The 14-Day No Sugar Diet(4)
Avoiding the sugar crush can also do wonders for keeping you as smart as a whip, suggests new research exploring the impact of food on the brain. Reduced levels of insulin in the blood and markers of inflammation correlated with improved cognitive function, especially memory, in a study at University of Munster. Researchers there placed subjects between ages 50 and 80 into one of three groups. One group ate a reduced-calorie diet; one group a diet low in saturated fat, and the third ate as they normally did. At the end of the 3-month experiment, only the low-calorie group experienced a significant (above 20 percent) improvement in their ability to recall words on a list. That clear-thinking group also had the lowest blood insulin and lowest levels of an inflammation marker called C-reactive protein.
You’ll Protect Yourself from Dementia
Several studies, including research published in the New England Journal of Medicine, have linked high blood sugar to dementia. In fact, some doctors refer to Alzheimer’s disease as “type 3 diabetes.” Why? Well, insulin is a vasodilator that increases blood flow throughout the body, including the brain. When you have insulin resistance, cerebral blood flow is compromised. Poor blood flow affects neuroplasticity, or brain plasticity, the brain’s amazing ability to change and adapt by forming new connections between neurons.
CHAPTER
2
Start Shedding Sugar Pounds Now
Get a head start in four simple steps
BEFORE YOU embark on the 14-Day No Sugar Diet program, I’d like you to do something. You can start it now even before you read beyond this chapter. Call it a warm-up or pre-game prep.
Maybe you played a sport or an instrument in high school. Before any competition or performance, and even before every practice session, you probably went through a ritual of stretching, warm-up exercises, drills, and visualization to get ready. Remember? There’s a simple reason every athlete, musician or actor does this: A physically and mentally warmed up body performs better and is more successful.
So, doing this easy head start below will help you begin to minimize sugar’s impact on your body and lose more weight quicker once you start the 14-Day No Sugar Diet plan that’s detailed a little later in the book. These are just four simple steps, but they will make it so much easier, mentally and physically, to adopt the lifestyle changes of the program.
You’ll gain four powerful benefits from this head start:
you’ll eliminate mindless snacking;
you’ll block the pervasive cravings that often sabotage healthy eating habits;
you’ll cut sugary liquid calories from your diet, which is one of the quickest ways to drop significant pounds;
you’ll understand how sugary carbs affect your body. And that will give you an enormous advantage for striking a sugar balance.
Begin this program with momentum. Here are four steps to give you a head start:
Step 1
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Identify the Hidden Calories
It’s easy to ignore the number of calories in a beverage. Liquid goes down so effortlessly. You don’t have to chew. And it doesn’t really fill you up so it’s hard to remember how much you’ve had. This exercise will help: Grab an index card and a pen. Keep them in your pocket all day. Whenever you drink something—from water to wine and everything liquid in between—write down what you had and how much. At the end of the day, look at your drink list. If you’re like most Americans, there’s not much pure water on your list but a lot of high-calorie drinks, especially sugar-sweetened beverages. Now, for a real surprise, tally up the number of liquid calories you consumed in that one day. And remember, a bottle of juice or soda often contains two or more servings. So, be sure to get the math right if you drank the whole bottle. What did you get? How many calories came from drink? How many carbs? How many grams of sugar from beverages did you consume that day? Eye opening, isn’t it?
Step 2
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Substitute Water for Sweet Drinks
Soft drinks account for 33% of our total intake of added sweeteners. Depending on which study you read, it’s estimated that the average American adult swallows between 150 and 400 beverage calories a day. Some folks drink a lot more. How does your liquid list in step 1 compare?
Liquid calories—soda, 100-percent fruit juice, fruit punch, milk, sweetened coffee and tea—are easy to miss because they go down so quickly and easily and they typically don’t fill you up. Because they are such a big part of your calories—easily 20 percent of your daily calorie intake —evaporating those calories is the best way for you to lose significant pounds and beat diabetes.
How to do it? You guessed it: drink water. There’s no better beverage for good health. In a French study, researchers found that drinking four or more 8-ounce glasses of water likely protects against high blood sugar, the precursor to metabolic syndrome and type 2 diabetes. The study involving 3,615 men and women showed that those who reported drinking more than 34 ounces of water a day were 21 percent less likely to develop high blood sugar over the next nine years than those who drank 16 or fewer ounces daily.
Step 3
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Put a Dent in Mindless Eating
One day, I saw a bowl of potato chips on the kitchen counter. My daughter had brought it up from the basement where she was watching TV with some friends. Each time I walked past the bowl, I dipped my hand in. On the fourth or fifth pass, I took a paper towel and put a pile of chips on it to take into my office.