The 14-Day No Sugar Diet(10)

Do some meal prep on Sunday evenings. Make and freeze a batch of bean chili for quick heat-and-eat dinners. Boil a dozen eggs for hardboiled egg snacks to take to work. Plan to pack your lunches instead of eating out. Keep in mind that the average fast food meal weighs in at more than 600 calories. In one study published in the Journal of the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics, women who brought their lunches to work lost five more pounds than dieters who went out for lunch at least once per week.

Simplify your kitchen counter. Keeping a clean, uncluttered kitchen leads to a healthier diet (and probably fewer ants). According to a study in the journal Environment and Behavior, people who have cluttered, messy kitchen counters strewn with chip bags, cookie boxes and even cereal boxes tended to consume 40 percent more calories than people with tidy kitchens.

Use the half-plate rule. Practice this every time you sit down to lunch or dinner: Fill one half or more of your plate with vegetables. Fill the space that’s left with mostly lean protein and the rest whole grains or legumes. It’s the easiest way to reduce calories and lose weight without counting calories, say dieticians. Because vegetables are low-calorie, high water-content, nutrient-dense foods, they satisfy your hunger for less overall calories.

Step 3

Start Carrying a Bottle of Water Everywhere

Cutting out sugary beverages is the easiest, quickest way to start losing weight and lowering high blood sugar. It is so easy to swallow hundreds of calories and much too much added sugar from soft drinks over the course of a day without even noticing. Consider: a large McDonald’s Sweet Tea contains 71 grams of added sugar, delivering 280 calories. An 18.5-ounce bottle of Gold Peak Sweet Tea packs 48 grams of sugar for 190 calories.

In both cases, that’s a lot of sugar. So be mindful of this weight-gain pitfall and avoid it. But think about this: If you eliminated just one sweet tea or soda every day for a year, you’d cut out the calorie equivalent of nearly 20 pounds of fat. Work your way toward drinking only water or unsweetened tea. One way to do that is by swapping high-calorie, high-sugar beverages for less sweet options. The second and more preferable solution is to make your own iced tea, gradually using less and less sugar until you don’t miss the sweet stuff at all. Water and unsweetened ice tea will become your go-to beverages. What’s more, your desire for other sugary foods will wane, too, until cereals, condiments, and baked goods high in added sugars will be too sweet for your palate.

Drinking lots of water during the day can also make it easier to lose weight. For one, thirst is often misunderstood for hunger. Try answering a hunger pang with a zero-calorie glass of water and see how you feel five minutes later. The amount of water you drink may also impact your blood sugar levels. Not long ago, a study of 3,615 men and women conducted by the French National Research Institute found that people who drank very little water, a few glasses each day, may be more likely to develop abnormally high blood sugar. While monitoring 700 of these study participants over nine years, the researchers found that people who drank 17 ounces of water or more per day were 28 percent less likely to develop high blood sugar than those who drank less. While the study doesn’t prove a cause-and-effect relationship, scientists suggest that people who drink little water may be overloading on sugary drinks, which could lead to weight gain and high blood sugar. There could be another factor at play: vasopressin. This hormone acts as an antidiuretic to help regular water retention in the body. When you become dehydrated, vasopressin is produced to signal the kidneys to conserve water, which may elevate blood sugar.

Are you dehydrated? Here are some clues:

Check your urine. Is it dark in color? You’re dehydrated. Your pee should be the color of lemonade, light in color, when you are drinking enough water.

Pinch the skin between your thumb and index finger and then let go. If you are well-hydrated, it should snap right back smooth. If the pinch lingers there, you can probably use a drink.

To drink more water each day, keep a tumbler full of ice water with you at your desk at work and take it wherever you go. Sip constantly. And remember that you get a lot of water from the foods you eat, especially fresh vegetables and fruits like lettuce, watermelon, apples, broccoli, spinach and pears.

Step 4

Commit to Moving More Every Day

Let’s be honest with ourselves: We just don’t move our bodies much compared to our ancestors in the days before golf carts, BarcaLoungers, Amazon Prime, and Netflix. How much of your day is spent sitting? It’s pretty easy to figure out: Check in with yourself every hour for one day and write down your butt-in-chair time. Add it up. Surprised?

Researchers say the average person spends more than half of their waking hours sedentary, watching TV, sitting in a car, or working at a computer. You’ve probably heard about the study that made big news back in 2015 about our national sitting habit. An analysis of previous research in the Annals of Internal Medicine found that sitting for 8 or 9 hours a day is a health hazard. The study found that sitting for prolonged periods raises your risk for diabetes by, get this, 91 percent! How is that so? Well, jump back to what we learned in Chapter 3: Physical activity helps move the sugar that’s in your blood into your cells. When you sit, the sugar just stays there and increases your insulin resistance.

So, this is critical: move more, every day. Make movement self-motivating by doing something that puts a smile on your face, like walking or tennis, or swimming. Then do it every day for at least 30 minutes. Remember that breakthrough 2002 study that outlined how to reduce the risk of diabetes nearly 60 percent? Part of the formula was logging 150 minutes of physical activity every week.