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BREAK FREE FROM THE SUGAR TRAP
Welcome to the Sugar Impact Diet! Get ready to change your life in just 2 weeks! There are so many amazing benefits to eliminating high-impact, sugary foods. Yes, you’re going to lose fat fast—on average, people lose 10 pounds in just 2 weeks! You’ll also break free of your cravings, regain control of your appetite, and enjoy high, steady energy and laser-sharp focus. You’ll finally ditch the constant bloat that makes you feel like you could be popped with a pin. You’ll look and feel younger almost overnight, and you’ll get rid of the nagging symptoms that make you feel crummy every single day—once and for all. And, more important, when you go low Sugar Impact (SI), you’ll even begin to reverse chronic diseases like obesity, diabetes, and heart disease.
BECOME A FAT BURNER, NOT A SUGAR BURNER
One of the biggest benefits of the low SI diet is that you lose weight, fast. And I’m talking about that really stubborn, clingy weight… the weight you thought you were doomed to carry forever because you were told you’d be packing on a few as you got older. Don’t believe that myth!
If you’re carrying extra pounds, it’s because when you weren’t looking your body trained itself to burn sugar when it needed energy instead of fat. You became a sugar burner. Now your body doesn’t even go near your fat reserves to look for fuel. It’s gotten used to relying on a steady supply of carbs, so you need to keep snacking to give it fuel to burn, or you’ll crash.
When you eat sugar or carbs, your pancreas releases insulin to pull the excess sugar, or glucose (blood sugar), out of your blood and restore balance. Glucose is a form of sugar in the food we eat. It’s also our primary source of energy. It’s packed away in your cells for quick-access fuel, and what’s left over is stored as fat. If you eat lots of sugar and keep calling on insulin to lower your blood sugar all the time, you’ll eventually lose your sensitivity to it, resulting in a condition called insulin resistance. Insulin resistance is a known cause of weight gain and can lead to diabetes.
One of the hallmarks of being a sugar burner is that while you’re burning sugar and storing fat, you experience frequent drops in blood sugar that make your body scream for more sugar. You’ll get crazy hungry if you go for a few hours without food or you skip a meal. And when this happens, watch out! You’re irritable, foggy, totally preoccupied, and showing the fangs of cravings. So let’s fix that! All it takes is 2 weeks to reap the benefits of being an Impact player! When you make just a few simple, tasty swaps for seven high-SI sugars, voila—with the new, low SI you will be burning fat and craving-free with sky-high energy.
ALL SUGAR IS NOT CREATED EQUAL
Let’s start with one very important fact: all calories are not the same! The old mantra of “a calorie is a calorie” doesn’t hold true. Isn’t that liberating? No more counting calories! That’s because food is information, and it has marching orders for your body. Different nutrients have different physiological effects and distinct roles within the body.
This makes sense, when you consider that you’d never say the calories in your spinach salad are the same as the ones in your Bananas Foster, would you? (Would you?) Maybe it’s the guilt we associate with dessert, but we know some calories just feel different. The calories in the spinach will have a different effect on your body than the calories in that Bananas Foster. Let me tell you why.
Our bodies run on glucose. Our body can also metabolize fructose, the primary sugar in fruit and a main component of processed sugars like high-fructose corn syrup. But fructose is metabolized differently than other sugars. When most types of sugar enter your bloodstream as part of the digestive process, they elevate blood sugar levels, and your body then releases insulin to help lower those levels. But fructose bypasses this trigger by heading directly to your liver, the only organ that can metabolize it. Since it doesn’t raise blood sugar levels, there’s no real bump in insulin. When it hits your liver, it gets converted to glucose, and some of it is stored as glycogen, which is how we pack away carbs for energy use later. But another metabolic fallout from fructose metabolism is that the liver repackages excess fructose as triglycerides, or fat.
Of course, there are other forms sugar can take, like galactose, maltose, and lactose (milk sugar). Sugar is found in many plants, though most straight sugar as we know it comes from sugar cane and sugar beet. But no matter what source the sugar you eat comes from—whether it’s high-fructose corn syrup, honey, or molasses—your body is going to break that sugar down until it has either glucose or fructose. And the end games for those two are not the same. Glucose gives you fuel; fructose gives you fat. That’s what I mean by Sugar Impact.
