Get Over the Sugar Hump to Reduce Cravings

Food cravings are a weight loss seeker’s nightmare. Everyone gets a craving for a certain kind of food or a favorite indulgence from time to time. However, when you’re trying to lose weight always seems to be the time when the cravings get stronger. This is for good reason.

Once you embark on a healthy eating plan to facilitate weight loss, your body goes through withdrawal from certain substances that it has gotten used to and depended on, like sugar. Sugar is highly addictive because of the chemical effect that it has on the brain. It’s said that sugar addiction is as strong as nicotine addiction.

To complicate matters, if sugar has been a main feature of your diet for a long time, you probably have some yeast buildup in the digestive system. Once you embark on a healthy eating plan, you may reduce your sugar intake to the point that the yeast in your digestive tract begin to die off. This causes a variety of symptoms such as extreme hunger, fatigue, headache, mood swings and other unpleasant side effects.

You may even go through a few days where you feel like you’re coming down with the flu as your body works on offloading the toxins produced by yeast die-off in your gut.

After a week or so, you may feel your energy levels return to normal as the sugar cravings subside. Once you’re past this point, it will be easier

to say no to sugary desserts, snacks, and treats.

If you do backslide on your antisugar campaign, you might actually find that sugary foods now seem extremely sweet to your taste buds. This is because your body has gotten used to living without them. It also means you’re now in a good place. So try to stay on track with controlling sugar in your diet.

Tips for Cutting Sugar from Your Diet

Love to indulge your sweet tooth, but you know that it will lead to eating more sweets, and throw you off your weight loss plan? Work on your health by becoming sugar savvy. Sugar hides in many foods that we don’t even think might be contributing to weight gain and poor health.

Below find some good practices and tips to help you cut out or drastically lower the amount of sugar in your daily diet.

The bulk of your diet should be from whole foods. Nature did a good job of balancing natural sugar with fiber in plants that we consume. If you’re watching sugar, you can eat some of these foods from time to time but keep portions low. Vegetables and fruits that contain carbs are still a much healthier choice than prepared foods that contain high amounts of processed, white sugar. If you need something sweet for an energy lift, try a piece of fruit or even a sweet veggie like carrots or sweet potatoes. Again, portion control is key. Work off the carbs from these foods with some cardio exercise.

Keep blood sugar levels stable. Take along proteinbased snacks so you can refill fuel before getting to that danger zone where you grab the nearest junk food. You want to avoid too-low blood sugar (from being hungry) and toohigh blood sugar (from eating processed sugar, or high amounts of carbs).

Watch out for condiments. Ketchup is the leading offender when it comes to foods that masquerade as being good for us but are high in sugar. It’s hard to say whether a ketchup alternative would be worth it because the general recipe of tomato, vinegar and corn syrup is what gives ketchup its signature flavor. You can also substitute your sweet condiments with ketofriendly ones that contain a sugar substitute. But how will these affect our health in the long run? The jury is out on that one.

Become a label reader. When in doubt, read the ingredients and the basic nutrition information on a certain food. Again, you should mostly eat whole foods for optimal nutrition that results in weight loss. But from time to time, you may want something from a box, bag, or jar. Granola, for example, is billed as healthy but the sugar and fat totals can tip the scale for weight loss seekers. Read the carb and fat counts to learn which foods are safe and which should be avoided.