Besides being created differently, sugars arehidden in many of today’s processed foods. J J Virgin, a nutritionist and fitness trainer, has written a book that comprehensively explains how these sugars are hidden.
The book, ‘The Sugar Impact Diet: Drop 7 Sugars to Lose Up to 10 Pounds in Just 2 Weeks’, also presents practical tips on how you can wean yourself from this unhealthy ingredient. While many people believe that all-natural sugar is fine to eat, she says:
“Sugar is really public enemy number one. That’s why I chose to focus on it. I don’t think addedsugar is really the problem; I think it’s what’s in a lot of our food that we don’t recognize [as sugar].
Whether it’s having apple juice (which is worse for you than a soda), or having a yogurt sweetened with fruit juice concentrate, or whether you’re just thinking that fruits are free for all, these are all creating problems.
I wanted to create a structured program that could help someone break free of those sugar cravings, drop the weight forever, and then let them go back and [do a food] challenge… in order to connect the dots between what happens when they drink one of those big fruit smoothies that are supposed to be so healthy.”
YOUR BODY MUST BURN FAT AS ITS PRIMARY FUEL, IN ORDER TO END SUGAR CRAVINGS:
According to JJ, in doesn’t matter where the sugar comes from, natural or artificial; it is all the same thing to the body. As such, you must break free from your body’s continual demand for yet another dose of sugar, to be able to experience incredible levels of new found energy plus clarity of mind. You can achieve this by retraining your body to burn fat as its main source of energy, instead of sugar.
In her book, JJ explains the gradual process of getting your body from burning sugar to burning fat as its main fuel, in a bid to maximize your chances of success. She explains:
“There’s got to be a transition period, where you go from sugar burner to getting your body to be able to start to burn fat again.
You have to taper down from where your starting point is, which is what I call a Sneaky Sugar Inventory, of things you would never think about (like sundried tomatoes and marinara sauce) that we’re just using like crazy not realizing how much sugar this is actually adding into our food.”
THE SUGAR IMPACT SCALES: ANOTHER PESPECTIVE OF LOOKING AT SUGAR
First, you need to weigh yourself, in addition to measuring your waist-to-hip ratio. This is to know your starting point. Secondly, do an initial inventory of every hidden sugar in your diet.
You’ll get this information by reading the food labels, including products you could never expect to contain sugar, like that jar of pickles, sauces, marinades, and condiments. JJ’s book has a list of all the sneaky places sugars hide in your diet, and by creating what she dubbed Sugar Impact Scales, JJ created a new perspective of looking at sugar. She explains:
“It looks at fructose grams, glycemic load, nutrient density, and fiber. Bad are fructose and aglycemic load; good are nutrient density and fiber.
Depending on where the food falls, it can either be low, medium, or high-sugar impact. The reason this was so important to me is I keep looking at programs out there, and they either focus on fructose… glycemic index, or glycemic load.
That can be very confusing because it makes things like agave sweetener look great. It makes milk look great… People go, ‘We should have fructose because fructose is low on the glycemic index.’
The difference between fructose and glucose is fructose doesn’t trigger the whole insulin response. Because of that, it doesn’t trigger insulin, leptin, or ghrelin, so it doesn’t tell your body you ate anything. Instead, it just goes to the liver. If there’s no room for it to become glycogen… it starts becoming fat.
You look at that and you go, ‘Okay, food is information. What does fructose say?’ It says, ‘Hey, make fat but don’t tell us we ate. Stay hungry.’ What a nightmare!”
Hence, the basic symptoms of having high-sugar impact include:
- Gas and bloating
- Joint pain
- Fatigue
- Headaches
- Sugar cravings
- Weight loss resistance
If you grade yourself on these symptoms, among others, while keeping track of your weight, hip, and waist, you will get a better picture of how sugar impacts your body, including your progress regarding retraining your body to burn fat, not sugar, as its main fuel.
THE THREE CYCLES OF THE SUGAR IMPACT DIET
For the first cycle, we have the 1-2 weeks long taper cycle, which involves switching from high sugar-impact to medium sugar-impact foods. If you normally eat regular pasta, for instance, you could switch over to quinoa pasta.
Also, she advises you to stretch the time between meals to avert insulin spikes; you shouldn’t be eating every two hours. This is a form of intermittent fasting. When the 1-2 weeks taper down period ends, you can retest yourself on the sugar impact quiz and see how you’ve performed.
There should be a reduction in your symptoms if all is going well. Then, you can move to cycle two, which involves resetting your taste buds and restoring your sugar sensitivity.
“What I’m doing is I’m getting rid of all of the fructose. We’re getting down to five grams or less [per day], just as low as possible because you don’t want your body to be good at processing fructose. One thing we know is that the more fructose you eat, the better you get at handling fructose, which means the faster it goes to your liver, the faster you start making fat, and the more fat you make.