Fructose, as it exists in the natural whole foods we eat (like fruits and some vegetables), is all wrapped up in fiber and bundled with nutrients. When fructose is delivered to us that way, things change for the better—our digestion slows down, we burn some energy extracting the fructose, and fructose moseys to our liver in a steady stream rather than a torrent. But most of the sources of fructose in our diet are the ones that cause the Pavlovian response we know well… the cupcakes, ice cream, and crunchy candy bars. When fructose is freewheeling, or separated from its fiber source, like the high-fructose corn syrup in juice, sodas, and candy, it might as well be taking a laundry chute–like plunge to our liver… where its idea of a party is to start making fat.
Much of the credit for sounding the fructose alarm goes to Robert Lustig, MD, a pediatric endocrinologist and professor at the University of California, San Francisco. He ignited a very public conversation about sugar and the harmful effects of fructose metabolism with his YouTube video, “Sugar: The Bitter Truth.” And I’m so glad he did. If you haven’t seen it, it’s definitely worth checking out.
In an October 2013 article in The Telegraph, Dr. Lustig reacted to a study in the journal PLoS One. The study, published February 27, 2013, looked at the rate of diabetes in 175 countries over a decade and linked increased consumption of sugar to higher rates of diabetes, independent of obesity. Dr. Lustig explained what that meant: the cause of type 2 diabetes isn’t tied to the amount of calories you eat. It’s more important where the calories come from. The study showed that when people ate more calories every day, yes, their rate of diabetes went up. But when they added the same number of calories and got them from added sugars like high-fructose corn syrup and sucrose, the rate went up a lot more. Dr. Lustig noted, “Added sugar is 11 times more potent at causing diabetes than general calories.”
But we’re not always choosing to eat more sugar; we’re being dosed with it. Sugar is slipped into foods we’d never suspect, and often in combination with more than a dash of added salt, to keep us hungry and thirsty and coming back for more. No wonder you’ve been feeling like your health and waistline have been hijacked! Taking them back will be the most powerful part of your Sugar Impact transformation.
Eating too much of the wrong kind of sugar can also impact your appetite and hunger levels for the worse. When you eat lots of sugar, your insulin levels stay elevated. High insulin levels drown out the signals from the hormone leptin, otherwise known as the satiety hormone. Leptin is an important hormone produced in fat cells that tells you when you’ve had enough to eat. When leptin is working right, it tells you you’ve gotten enough energy and to stop eating, already. If things were working as they should, leptin would also keep its counterpart, the hunger hormone ghrelin, suppressed after a meal. Ghrelin is responsible for sending your brain the signal to eat when your stomach is empty or your blood sugar is low. Leptin should be the stopgap we need before we eat ourselves to death. Dr. Lustig calls leptin “the holy grail of obesity.” When your brain ignores leptin (in a condition called leptin resistance), you eat more than you’re supposed to, because ghrelin is never suppressed and your brain still thinks you’re starving.
So, in essence, sugar fractures your ability to control your appetite. But you’re not doomed to live with it as a permanent condition, something another anti-sugar crusader, David Gillespie, points out in an interview about his book Big Fat Lies: “Remove [fructose], and the appetite control system goes back to working as designed and starts moderating the amount of everything you consume. Slowly but surely, your weight returns to the normal weight range, and it stays there.”
Isn’t that great news? You can fix it, and fast. But not by counting calories. Even if you make an extreme cut to the calories you consume, research shows that if most of your calories come from fructose, you’re wrecking your metabolism and satiety signaling and paving the way for insulin resistance, gastrointestinal disorders, obesity, and diabetes. The key is lowering your SI—making simple swaps that deliver huge rewards.
High-impact sugars have also been found to play a role in a serious condition called metabolic syndrome, a combination of risk factors including excess abdominal fat, high blood pressure, and high triglycerides. In fact, Dr. Richard Johnson, author of The Fat Switch, squarely points the finger at a high-fructose diet as increasing the risk of developing metabolic syndrome. Metabolic syndrome raises your risk of diabetes, heart disease, and other chronic health conditions. It’s the disease equivalent of being run over by a truck. He also suggests that consuming high amounts of fructose is connected to chronic inflammation and uric acid buildup, which can also cause you to gain more weight.
One of Dr. Johnson’s key contributions to our understanding of fructose metabolism is that he discovered it actually throws a pretty significant metabolic switch in your body. Flip the switch, and you store fat! He found that fructose activates an enzyme, fructokinase, which then activates another enzyme, aldolase, that throws the switch and causes cells to accumulate fat. This process can be life-saving if you’re a bear preparing for hibernation. It’s what allows animals to beef up for a long winter snooze—or add fat when food is scarce. Once they need access to their reserves, the enzyme is blocked, and they burn fat to survive. But it doesn’t do your waistline any favors if you don’t have a five-month sleep in your future!
