Hello friends, family and random people that find this blog on the internet. I am starting this blog like many others have to share the truth about how important dieting is to finding weight loss.
I know that many of you are not convinced that
your eating habits are the cause of your weight gain or
inability to lose weight. Most of you believe that it is because
you don't exercise regularly or exercise at all. Most of you blame
yourself because of your addiction to "fatty foods" and unhealthy habits
of eating. But what if you are not to blame and you are actually the victim?
I want to share some information and facts that I have learned from my personal trainer, self discovery, health articles and informative videos.
Some of you may not like what you read, but it may be because
it's hard truth to hear that what you have been told about
weight loss and healthy living has been bad advice.
I ask you to honestly consider these studies
and facts before you brush them aside
with other myths you read on
the internet.
SUGAR. Is it really that bad for you? It tastes delicious, we get it whenever we celebrate anything and it's in almost every food at the grocery store. So if it's that bad for you wouldn't the government or someone have done something by now? Truth is, it's complicated.
In the 70's obesity was on the rise and so was heart disease and guess who was the villain? Dietary fats. So guess what happened? Low-fat foods started appearing in our grocery stores because eliminating fat from our diet would make us thin. FALSE. When you take the fat out of food it tastes like cardboard. So what do you do? Add sugar. Let's take a look at this Yoplait Yogurt label
It has 26 grams of sugar! A sugar packet contains about 2 - 4 grams of sugar, would you sit down and eat 7 - 13 packets of sugar for breakfast? This is the nutrition label for Starbursts original.
For 8 pieces there's 23 grams of sugar, and the same amount of carbohydrates. Eating a cup of yogurt is almost equivalent to having a pack of starbursts. But wait isn't the yogurt low-fat? Well maybe dietary fats aren't the villain here at all. Were the fats framed?
Now our food tastes great, so great that we can't put it down. That's great for the food industry, but bad for our health. By the mid 90's sugar was viewed as a health alternative to fatty snacks! It was suggested by the American Heart Association to replace fatty snacks with high sugar foods like hard candy, juices and spreads like syrup or honey.
One half of the sugar
we eat today are in items we didn't even know had sugar, tomato sauce, barbecue sauce, hamburger buns, hamburger meat, and pretty much all processed foods have
added sugar! Our diet has vastly changed
over the years from the agriculture revolution to be high in carbohydrates. Now here's a little biochemistry for ya.
The truth is if
you constantly eat carbs you’ll have higher insulin. The more insulin you have the
more likely you are to store fat, because insulin is the main hormone, which
puts fat into fat cells. If it's subcutaneous fat, the type that collects under
skin that’s okay, if its visceral fat (around belly and organs) that is bad for your
health. Visceral fat releases a different set of hormones that can cause inflammation through
out the body. Some of you may start to think, well I'm not obese and I eat carbs all the time. Well, it’s
possible to be thin and have visceral fat which means you're metabolically unhealthy, 40% of people that are normal
weight show signs of metabolic syndrome and 20% of obese people are metabolically healthy. (Metabolic syndrome is a name for a group of risk factors that occur together and increase the risk for coronary artery disease, stroke, and type 2 diabetes.)
Sugar is a simple carbohydrate formed of two molecules fructose
and glucose. Glucose drives fat cells
under the skin and Fructose drives fat cells around organs for example around
your liver. When you have fat around your liver it mucks up the work it does. It
can make you insulin resistant so the pancreas has to make extra insulin. It also
causes hyper tension in your brain, which are changes in the brain that might cause
dementia. It can increase cell proliferation which can cause cancer, also
heart disease.
Sugar
can also accelerate aging. When you paint your steak with barbecue sauce, it
browns faster, and that’s what’s happening inside your body. Browning reaction,
which causes cellular aging and you do it with fructose because it browns
better, it’s why it’s added to bread, to brown better. It browns your insides better too, if you had
a glass of fruit juice this morning, your aging 7 times quicker. Fructose is
found in fruit, and if you had the same amount of fruit that’s in your fruit
juice, you probably wouldn’t be able to eat it all. Juicing fruit removes all
the fibrous pulp, which means you can take in a whole lot more calories without
feeling as full. So if you’re going to eat fruit, stick to whole fruit, because
it’s the fiber that tames your insulin response to sugar.
In this commercial they say they put 16 oranges in one 32 oz carton of Orange Juice. So that means that for every 8 oz that you drink you're actually taking on the calories of 4 oranges. How often do you sit down to eat four oranges on top of your breakfast or lunch? They say there is no added sugar, but in one orange there are 9 grams of sugar, and with 4 oranges in each glass, that's 36 grams of sugar.
High
intake of fructose not only messes with your liver, but it messes with the hormones
that control your appetite. There’s a hormone in your stomach called ghrelin which, which is the hunger hormone. So when your stomach is empty ghrelin goes up and
tells your brain, “Time to eat,” then you eat and ghrelin goes away, but when you eat sugar, fructose doesn't get registered
by the brain that you have eaten. Ghrelin doesn’t change, and you stay hungry.
It’s not just fructose that does this, refined starches do it too (a
carbohydrate).
Doctors have been telling us that it's about portion control and exercise. Overweight people only have themselves to blame, and it shows a character flaw that you can't control what you eat. But I ask you this what about an obese six month old? Or obese newborns? Yes NEWBORNS. Can they diet and exercise?
Of course
over eating and staying sedentary can make you gain weight, but it can’t fully
explain the sudden escalation in obesity across the globe. It has to be
something in the environment and its likely the change in the composition in our
diet. Our fat consumption has stayed the same through the last 30 years and look at
the disaster that has befallen us, and a lot of that is because of our vast increase
in consumption of carbohydrates. Anything that drives insulin up will drive weight gain.
Most
doctors tell you to watch your calories; it’s all about balance calories in vs.
calories out. It’s not that symbol, we metabolize
different calories differently and this
is how this bad advice started. It depends on how the calories are metabolized that will
decide weight gain. When you burn protein for energy it takes twice as much energy
to metabolize that protein into energy as for carbohydrates. It’s known as the thermo
effect of food. You burn more energy metabolizing protein than you do carbs, hence not all calories are equal.
So how do we lose weight??
We
all know starving your self doesn't work, and there have been studies that show
that just exercise has virtually no effect on weight loss. One thing it does do
is make you hungry. Your body knows you’re losing energy so it slows down your
metabolism to store that energy.
It’s so hard to lose weight because were metabolically programmed to return back to how we were.
97% of people who lose weight, regain it within five years.
Exercise does have good health benefits. But to lose weight you need to lose the foods
that are low in fat and high in carbohydrates (foods that we've been told to eat through out the last 30 years) weight loss should follow.
And now here's the truth:
When you get off SUGAR and
get your insulin level down,
you will feel more energetic,
you will
feel better,
you will WANT to engage
in physical activity and
that is part of why you
will lose weight.
If you're not convinced,
there's one last thing you should know:
MRI
scans show that sugar triggers the same reward center in the brain as nicotine, alcohol, or cocaine. By triggering the reward you down regulate the receptors in
that area, making it necessary to consume even more the next time to get the
same level of reward. This is a phenomenon called tolerance. Tolerance is the
first step on the way to addiction. Sugar has the potential for abuse, and we've seen the results:
to finish...
I'd like to say, I'm not a doctor, a scientist or a professional in this line of work. I'm someone who wants to live a healthy lifestyle and feel confident about how I look. Believe what you will, but I hope with more of my posts about my journey of weight loss and cutting out sugar you will come to see the bitter facts on sugar.
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