The Sugar Smart Diet: Stop Cravings and Lose Weight While Still Enjoying the Sweets You Love (6 page)

Next to the lid-up, lid-down discussion, many couples engage in small-scale thermostat wars. He likes the house toasty. She prefers Arctic-like temperatures. Or vice versa. To make peace, you agree to set the thermostat to a temperature that keeps your environment neither too hot nor too cold.

You can think of your desire for sugar just like this. When you settle on that perfect number—and this plan will help you do that—your attraction to sugar isn’t so “hot” that it contributes to belly fat, weight gain, and a higher risk of disease; and isn’t so “cold” that you’re deprived of the pleasure of a square or two of exquisite chocolate after dinner or a couple of cookies during the day.

This plan’s gift to you is sugar freedom. To receive it, you must reset your sugar thermostat. This helps you achieve sugar freedom in two ways:

It dials down your body’s physical attraction to sugar and cools your emotional connection with it.
On this plan, you reduce your sugar intake in stages, then cut it out completely for less than a week as you learn practical tools that temper sugar withdrawal and replace the reward of a sugar rush with healthier pleasures. This strategy resets your taste buds. Once you reintroduce sugar to your diet, it will taste intensely sweet, and you’ll be satisfied with less (way less).

It sets the stage for metabolic harmony.
Dramatically curtailing your sugar consumption also resets your metabolism. Your insulin levels will fall, and your body’s ability to burn fat will improve. Levels of the hunger hormone ghrelin will drop, and your response to the appetite-quelling hormone, leptin, will improve. As insulin, ghrelin, and leptin once again work in concert to manage hunger and cravings, metabolic harmony is achieved, the sugar belly flattens, and the risk of disease falls. (We’ll explain exactly how these hormones can go awry and affect your appetite and cravings in the next chapter.)

Once you begin to introduce sugars back into your diet, you’ll add them slowly and in a particular way, so you can determine how you feel without all that sugar in your system. You’ll learn how to enjoy it without triggering fatigue,
weight gain, or negative health effects—and how to keep the physiological/emotional pulls of sugar at comfortable levels.

How will we get you to this point? The Sugar Smart Diet is a 32-day plan that ensures your success through a diet based on whole, natural foods, physical activity, emotional coping strategies, and other tips to outsmart sugar cravings without feeling hungry or deprived. It gradually weans you off both obvious and hidden sugars and refined carbs so you can reintroduce sugar in a healthy, balanced way.

How do we define success? Of course, you’ll see desired changes in your weight and measurements. But you will also achieve so much more—more energy; better sleep; improved cholesterol, blood pressure, and blood sugar levels; and fewer cravings. When it comes to sugar, we’re lovers, not fighters, so our plan is designed to help you make peace with sugar, not banish it from your life forever. Take a look at what’s ahead, and you’ll see that it offers everything you need to make that peace: knowledge, practical ways to apply that knowledge to everyday life, and—above all—choices.

Days 1–5: The Sugar Step-Down.
During this time, you’ll assess your current intake of sugar and refined grains, and you will gradually eliminate them. In just 72 hours, you begin to transform your physiological and emotional connection and reduce sugar overload’s harmful effects.

Days 6–11: The Tough Love Turnaround.
Tough
, because this phase removes all sugar—even from fruit—from your diet.
Love
, in that you will love the results: Our test panelists lost an average of 4 pounds by Day 11. You also won’t be eating any processed grain products, refined or whole grain. It’s an adjustment, I know, but I’ve given you strategies that temper sugar withdrawal and replace the reward of a sugar rush with healthier routes to pleasure. The delicious, sugar-balancing meals we’ve provided will help, too.

Days 12–18: Fruit Feast!
Fruit is back in healthy amounts. You’ll be amazed at how satisfying it will taste now that you’ve begun to reset your
sugar thermostat. Low-sugar whole grain bread products return, too—one serving per day.

Days 19–25: A Spoonful of (Natural) Sugar.
To help make whole, nutritious foods even more enjoyable, this phase reintroduces honey and maple syrup. We chose these sweeteners because they have some nutritional value, they are straight from nature, and they are sweeter than cane sugar, so you don’t need to use as much of them. You’re allowed 1 teaspoon a day. Whole grain pasta and bread are also included; you can continue to have them once a day.

Days 26–32: Hello, Sugar!
You’ll be consuming approximately 6 teaspoons of added sugar in this phase, which is the amount you should eat on most days for good health. We have some delicious treats in store for you that contain no more than 3 teaspoons of added sugar. You can still have fruit and a meal that includes honey or syrup. And you can have processed whole grain products—regular or whole wheat—once a day.

