To quote Jules from Pulp Fiction: "…my girlfriend’s a vegetarian, which pretty much makes me a vegetarian. "
My wife is going to try to give up sugar for Lent, with the ultimate goal of just trying to cut back, and eat smarter. I figure I’ll try it too. The truth is, I don’t really know what that entails. The simple sugars, I get it. I’m not a cola drinker. I already drink my coffee black I will cut out what little junk food I eat.
The next level seems like it would be to cut out or reduce carb intake. Breads, Beer & alcohol seem to be easy targets for me.
So… let’s talk about this please. Do any of you have any books you’d recommend on the subject? There are so many books out there, and so many look gimmicky. I’m not interested in a fad diet. I’d say I’m more interested in educating myself on sources of sugars, and other related knowledge.
On a somewhat related point; I was in a two day conference earlier this week. I’m not usually a huge junk food eater; and I’ve never self diagnosed myself with a behavior that occurred because of something I ate. At this conference they had little bowls of candy on the tables. I indulged too much on the sweets. A couple of hours later I never felt so exhausted in my life. It was like I crashed from the sugar and just needed to sleep. I was already going on light sleep, which I’m sure contributed; but, Wow! I don’t ever recall sugar affecting me so much!
Read food labels. They tell you how much added sugar, how much sodium, how much fat, etc. It’s nearly impossible to entirely cut out sugar. Many foods grow with sugar in them. Your own saliva makes starches into sugars right in your mouth. To demonstrate this, chew up a saltine and let it linger in your mouth for a minute or so. The starchy cracker will begin to taste sweet. Today’s food often has much more sugar, fat, and salt than we need. Why? It sells, that’s why. It tastes good, and we like it.
I’m not the guy to tell you sugar is dangerous; I’m the guy who says you can cut way down by reading labels.
Labels are indeed your main source of info on carbs. Don’t worry about fiber, worry a little about starch, more about sugar and most of all about fructose sugar. The hard part isn’t knowing what foods have sugar in them. Cutting sugar is much more about strengthening impulse control than about gathering nutritional data.
If you find foods boring without sugar, the good news is that fat and protein are tasty and once you’ve weaned yourself off sugar, it won’t have the same pull on you that it does now.
Odds are high that you’ll give in in a moment of weakness at several points. Don’t beat yourself up over it, don’t think: “Well, I’ve already broken it by eating some sugar, might as well eat more”.
Don’t have it in your home. Trying to quit something is a bitch when you can so easily make unpleasantness go away by giving in to what’s easily accessible.
Exercise, meditation and practicing a hobby are helpful.
The energy loss that occurred at the conference was because of hyperglycemia which prompted high insulin release which caused hypoglycemia and low energy. Once you eat less sugar, your energy levels will stabilize.
Dr. Atkin’s wrote his 1st Diet Revolution in 1972 his 1982 book New Diet Revolution is better. Early Dr. Atkins was a trip, he sold his name and business and then slipped on the ice and died from a head injury, the corporate Dr Atkins isn’t worth exploring but those 1st books are very sincere and have a world of info on sharply reducing carbs in your diet.
As a rough rule of thumb, and if you don’t want to be scrutinising the tiny print on the nutritional information labels, if you want to reduce your sugar intake avoid (apart from obvious things like icecream, cakes and confectionery) dried fruit; tinned fruit; fruit juice; almost anything marketed as a low-fat variety of something else; ketchups, bbq sauces and similar; premade soups and sauces; sports drinks; flavoured milk; flavoured coffee; iced tea; flavoured water; premade smoothies; processed breakfast cereals; cereal bars; protein bars; canned baked beans.
For some of these categories you kind find low-sugar (or, at least, lower-sugar) options, but you can only identify them by reading the nutritional labels.
My advice as a lifetime on-again-off-again low carber who is now permanently off but still awesome at watching sugar & carb intake…
Find out what tastes you like and try to cut the carbs from the dish. If you like pizza, make something with sauce and cheese and toppings but no bread (literally sauce and cheese and toppings melted in a skillet is great). If you like spaghetti, make a low sugar meat sauce and put it over roasted veg or spaghetti squash. If you like chicken noodle soup make chicken soup without noodles.
That being said, don’t go crazy trying to make “frankenfoods”. Don’t be trying to make a loaf of shitty sprout bread because you want bread. It’s shitty. Either go without it or just have some good bread. Real good fresh bread from the bakery, not Wonderbread. It’s not worth the time and trouble to concoct these crazy recipes just to come out with something that is ultimately disappointing. That is the path to just going back to Wonderbread every day.
Honey is sugar. Fruit juice is sugar. Turbinado is sugar. Maple syrup is sugar. Don’t be fooled by stuff that says it’s all healthy because it has honey or something else in it instead of sugar. READ THE LABEL.
Don’t be afraid of fat. You don’t have to up your fat intake but you can replace some of your sugar calories with fat. Get full fat plain greek yogurt and go to tooooowwwwwn. Add Splenda and blueberries of course.
I agree that Dr. Atkins’ book is extremely useful. Look for the yellow 1997 version. You don’t have to go full low carb ketosis like he talks about in the book but IMHO reading it is quite inspiring and makes everything very simple. The science is there, people are just now accepting it (and cashing in on it).
I really like Dana Carpender’s low carb cookbooks. At least in her “500 recipes” and “300 recipes” books she wasn’t making frankenfood. She was just making tasty dishes that happen to be super low carb.
Not necessarily. OTHER PEOPLE have made money - decades ago - by writing those books. Since they’re already penned & published, however, I doubt you’d find a lucrative market.
We’re on a kind of lower-sugar-lower-carb thing where neither of us are following a strict eating plan but we’re very cognizant of labels and what we do eat. The easiest part by far is just not having trigger foods easily available. For instance, if either of us has a sudden chocolate craving, the bag of dark M&Ms is on the uppermost shelf in the pantry. We don’t regularly eat bread nor cereal. I was skeptical at first, but protein and a bit of fat not only keep you feeling full longer but they also avoid that sugar spike-then-drop you sometimes get if you eat something sweet.
There’s also truth in that after eating like this for awhile, your sweet tooth tends to diminish. I find a lot of stuff too sweet now, so I eat much less of it than I used to.
When I was on weight watchers, what helped me the most was not to eliminate foods, but to introduce new fruits and vegetables and just require myself to eat them before any sweets. By the time I finished meals or snacks, I was just too full to contemplate many additional sweets. They and bread were more or less just crowded out of my diet without a ton of thought or angst.
In contrast, if I feel like I’m limiting myself, I think about sweets way, way more.
The Whole 30 book has a bunch of recipes that don’t use sugar, if you’re looking for recipes. Another neat feature it has is a timeline, which roughly maps to the way the body reacts when you eliminate all added sugars and how long it’ll be before your energy levels off, your cravings lessen, etc. Granted, the Whole 30 diet requires you to give up a lot more than just sugar, but it’s a good source of info even if you don’t give up all the other foods that it suggests you do.
If your book simply says “Just don’t eat sugar, dumbass!” it won’t make much money.
The sugar-free and low carb books that do well have delicious recipes that make you forget there’s no sugar in them. And they likely don’t make the authors rich either. Dana Carpender is pretty well known though in the low carb/keto diet community. She has some outstanding recipes and meal plans. Over a dozen books worth.
She is also an old fan of Cecil. I wonder if she’s registered here.
