Sweet tooth?
A sugar addiction in not ‘sweet as’ — it might be the missing piece to losing weight, writes CAROLYN HANSEN
STRUGGLING WITH WEIGHT GAIN and trying without success to avoid junk foods? Sugar addiction may be the missing piece to your weight loss problem and the culprit behind your compulsive cravings.
And you’re not alone. Many people experience compulsive cravings for sugar. Unfortunately, they aren’t aware of their addiction and tend to joke about their sweet tooth.
Sugar addiction is nothing to joke about. It is a measurable, physiological phenomenon that negatively affects many people.
Sweet tooth is, in most cases, a serious sugar addiction that rewires our brains to crave it like a drug, eventually leading to withdrawals.
Some people with a sugar addiction understand they are eating too much, but rather than finding ways to cut back, they choose to hide it. If you hide sweets or sneak around to eat them, you might be looking at a sugar addiction.
Tolerance to addictive behaviours and substances, including sugar/sweets, builds up over time and making the necessary dietary changes can be difficult. However, overcoming sugar addiction can spell the difference between finally being able to lose that stubborn excess weight, eating an all-round healthy diet, feeling full of energy or…
Continuing to struggle with perpetual weight gain, enduring daily energy crashes, experiencing yo-yo dieting and premature ageing with the added risk of serious lifestyle diseases including heart disease, cancer or diabetes.
If you’ve felt trapped for months or even years by powerful sugar cravings, th then intermittent fasting, or IF is the best way to eliminate them.
It’s a cycle between periods of eating and fasting. It includes set windows for refraining from eating and specific hours to eat. The basic goal is to reset the body to burning fat rather than burning sugar as its primary fuel.
There are many different variations of IF. If you are like 85 per cent of the population with some level of insulin resistance, fasting every day by scheduling your eating into a narrower window of about six to eight hours each day is the key. Eating this way teaches the body to burn sugar as your primary fuel, effectively shutting off your ability to use fat as a fuel.
Since most people require an 8- to 12-hour window to burn the sugar stored in their body as glycogen (found primarily in the liver and muscles), the old way of eating three meals a day won’t work to eliminate that excess fat/ weight because it puts our body in constant feast mode, never allowing it to deplete its existing glycogen stores.
When you eat throughout the day and never skip a meal, the body adapts to burning sugar as its primary fuel. This down regulates the enzymes that utilise and burn stored fat. As a result, the body starts becoming progressively more insulin resistant and begins gaining weight, and most efforts to shed the excess weight become ineffective.
To lose body fat, the body must first actually burn fat. Two powerful ways of shifting your body from carb-burning to fat-burning are fasting and/or eating a cyclical ketogenic diet.
For IF to work properly, the length of the fast must be at least eight hours. And it isn’t as hard as it seems. For example, you could restrict eating to the hours between 11am and 7pm. This method skips breakfast and makes lunch the first meal of the day, resulting in a daily fast of 16 hours, twice the required minimum to deplete any glycogen stores and begin the shift into fat-burning mode.
For most, the process of shifting to fat-burning mode occurs naturally after several weeks of intermittent fasting. However, don’t get discouraged if it takes more time. It can take months for some people before their body learns to turn on its fat-burning enzymes, the switch that allows it to effectively use fat as its primary fuel. So be patient and have faith in the process.
Once your body adapts and is of normal weight, you can continue with scheduled eating via IF, use it occasionally, or even go back to eating three meals daily, just so long as your ideal body weight is maintained.
IF also offers other benefits. It enhances hormone function, lowers insulin levels, and increases metabolic rate, helping to burn more calories. It has major benefits for insulin resistance, leading to reductions in blood sugar levels and protection against the all too prevalent type 2 diabetes.
Adopting intermittent fasting, while enjoying whole, healthy foods is the eating pattern empowered to combat and eliminate any stubborn sweet tooth, helping you get back on a healthy path.