat than it is to convert it into glucose.

• The second has to do with the elevation of insulin (the hormone that controls blood sugar) every time you eat something sugary. Insulin and produces another molecule called glycerol-3-phospate (G3P) and it is G3P that allows fats to go from the blood stream into the fat storage cells. Every time your blood sugar rises, you are creating the conditions for fat storage.

What the Low-Carbers got wrong

When we talk about fat storage high sugar is not the only thing that will raise insulin, protein also increases insulin.[i] There are also other ways to store fat, another molecule called Acylation Stimulating Protein (ASP) will do the same thing as glycerol-3-phospate and it is not dependant on insulin.[ii]

But probably the worst part of the low-carb groups insistence on high protein and high fat meals is that they miss the very foods we should be eating a lot of: vegetables and fruits. The research behind the quality of nutrition in vegetables and fruits cannot be questioned (see my post on Vegetables and Fruits), they are essential for building good, healthy bodies.

If you are on a low-carb diet, try at least eating low-carb vegetables. Don’t miss out on the life-sustaining nutrients of these foods just because you want to lose weight. You don’t want to lose weight and give yourself other problems. Here is a list of the lowest carb veggies:

• Asparagus
• Bean sprouts
• Beet greens
• Broccoli
• Cabbage
• Cauliflower
• Celery
• Cucumber
• Endive lettuce
• Mustard greens
• Radishes
• Spinach
• Swiss chard
• Watercress.

[ii] Redinger RN. The physiology of adiposity. J Ky Med Assoc. 2008 Feb;106(2):53-62.

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Losing weight is not as difficult as it is keeping the weight off (you probably know that). But keeping the weight off is not as big of a mystery as you might think. You really don’t have to resort to some crazy diet plan like eating only rice or grapefruit, you do (however) have to change what you are doing. Remember the definition of crazy is trying the same thing over and over but expecting new results. In order to lose weight you have to change what you are doing.

If weight loss is your goal, here are the top 10 tips to lose weight.

1. Stop Short Thinking

Most people think that they can go on a diet and lose the weight that they want to lose and once they achieve their goal they can go back to eating the way that they were eating before their diet (not realizing that the way that they were eating is the cause of their weight gain). When you are looking for a new diet plan, find one that you can live with the rest of your life. Yes, you read that correctly: The Rest of Your Life. The reason why you have a hard time losing weight and keeping it off is because you are eating foods that are not meant to go in a human’s mouth. When you are looking for a diet, pick one that nourishes your body and allows you to lose weight. What does that look like? Read on.

2. You Don’t Have to Spend a Lot of Money

Any plan where you have to shell out a lot of money is a bad idea. Weight loss is simple (well, maybe not so simple to do, but simple to understand). In order to lose weight you simply have to give your body what it needs and your body will respond by giving you what you want: a lighter, healthier body.

3. Don’t Trust Prepackaged Anything

If you want to lose weight, you are going to have to stop letting other people make your food. Both restaurants and food companies want to make you happy and in order to make you happy they are going to fill their food with three magic ingredients: Sugar, Salt and Fat. These three are the deadly ingredients of the dietpocalypse are guaranteed to bring you back to the table over and over again, but also guaranteed to add to your waistline.

4. Remove Food Allergies

Most people don’t know that they are carrying around a lot of extra weight in the form of water weight. Your body holds on to water when you are eating foods that you are allergic to. How do you know if this might be you? Try an allergy elimination diet (see my article: I’m Allergic to Everything). The most common food allergies are probably the foods that you like most: wheat (and gluten-containing foods), nuts, shellfish, dairy, soy, corn and eggs.

5. Eat Your Veggies

You don’t eat enough veggies. How do I know that you don’t eat enough veggies? Because no one eats enough vegetables. You may know that eating enough vegetables is a good thing to do (after all, your mom told you to do it), but veggies are not only good for you but they are also good for your weight loss. Researchers have shown that people who eat a lot of vegetables weigh less than those that don’t.

6. Eat Your Fruits

Remember what I just told you about veggies? The same is true of fruit. If you want to lose weight, find a way to get as many fruits into your body as possible.

7. Exercise

I’m guessing that this is not the first time you have heard that you need to exercise in order to lose weight but I’m going to mention it here because exercise is critical to your weight loss. The only way to get your metabolism back is to make sure you are building new muscle. Get out there today and get some exercise.

8. Cut Out Dairy

While many people are allergic to dairy products (and that can cause weight gain) that is not the main reason why you want to kick dairy out of your life. You want to stop eating dairy foods because they are a major source of fat in your diet. After you read that sentence, you might be thinking that you will just switch to low-fat dairy products but even that won’t work because low-fat dairy products are still high in fat. Read the labels on dairy products and compute the number of fat calories compared to the number of total calories and you will find that even skim milk is around 40 percent fat – those milk producers are tricky when the calculate the total fat calories by volume (this is why they can say skim milk is only 2 percent fat). Worried about calcium? Check out this post: Calcium Myths

9. Reduce Meat

Reduce or eliminate meat from your diet is another great way to kick the fat out of your diet. People who are vegan or vegetarian have a much less chance of being overweight than the rest of us. Try a one-month trial of removing meat from your diet and see what it can do for your waistline.

10. Stop the Sugar

If you want to lose weight, you have to stop the sugar insanity. Sugar is easily turned into fat in our bodies and kicking it out of your life is a great way to keep the pounds off. But let me warn you that if you are trying to stop sugar you also have to stop eating the foods that act like sugar in our bodies.

There you go: Top 10 Tips to Lose Weight.

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