Why Diets Fail (Because You're Addicted to Sugar) (19 page)

Our natural satiety signals generally work really, really well when they aren’t being squashed by the powerful urges that may result from an addiction to food. When you are addicted to sugar, you bypass or ignore these satiety signals, which leads you to eat more than you need and you gain weight. Your body only
wants
you to eat as much as it needs to function, but if you’re addicted to food, your addiction may lead you to eat more than you need. When you reduce your intake of the foods that promote your overeating, you’ll inevitably decrease your caloric intake and lose weight. Further, the quality of the calories you will likely consume will be better than before, and this will also assist you with your weight-loss goals.

How Exercise Fits In

We have so much going on in our lives that exercise (along with eating right) often ends up on the back burner. Instead of seeing exercise as something that brings us pleasure, it becomes something that we never seem to have time to do and we end up feeling guilty
about it. Exercise should be something that you
want
to do, not necessarily something that you
have
to do.

Also, your overeating of sugars and other carbohydrates may result in periods of withdrawal, which may leave you feeling lethargic, anxious, annoyed, and tired. The dips in blood glucose levels that you experience from bouts of excess sugar intake will add to these feelings of lethargy. Once you reduce the amount of sugars that you consume and lessen your dependence on them, and as a result get rid of the side effects of lethargy, you may actually look forward to exercising. You don’t have to be a cycling fanatic or wear a sweatband to Zumba class, exercising can be as simple as taking a walk in your neighborhood, biking with a friend, or going for a swim.

There are several reasons, aside from weight loss, that exercise is important. If exercising with weight loss as your goal has not been effective in the past, you may find some new motivation in recent scientific studies. Your mind can benefit tremendously from regular exercise. For example, studies using animal models have shown that exercise can result in the development of new neurons in the brain and can also improve memory.
¹²
Studies in humans provide evidence that exercise may affect mood. For instance, evidence suggests that exercise may help to reduce depression, stress, and anxiety,
¹³
which, one might argue, may also help to reduce emotional overeating.

In the beginning phases of this diet, you may experience symptoms of withdrawal, which we will cover in more depth in Step 6. During this time, there is nothing like exercise to make you feel better. While exercise may not seem appealing to you at the time, you will definitely feel better if, as Nike says, you “just do it!” Also, there is a biological basis for exercise being rewarding. Have you ever heard of a runner’s high? When people exercise, chemicals called endorphins are released in their brains, and these chemicals are associated with pleasure. But exercise doesn’t always feel good when you first start a regimen. Studies measuring endorphin levels
during exercise found that they were the highest when participants finished exercising,
^14
,
15
indicating that endorphin release increases with activity, which may explain why the first few minutes of exercise can seem the hardest to get through. Once you start moving and the endorphins start flowing, you feel good.

Here is another reason why exercise is important: Once you kick your addiction to sugar, you may find that you feel the urge to replace the pleasure that you used to derive from food with something else. This is actually a well-known concept in the addiction literature, referred to as addiction transfer. Most commonly, this concept is discussed within the context of drug addiction, wherein an addict might transfer from one drug addiction to another. Have you ever been to an Alcoholic Anonymous meeting? People at these meetings are sometimes heavy smokers and coffee drinkers. This is a perfect example of addiction transfer. They replace their addiction to alcohol with other (not ideal) addictions to nicotine and caffeine.

The same thing may happen with addiction to food. There is some evidence that when people quit compulsively overeating, they turn to other unhealthy substitutions. For example, a trend has been observed in which people who experience dramatic weight loss following bariatric (gastric bypass) surgery are at risk for substance abuse.
^16
,
17

It’s obviously not healthy to substitute one addiction for another, but it is advisable to replace an unhealthy source of pleasure with a healthier one, such as exercise. Remember, palatable foods and exercise can both activate reward systems in the brain, so perhaps you can replace the pleasure that you used to get from eating excess sugars and other carbohydrates with the pleasures of exercise. Sound too good to be true? It isn’t. You may find that you will welcome exercise because once you’ve lost weight and you’ve gotten your food intake under control, you’ll feel better and you’ll have more energy.

Simple thermodynamics says that if you’re more active and burning more calories while maintaining the same amount of calorie consumption, you will lose weight. But again, forced exercise is not the key. The worst way to get someone to exercise and participate in sports is to tell them that they
have
to do it. But we certainly encourage you to incorporate walks, bike rides, or whatever other activities you find fun into your routine, even for just thirty minutes each day to get you moving. Try not to view it as a chore, but rather as way to make your weight-loss goals happen even faster. Not only will you burn calories, but you will also tone your muscles and feel better about yourself.

