The Simple Truth on Sugar

Ready for the hardest thing to give up on your journey to wellness? In my opinion it isn’t bread or a favorite snack food but it is the ubiquitous ingredient sugar. Not only is sugar in so many foods that you’d never think of off the top of your head, but your body tends to love sugar, and as such, sugar can be very tough to remove from the diet.

I’ll first off break the shocking news, sugar is not a health food. Now, of course we all knew that. Sugar is now being thought of as a food with a one of the highest risk to our health due to its negative impact on insulin. Insulin tells the body to store ingredients as fat and when we are having a desire to eat unhealthy foods, the last thing we need is MORE signals to tells us to eat more food. It is a vicious cycle of sugar-laden foods and drinks which can be quite scary.

So why is sugar so hard to not eat? Sugar is known to cause a euphoric drug-like effect in our brains and gives us a nice jolt of happiness. In the end, anything that releases dopamine is hard to stop doing. The euphoria isn’t all good as sugar’s high will crash as our blood sugar drops and we experience a dip in mood and energy. To return to our normal state, our brain coordinates with our hormones a way to get our energy up and that’s why we experience craving after craving. In this way, sugar becomes addictive on a biological level.

Sugar cravings are completely a physiological rollercoaster ride of hormones rising and falling. If you are serious about banishing cravings, cut out all added sugars until you are “fat adapted.” This means anything containing sugar or one of its many pseudonyms needs to be avoided.

By The Good People of Simply GOODFATS