Many people experience compulsive cravings towards sugar. Photo / 123rf
Many people experience compulsive cravings towards sugar. Photo / 123rf
Opinion
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 oftheir own addiction and don’t take their sweet tooth seriously but instead joke about it.
Sugar addiction is nothing to joke about. It is not a made-up term but a measurable, physiological phenomenon that negatively affects many people.
What most believe to be a simple “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 fit this description and 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 needed 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 natural energy or…
Continuing to struggle with perpetual weight gain, enduring daily energy crashes, experiencing yo-yo dieting and premature aging with the added risk of serious lifestyle diseases including but not limited to heart disease, the number one killer, cancer or diabetes. And the list goes on and on.
If you’ve felt trapped for months or even years by powerful sugar cravings, the following steps can help to restore your health and revitalise your body.
One of the most effective ways to eliminate sugar cravings and shed unwanted weight is intermittent fasting or IF. 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 of intermittent fasting 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 approximately 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 eight 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.
Some people with a sugar addiction understand they are eating too much, but rather than finding ways to cut back, they hide it Photo / 123rf
In order 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 11 am and 7 pm. 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 implementing 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 with yourself 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 if you want, 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. It’s a good thing.
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.
