Life and Greatness

Crush Sugar Cravings With These 6 Tips

Do you feel chained to sugar and its ill effects? If you eat sugar every day or excessively, and you want to reduce your sugar intake to promote better health, stop the bloating and fatigue, along with shifting your body into a fat burning mode (as opposed to a fat storing mode), you are ready to win the battle against the sweet stuff.

Implement These Six Tips to Achieve Sugar Freedom:

    1. Use the Sugar Freedom Trifecta Plate

We all need guidelines to ensure success and the Sugar Freedom Trifecta Plate is going to help you. The best part? You are going to be adding to your plate, not taking away. You will be adding delicious healthy fats, clean lean protein and healthy fiber.

Adding these three food groups (the trifecta) will help prevent up and down blood sugar swings that happen quickly with the wrong foods.

Foods such as: sugar, excess carbohydrates, white flour products, chips, processed junk foods, which all send your blood sugar crashing. What do you do when your blood sugar plummets? You go in search for that candy bar to bring your blood sugar back up as the body always needs to maintain balance. This is a key component of the sugar addiction cycle.

Every plate should have protein, fat and fiber – the Sugar Freedom Trifecta. Add in healthy proteins such chicken, wild fish, whole eggs, and grass fed beef or lamb. [Ratliff, J., Leite, J. O., de Ogburn, R., Puglisi, M. J., VanHeest, J., & Fernandez, M. L. (2010).

Consuming eggs for breakfast influences plasma glucose and ghrelin, while reducing energy intake during the next 24 hours in adult men. Nutrition Research, 30(2), 96-103.]

Add in those healthy fats like nuts and seeds, creamy avocados and coconut.

Then add the fiber! Avocado is an excellent choice, as you not only get the great healthy fat, but the high fiber as well. All varieties of veggies are a key fiber choice and especially leafy greens, along with chia seeds and nuts as well.

    2. Engage in Interval Training

Interval training is a form of exercise that is done in short bursts and effectively triggers an endorphin and dopamine response; exactly what sugar does, however, sugar’s lasting effects promote inflammatory health conditions, including weight gain down the road.

Exercise in general promotes the ‘happiness’ neurotransmitter, serotonin. When you have plenty of serotonin, you are less likely to have cravings for sweets. However, Interval training or burst training has many benefits compared to traditional longer cardio. [https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/23835594]

This quick and efficient form of exercise helps to boost metabolism for over 24 hours and takes just minutes! It helps to use up those fat-storing enzymes such as lipoprotein lipase (LPL) that essentially locks the door of our fat cells – think fat storage. Use interval training with any form of exercise such as walking, running, biking, elliptical trainer, your own body weight such as in the image below and more.

Here is a basic Interval Training example:

Go as fast as you can for 30 seconds, go back to a slow to moderate pace for 90 seconds. Repeat 8 times. That’s It!

   3.  Eat Something Sour

Eating anything sour such as lemon juice or apple cider vinegar can help quash sugar cravings by taking your sweet tooth away. Lemons in particular, help prevent fluctuations in blood sugar levels. One major benefit is the citric acid in lemon helps slow the conversion of carbohydrates to sugar. Lemons also contain the soluble fiber pectin that forms a gel in the stomach preventing hunger and cravings.

4. Add Supplements

Adding in specific supplements will powerfully reduce sugar cravings without relying on will power alone. This is that one time (with physician’s approval) if you are going to take supplements, will make a robust difference. The correct supplements make the whole process of crushing sugar cravings so much easier!

Here are my top 3 recommended Sugar Freedom supplements:

L-Glutamine (500 mg. twice daily) This amino acid will stop sugar cravings in their tracks.

Chromium Picolinate (400-600 mcg daily). Chromium picolinate will balance blood sugar kicking sugar cravings to the curb within three days in most cases.

Alpha Lipoic Acid (250 mg. daily). This supplement will help stabilize blood sugar levels, so you don’t get the munchies or get hungry a few hours after eating,

    5.  Reduce Stress

So many people are stressed with work, family and other obligations. They reach for food to soothe frazzled, anxious nerves. When you are stressed, you raise the stress hormone cortisol that lowers the feel-good neurotransmitters dopamine and serotonin and that is going to send you right to the carbohydrates and sweets. The hormone cortisol is also a fat storage hormone – especially inflammatory belly fat.

The key takeaway here is to practice stress reduction every day.

To effectively combat stress, we need to activate the body’s natural relaxation response.

Examples include: deep breathing (such as the 4-7-8 Technique below), a warm bath with lavender essential oil, massage, yoga, meditation or guided mediation [Schulte, Brigid. “Harvard Neuroscientist: Meditation Not Only Reduces Stress, Here’s How It Changes Your Brain.” Washington Post]. specifically for stress reduction, or the #1 stress reduction technique: exercise.

We need to get moving to manage stress. Exercise is important in every facet of our health and will help to boost your feel-good endorphins making you more resilient to sugar cravings.

6.    Get Crucial Sleep

Do you know what happens when we lose just one night of quality sleep? We become more insulin resistant, the ‘feel-good’ neurotransmitter serotonin is lowered, the stress hormone (belly fat hormone) cortisol is raised and after just one night of poor sleep, you are also left hungrier the next day … and it’s not for broccoli, but for high carbohydrate, sugar-laden foods.

Once you get started on that cycle of using carbs such as sugar to increase energy, it will wreak havoc with your weight and health. [“New Pathways From Short Sleep to Obesity? Associations Between Short Sleep and ‘Secondary’ Eating and Drinking Behavior” by Gabriel S. Tajeu, DrPH, MPH; and Bisakha Sen, PhD in American Journal of Health Promotion.]

Make time for sleep. Incorporate 7-8 hours of quality sleep each night. If you have trouble falling asleep or wake up during the night, use this highly effective breathing 4-7-8 technique that can put you back to sleep right away:

Breath in through your nose for 4 seconds, hold for 7 seconds and exhale for 8 seconds. Repeat 6 times or as often as needed. This will make a powerful difference in reducing your sugar cravings.

These six tips have been shown to help crush even the most powerful sugar cravings. Follow them and you will begin to feel vibrant health and leaner in no time.

References

Lawler, David. “America’s Sugar Addiction: Just How Bad Is It?” The Telegraph.

Locker, Melissa. “Oreos May Be As Addictive As Cocaine.” Time.

Schulte, Brigid. “Harvard Neuroscientist: Meditation Not Only Reduces Stress, Here’s How It Changes Your Brain.” Washington Post.