BECOME A FAT BURNER, NOT A SUGAR BURNER
Now that you understand the ways different sugars react in your body, you can see why SI is the key to freeing yourself from the sugar trap—and the jelly belly, bloating, and fatigue that come with it. Some sugars cause a higher SI than others. By tapering you off high SI foods and transitioning to a diet filled with low SI foods, the Sugar Impact Diet pulls you out of that sugar-burning, fat-storing cycle and transitions you to being a fat burner, which is exactly what you want to be to lose weight fast and keep it off. Reducing the SI in your diet will reset your body’s toxic habit of pounding you for a quick hit of fuel. You’ll move off burning sugar, and as more good fats and clean, lean protein take center stage in your diet, you’ll burn a steady, high-energy flame all day long.
Becoming a fat burner is exactly how it sounds—you burn fat! So you drop weight fast. And you stay in power weight-loss mode because once your SI is under control, your hormones will work with you to lose weight and stay lean. You’ll finally be hearing leptin bark out the order that you’re full and you should stop eating. Ghrelin will be back in check, so you’ll actually know what it feels like to feel full again!
You’ll also have more energy, because when you fuel your body with low SI foods and burn your stored fat for energy, you avoid those awful energy slumps that come with a high SI diet (you know those sugar crashes all too well!). And here’s a bonus—you’ll even burn more fat as you sleep!
LOW SUGAR, NOT NO SUGAR
Don’t worry. I’m not saying you have to totally give up sugar! It’s important to remember this is a low SI diet, not a no-sugar diet. We’re designed to eat sugar; our genes tell us so. But getting it in the right amounts and from the right sources is the real secret. The Sugar Impact Diet will do all that for you and more. Just by transitioning to a low-SI diet, you’ll see big shifts in your weight, energy, bloating, joint pain, and all-around joie de vivre. And there’s lots more wind at your back in the way of Supportive Supplements (visit http://sugarimpact.com/resources), Speed-Healing Techniques (see here), and strategies to beat back cravings and cope with withdrawal. You’re not in this alone! I’ve not only helped myself dig out of the sugar trap, but I’ve helped thousands of people do the same. In fact, you can read some of their inspiring stories in this book. I hope their success with the Sugar Impact Diet will be all the motivation you need!
WHAT’S WITH THE CRAVINGS?
This program is designed to help you win the battle against high-impact sugar—and a key part of that is staving off the intense cravings that can derail your best intentions.
Cravings can have their roots in everything from ancestry to lifestyle choices, and you have to know where they’re coming from to break their grip. So let’s dig in to find out the source of yours. Just so you know, these causes aren’t like coupons—you’re not limited to just one! Knowing what kind of cravings you’re dealing with could be the key that finally helps you break free of your sugar addiction.
Let’s start with two of the most common causes of cravings: genetics and a low-fat (read: high-SI) diet. We all have sweet-seeking behavior as part of our evolutionary beginnings. But cravings could be part of your unique genetic wiring, and that’s something different. No surprise to you! Because if you’ve got a sweet tooth, you know it.
Just one change to a single gene could explain why you break into a sweat trying to resist dessert, while your friend could care less about the hot lava cake topped with whipped cream. Research shows that a difference in DNA could mean some people are less sensitive to the taste of sugar, so they chase sweeter and sweeter foods to get the reward—foods the average person would find way too sweet.
The other major cause of cravings comes from eating high-impact sugars. They give you quick energy fixes, but ultimately set off a vicious circle of cravings for the very foods that create cravings. These two sources of cravings may seem pretty far apart—one you inherit and one you create—but your body responds to both the same way. The insulin spikes and blood sugar dips that come on the heels of eating sugar make you a metabolic rag doll, with your hormones and defense system being thrown all over the place, at the mercy of whatever you’ve eaten, and how much.
You may not even be aware you’re eating that much sugar. Labels don’t make it easy to spot. Sugar is sneaky, and it’s often not even listed as sugar on the ingredients list. It may be hiding there with names like maltodextrin, barley malt, or fruit juice concentrate. If you believe you’re making all the right food choices and eating healthy, but you’re still dealing with the frustration of…
Bloating, gas
Cravings
Increased appetite
Poor mood (focus, irritability, depression)
Low or unstable energy
Stubborn belly fat
Inability to lose weight
… it’s likely you’re getting way more sugar in your diet than you want or need.