If someone’s used to eating fruit, they eat more fruit, they eat more fruit, and they can handle it. If you never eat any fruit, and you ate a bunch of fruit, you’d be bloated, you’d be gassy, and it’d be horrible. I take fruit out altogether except for things like lemons, limes, avocado, tomato, and olives. And we go down to all low-sugar impact foods. But you’re still eating great stuff. You’re eating wild salmon, grass-fed beef, kale, avocado, nuts and seeds, a little quinoa, legumes, and lentils.”
Most individuals manage to shift from burning sugar to burning fat in this second cycle within a few weeks. However, it make take longer if you are gravely leptin/insulin resistant. She explains:
“The reason it can happen so fast is number one, you’ve got to do that initial one-week [taper] period”
“Whenever you look at a program, you want to jump right into the most intense part, but you can’t because you’ll fail.”
The third cycle involves challenging yourself through reintroduction of some of the medium or even high-sugar impact foods. Many individuals will now feel overwhelmed by the sweetness, or they will feel bloated or utterly ill by the high-sugar food. Consequently, the psychological grip of sweet foods lessen, since you just don’t want to go back to feeling sick once you’re feeling incredibly great.
What’s interesting is that sour taste, like the one of cultured vegetables, is also effective in reducing sweet cravings. This is a double blessing, since fermented vegetables also boost gut health. JJ says:
“It’s a sweet tooth strategy. One of the things that I do in these books is I try to keep it simple and give people simple strategies. But I’m always thinking, “How am I healing their gut with this? How am I improving their gut flora? How are we reducing inflammation?”
HEALTHY SNACK ALTERNATIVES
According to JJ, nuts are excellent for satisfying the occasional hunger pang, especially macadamia nuts because they’re very rich in good fat and low in protein.
However, JJ warns that you must moderate your intake of nuts because they’re normally high in calories, lest you turn a good thing into something bad.
“If you know something’s your trigger, don’t bring it into the house. It doesn’t matter if it’s healthy or unhealthy. But I think if you put them into little serving baggies, that’s a perfect way to go with it. I also like that because most people aren’t home all day long, so I say, ‘Put one in your car. Put it in your purse. Put it in your office so that you have them scattered around if you ever get in trouble.’
Dehydrated kale chips is another healthy snack. Just like the roasted Brussels sprouts (another alternative), it’s quite hard to ‘overdose’ on.
THE MAINTENANCE PHASE
If you frequently feel hungry, say every two hours, then you are burning sugar, instead of fat. You are craving food because sugar is rapidly burning, and the hunger is a sign that your body needs refueling. When burning fat as the primary fuel, you should go for at least five hours without feeling hungry because fat is a much slower-burning fuel. Moreover, sugar cravings are virtually eliminated once you start burning fat, rather than sugar.
While virtually everyone can benefit from implementing a program such as JJ’s, very few actually know how long they’ve to continue eating that way. Hence, the question: What does maintenance look like?
“The maintenance phase is different from the weight loss phase,” JJ explains. “It’s like dating and marriage. Totally different beasts, right? During the maintenance phase—for weight loss—it’s aboutsetting new goals and doing different fitness activities. The biggest thing that I want someone to do is to connect the dots between what they’re eating and how they feel. It’s to lose that sweet tooth that they had and reclaim their sugar sensitivity so they really say, ‘Oh, wow, that’s how sweet a blueberry really is.’
[In the maintenance phase] you’ve got to mix up your exercise; you’ve got to mix up your food… Food is information. You want your food to tell your body to burn fat not sugar, keep steady energy, great focus, and reduce inflammation. It’s the same with exercise. Exercise can be therapeutic or destructive. I do no endurance training at all. I do not believe in endurance training. I did so much endurance training [when I was younger, yet] I was always slightly overweight. I was never lean.”
According to JJ, you need high intensity interval-type exercises, as opposed to endurance training. In fact, endurance training is among the least effective exercises when it comes to weight loss. She also loves exercising in a fasted state, as it helps repair, restore, and rejuvenate the muscle tissues. In choosing between the two exercises, JJ has this to say:
“I kind of play with both of them. Because if you eat a little bit before you work out, you can generally work out harder. If you’re doing resistance training, a lot of times you’re better off having a little bit [of food] before. If you’re doing burst training, ideally here’s what you would do: on burst-training days, do it first thing in the morning. It doesn’t take long anyway. It’s 15 minutes at the most. Ideally, do that a couple of mornings a week, two or three mornings a week. You do your resistance training two times a week, have a little bit of food before; have something really good afterwards, and you’re set.”
CONCLUDING REMARKS
What you consume makes all the difference. When it comes to effectively losing weight, the key trick is to switch your body from burning sugar to burning fat as the primary fuel. To achieve this, you have to reduce your intake of fructose-laden food that instruct your body to:
- Store the sugar as fat
- Eat more – fructose does not trigger leptin, insulin, or ghrelin in the same degree as glucose, meaning that it doesn’t tell your body you just ate an entire bunch of calories!
Source: http://www.houseofhealth.us/
Loading...