All Month Long: The Sugar Smart Workout.
The more muscle you have, the better equipped your body is to process sugar and carbs. Exercise also helps boost mood and control stress (a contributor to a sugar belly). And, oh yeah, it burns calories and fat. If you’re already exercising, good for you! You can stick with what you’re doing. But I encourage you to give the Sugar Smart Workout a try. It has a number of features that will help you get that sugar belly off fast.

That’s 32 days to sugar freedom, with bennies right away. So prepare to enjoy one of nature’s greatest treats on your own terms, in ways that enhance your health and well-being without skimping on pleasure. Sugar freedom, here you come!

V
irtually every TV news report about America’s collective weight problem uses the same stock footage: obese men and women walking on a city street, filmed from the waist down. We’ve seen that footage so often, it barely registers anymore. But those anonymous bodies tell the story behind the story: In the past 30 years, as the amounts of refined sugars in our food supply skyrocketed, so did the rates of obesity and obesity-related diseases such as metabolic syndrome, type 2 diabetes, and cardiovascular disease.

The American Heart Association (AHA) knows that back-story. In 2009, alarmed by America’s sugar-dipped diet, the AHA issued a scientific statement on the added sugars in our diet. The news was decidedly sour. The added sugars in processed foods—primarily sucrose and HFCS—are likely responsible for our increased calorie consumption and contribute to
the twin epidemics of obesity and type 2 diabetes, the AHA said. The statement also issued guidelines for added sugar: no more than 6 teaspoons (100 calories, 25 grams) a day for women, and no more than 9 daily teaspoons (150 calories, 37.5 grams) for men.

We need an intervention. Now. That’s because the average American consumes 22 teaspoons of added sugars a day, according to the AHA. That’s 366 calories. And that’s a conservative estimate. Some run even higher (see “From Sugar Bust to Sugar Crush”). And much of it is ending up on bellies.

What links a sugary diet with overweight and disease? Belly fat, which wraps around your heart, liver, and other vital organs. Researchers call it visceral fat.
Vicious
is more like it.

The pinchable fat that pads our thighs and butt and causes those maddening bra rolls is called subcutaneous fat. It provides padding and insulation and is a storage depot for energy. But belly fat is active fat—so active that it’s now described as an organ in its own right. Belly fat churns out nasty substances that impair the healthy functioning of the liver, pancreas, heart, blood vessels, brain, and even the tissue in a woman’s breasts.

For example, deep abdominal fat secretes inflammatory proteins called cytokines. The ongoing slow burn of chronic inflammation has emerged as a link between obesity and insulin resistance, diabetes, and cardiovascular disease.

Science hasn’t found such risks in those with curvy hips and thighs. In fact, large studies involving both men and women show that people who store most of their fat in these areas tend
not
to get obesity-related diseases such as diabetes and heart disease. And a study published in the
International Journal of Obesity
found that gluteofemoral fat—an elegant term that simply means butt and thigh fat—actually traps the fatty acids produced by belly fat and prevents them from doing their damage.

How does belly fat develop? It begins with your body’s ability to balance glucose and insulin. During digestion, your body breaks down food into its individual components: namely amino acids (from protein), fatty acids (from
fat), and glucose (from carbs). Your muscles and brain rely on glucose for energy. Insulin is a hormone that is released by the pancreas to help move glucose from the bloodstream into the cells that use it. The more glucose in your blood, the more insulin you require.

And there’s where problems can start. Carbohydrates that are digested quickly flood the blood with glucose and result in a large output of insulin. Which carbs are digested quickly? I’m sure you guessed that sugar is one of them. But so are refined carbohydrates, like white flour and products made with it as well as many processed whole grain products. For instance, the kind of whole wheat bread typically used for sandwiches and white bread are digested at about the same rate and cause about the same rise in blood glucose levels, and therefore require the same amount of insulin to clear the bloodstream of glucose.

Over time, continual spikes in insulin have several detrimental effects. First your cells become less responsive to it. This condition, called insulin resistance, results in your pancreas producing even more insulin to compensate. Glucose levels remain high, and in large amounts glucose can damage blood vessels and nerves.

On top of that—and here’s the link to your sugar belly—all that extra insulin floating around causes your body to store more fat than it normally would.
It also prevents your body from using fat for energy between meals. It’s as though the insulin has put your fat in Alcatraz—once it enters, it’s not coming out. And because your body isn’t able to use your stored fat for fuel, you get more hungry, more often. You produce more insulin, you store more fat. The more fat you have, the more your cells become resistant to insulin. It’s a vicious cycle.