By now, you probably have a good idea of which foods you should avoid, but you may still have a lot of questions as to which foods you should eat instead. These details and specific examples will be discussed more fully in the next chapter, but in brief, as you progress through the Sugar Freedom Plan, you will move away from a diet dominated by sodas, junk foods, breads, and pastas, and instead move to a diet in which you’ll eat things like chicken, beef, fish, seafood, pork, nuts, whole fruits, vegetables, and eggs. Most of these foods are very high in protein and contain almost no sugar or other carbohydrates. Because of their high protein content, these types of foods are more satiating, which means that, when you eat them, you’ll stay full—and feel full—for a longer period of time than you would if you were eating carbohydrates. How does this happen?

Well, when we eat, satiety signals are released from our stomach and intestines that tell our brains we have had enough. There is evidence to suggest that our satiety signals function less effectively following the overconsumption of sugars,
¹⁸
and a number of studies have reported that protein intake results in increased satiety compared to consumption of carbohydrates.
¹⁹
The beauty of this plan
is that you will not want to overeat these foods in the way that you might overeat carbohydrates, because they are satisfying, making you feel full, and you aren’t eating these foods for the hedonic pleasure that might drive the overconsumption of sugars.

It is true that fatty foods, including certain meats, are more calorically dense, which means they typically have more calories per serving than some foods high in carbohydrates. But, from this, you cannot conclude that eating fatty foods will make you fat. This was the erroneous conclusion of many who adopted the fat-free weight-loss plan. As a result of cutting out fat, many people ended up eating more carbohydrates, much more than one should eat if one wants to lose weight. Also, when you eat low-carbohydrate, high-fat foods, your glucose and insulin levels don’t spike and quickly decrease as they can with some carbohydrates, so it is less likely that you will be hungry soon after eating.

However, just because you don’t have to count calories doesn’t mean you should abuse that privilege. You still need to be mindful of what you are eating. You should think about an appropriate portion size for the foods you’re eating and reflect on how satisfied you feel after eating them.

One of the big benefits of the Sugar Freedom Plan is that over the course of approximately two to three months (for most people), you will wean yourself from your dependence on added sugars and excessive carbohydrates. As this happens, you’ll begin to see and feel changes in the way that you approach food. No longer will you want to binge eat, stuff your face, or think that you have to eat gut-busting amounts of food in order to feel satisfied after every meal. You’ll begin to let your satiety signals do their job and tell you when you have had enough. Your food intake will be dictated by your stomach, not an unhealthy relationship with food. So, as you overcome your sugar addiction, you can expect to eat smaller portions of food and thus weight loss can ensue. In addition, as you
lose weight, you’ll find that you concurrently lose your cravings for sugars, and your desired portion sizes will decrease. Remember, on average, the less you weigh, the fewer calories you need to maintain your weight, so your body will ask you for less food as time goes on and as you continue to lose weight.

You will see that once you lose your cravings for food, which are caused by your addiction, your life will no longer revolve solely around eating and obsessing about food. You’ll finally believe that it is possible to settle down to three square meals a day, with a couple of small snacks in between—a meal pattern that in the past may have seemed like an impossibly small amount of food to eat. You’ll eat enough so that you can go about your daily routine, but your daily routine will no longer involve obsessing about food.

Are you wondering how you’re going to do all of this? In the next chapter, we will discuss how to begin this process and offer specific suggestions of foods and drinks that are encouraged within this eating plan.

FOOD FOR THOUGHT

After reading through each of the five phases outlined in this chapter, which phase(s) do you think may be the most difficult for you, and why?

Think of at least one strategy that may be helpful for you as you seek to accomplish each goal
.

• What strategy can you use to eliminate sugary beverages?

• What strategy can you use to eliminate junk foods?

• What strategy can you use to reduce carbohydrates?

• What strategy can you use to reduce hidden sugars?

• What strategy can you use to maintain your new way of eating?

STEP 5

What to Eat and What
Not
to Eat

“
Thou shouldst eat to live, not live to eat
.”

—
SOCRATES

Up to this point, most of what has been discussed has been somewhat bad news: diets usually fail, sugary foods can have properties of addiction, and you have to quit eating certain foods that you think you love. Unfortunately, sometimes the truth is a bitter pill to swallow. If you’re depressed from hearing about the doom and gloom, then this is the chapter that you’ve been waiting for.

This is the chapter where you learn about the kinds of foods that you
can
eat. Once you know
what
to eat, an equally important question is what you should do about the foods you still desire but know you should now avoid. Avoiding foods can be difficult,
especially in our modern food environment where sugar-rich, high-calorie foods have become a staple. This is where substitutions and alternative foods come into play; they are key to your new way of eating. This chapter will review some of the primary foods that you should stay away from in order to reduce your dependence on sugars and suggest appropriate alternatives that you can eat to satisfy your cravings. You’ll see that eating the right foods can actually be pretty easy, especially once you discover some appropriate alternatives to those foods that feed into your addictive overeating.