Those symptoms may also be telling you that extra sugar has led to a stealth attacker—Candida Albicans, or Candida, a systemic fungal overgrowth. Candida is a condition that thrives on sugar and makes you crave it. You could also be struggling with small intestinal bacterial overgrowth, an overgrowth of bad gut bacteria fed by all of that sugar (see here). These bacteria actually cause you to extract more calories from the food you eat and store them as fat. Talk about unfair!
Or you may be dealing with leaky gut syndrome, which results when the tight junctions in your intestinal wall have become loose from repeated attack due to stress, fructose, gluten, toxicity, and certain medications. That increased permeability lets undigested food particles and toxic waste slip into your bloodstream, triggering an immune response and inflammation. You feel all that internal warfare as brain smog, headaches, bloating, gas, cramps, food sensitivities, and general aches and pains. All of these conditions make it hard, if not impossible to lose weight.
The important thing to remember is that you’re not powerless against the forces of sugar. When you lower your SI and reset your sensitivity to sugar, your metabolic balance is restored, which paves the way for you to drop weight and feel better fast.
SUGAR ADDICTION
That same survival circuitry that told us to eat sweets whenever we could find them has turned into an addiction pathway in a world of sweet abundance. We’re still driven to find it and eat it, in case it’s our last chance to have it for a while. If only that were the case!
A sugar high is a real thing, as is sugar addiction. As Dr. Pamela Peeke, author of The Hunger Fix, explained it to me, “Animal studies have shown that refined sugar is more addictive than cocaine, heroin, or morphine. An animal will choose an Oreo over morphine. Why? This cookie has the perfect combination of sugar and fat to hijack the brain’s reward center.”
A bag of chips or chocolate bar sends a rush of sugar that alerts the reward center in your brain to release feel-good neurotransmitters like serotonin, dopamine, and beta endorphin. These endorphins are made in your pituitary gland and hypothalamus and are released in response to dietary triggers—mainly foods with that powerful combination of fat and sugar. The endorphin surge gives you intense pleasure and blocks pain, the same as if you had just injected heroin. Yep, this is your brain on sugar. A 2001 study published in the journal NeuroReport states that “palatable food stimulates neural systems implicated in drug dependence.”
But you probably don’t need to be told about serotonin or dopamine or opioids to know you’re hooked. Just think about the way you feel when you have to do without it: you’re tired, cranky, irritable, lethargic, and craving it. That’s called withdrawal. So you get your hands on it (finally!) and you binge. Ahh. You feel so good. Then you feel so lousy. And guilty.
But it’s not your fault! Don’t beat yourself up for your lack of “willpower.” When your blood sugar gets low, you crave something that will give you a quick hit of energy, which is nothing short of a survival mechanism. Those cravings are your body’s way of getting what it needs to rescue your blood sugar. Sugar does that for you. Of course, once you have sugar, you’re back on the sugar-high/energy crash ride that started your cravings to begin with!
We can’t deny the mounting evidence of sugar’s toxicity. But if we’re sugar addicts, we’re patients first, and we need to heal ourselves above all else.
THE IMPACT OF STRESS
Sometimes those sugar cravings are a result of low blood sugar, but it’s no surprise that cravings strike even when you’re not hungry. We also turn to food for comfort when we’re stressed or upset.
When we’re stressed, we don’t crave wild salmon or grass-fed beef. We crave sugar. And you don’t have to take my word for it. Researchers at the University of South Florida found that when people are stressed, they crave foods that are higher in sugar and fat. But ironically, sugar actually stresses your body further, shooting it full of short-term energy, sending your hormones into a spin cycle, and causing your blood sugar to spike and then plummet. So our go-to crutch actually leaves us more jittery and crankier than before. Not to mention that it causes weight gain, fatigue, brain fog, hormone imbalance, and worse. I’d consider that pretty stressful!
The good news is that going low SI is the soothing change your system needs to pull you out of the cravings/crash cycle—in just 2 weeks.
SUGAR AND YOUR HORMONES
One of the reasons stress has you jonesing for chocolate chip cookies instead of Brussels sprouts is that stress puts a big dent in the level of your don’t-worry-be-happy hormone, serotonin. Serotonin is one of the feel-good endorphins released when you eat sugar.
There are lots of ways other than sugar to address chronic stress and stimulate your brain’s pleasure center, but unfortunately few offer the immediate relief of a “drug” like fudge. The serotonin hit you get from sugar quiets the noise and gives you a little pleasure—even if it’s not for long. Soon as you crash, you’re plagued with guilt and remorse, and you beat yourself up and reach for some munchies to self-soothe. Incidentally, antidepressants do what sugar does—they get available serotonin into your brain. That idea of self-medicating isn’t so far off, is it?
IT’S TIME TO HEAL
Now you know how bad sugar is for you. Don’t despair—there’s a solution! The key is to avoid drastic measures. If you try to cut out sugar cold turkey, you’ll go into withdrawal, just as you would with any addiction. That’s why you’re going to taper and transition, nice and easy, from high-to medium-to low-SI foods. It’s a process that sets you up for success and prevents the cravings that can set you back. I’m also going to give you strategies to help you fight any and all symptoms that pop up as you make the shift to low-SI living. I’ll hold your hand and help you ease off the high-SI foods that are hurting you—so you can seize the vibrant life that’s waiting for you!
As you heal, you’re going to retrain your taste buds. Yes, even if you have a genetic sweet tooth! Just as you trained your body to become insensitive to sugar and want more of the sweet stuff, you’re going to teach it to once again to be sugar-sensitive.
Being sugar-sensitive means you’ll finally get rid of your cravings. You’ll appreciate the exquisite subtle sweetness of fruit like raspberries and blackberries, spices like vanilla and cinnamon (which helps control blood sugar)—things you hardly notice or appreciate as a sugar addict. You’ll even become aware that some foods are “too sweet.” Yes, I’m going to ruin them for you!
LESS IS LESS, MORE IS MORE
When you give your body healthy substitutes for its addiction to carbs, it will begin to crave those foods instead. So pile on the clean, lean protein, stock your fridge with fresh veggies and hummus, and keep nuts and seeds at the ready on your countertop. They’ll keep your serotonin levels even and will help keep your amped-up food-reward cycle in check. A steady supply of sugar to the brain from slow carbs actually helps your mental clarity and focus.
And as your taste buds come alive again, I’ll help you work more spicy and savory foods into your diet using Cajun spices, salsas, garlic, and onions. You’ll ratchet up the flavor in your foods until you can appreciate the way they burst! As a sugar addict, you may not even realize that your diet is bland. But it is! Not only because you’re eating one-dimensional high SI foods, but because you’ve also lost your ability to truly taste. And you’re missing out on a lot. You’re missing bitter, like the nuance in dark chocolate, and tart, like the party on your tongue after you eat Greek yogurt. These foods and flavors will all help you transition beyond craving sweet, and only sweet.
Don’t worry about letting go of your favorite foods—remember we’re swapping delicious, familiar lower-SI foods for the high-SI foods you’ve been eating, so you won’t even miss them. I’m willing to bet you like the swaps even more—for the way they taste, and the way they make you feel.
EVERYTHING YOU NEED TO SUCCEED
You’ll have everything you need to be successful on the Sugar Impact Diet, even beyond the food. This program is designed to take you through three cycles (see here for a refresher) so that you can transition to a low-SI diet without shocking your body or succumbing to nasty cravings. If any withdrawal symptoms hit, don’t try to tough them out. You don’t have to! I’ve got lots of helpful strategies in Chapter 8 and in the Resources section on my website (http://sugarimpact.com/resources) to help get you through the first week until the withdrawal passes and you feel better than you’ve ever felt! In Chapters 8 and 9, I include fool-proof menu plans and delicious recipes that make it easy—and tasty—to follow the program. I’ve also got your back with strategies on how to handle stress (see the Supportive Supplements online at http://sugarimpact.com/resources) and eating out (see Chapter 12), and how to support your transformation with powerful exercises (see Chapter 12) that don’t require hours out of your week or a gym membership.
I’ve designed this program to win your fight against sugar—so you can’t fail! This program will help you heal your body, shatter those weight-loss plateaus, kick fast fat loss in high gear, and get you over the withdrawal hurdle, fast. Your inflammation will let up, your hormones will swing back into balance, your mood will level out, you’ll finally sleep, and you’ll wake up with enough energy to conquer the world. Most people feel so good they want to stick with it for life. I’m pretty sure you’ll never go back, either.