Category Archives: Uncategorized

I’ve been on vacation with family to the beach and found it all too easy to give in to sweets others had, and paid for it.  My sleep was shot for most of the time, and I felt joint pains I thought were history.  I was talking with my husband today, after we got home, about why we did what we knew we would regret.  We concluded that 1) just this once, is a lie, and will lead most of us down the garden path of much more, 2) having food around you don’t at home makes the temptation quotient far higher, 3) the addictive properties of sugar, starch, artificial sweeteners do not go away after you quit eating them, at least not for a long time (In Life Without Bread, Lutz and Allan, noted that after about 12-18 months of no sugar, people would cease to want it.), so if you start, you get sucked it quickly.  I remember a line from diet guru Stephen Gullo, who had this mantra: If I don’t begin, I don’t have a problem.  He talked as well about the F-Q Principle, which I believe I’ve mentioned before, that states that you may leave certain foods alone for a long time, but if you start up again, then soon the frequency, then the quantity will increase. Believe me, I have lived out the F-Q Principle many times,  including just last week.

Today we are back on track, our vacation family members have gone home, so we can get back to our healthy, no sugar-starch-faux sweeteners routine.  A slip is disheartening, but it is something to learn from. I am disappointed that I let myself cave to carrot cake, but that is not a reason not to keep working at my goals to stay sugar-sober.  With some hard work and luck, I won’t have to report further struggles for a good long while. I would like to say never,  but while I live in hope, I also know that the possibility exists.

Like I heard years ago it’s not what you do 20 days a year, it’s what you do the other 345 days of the year;  I now have high hopes for the grand total of sugar sober days.

I have a nice tan! And, I enjoyed time with family.  So there is almost always a great take away from vacation.

Working on my remaining days for this year, and will keep chanting: If I don’t begin, I don’t have a problem.

Yours in the struggle,

Nan aka Sugarbaby

In working to find ways to help deal with the challenging task of becoming sugar sober, or low carb, it can be very helpful to make yourself a recording to listen to night and morning until you reach your goal. I have done this for any number of things over the years when I felt particularly challenged, and needed to more deeply integrate the thoughts into the deeper mind.

Such devices are old tricks. The military during World War II used records played during the recruits sleep to help solidify their language skills learned during the day. And, in the 1970s a whole realm of self-help and how to succeed tapes were sold. Did they work? Depends on who you ask. Like any tool, recordings are only as good as the consistency of use. So playing a recording a few nights won’t likely help with a big problem like weight loss, or language acquisition.

To make a recording it helps to make a list of thoughts you want to include, so write down all the things that you think matter to you. Then find a quiet time and place, maybe play some meditative instrumental music in the background, then begin by imagining you are talking to yourself or to someone else. Don’t worry if you make a few mistakes, you can always re-record if they bother you, but chances are they won’t.  I find five to ten minutes is long enough, for on my iPod Touch, which I listen to at night, I can set a recording to replay continuously. But even without this asset, you don’t need a long recording, you just need to be faithful to listen to it morning and evening.

Within two or three weeks–even sooner for many– you will notice how improved your behaviors have become; for example, not snacking will start to feel natural.

Even if you can’t make a recording, the act of writing down your hopes, wishes, what it is you want to change has a similar effect. Writing is often called “brain writing” because the very act of forming the thoughts, then writing them out, has been shown to have powerful affect on the brain. It is a kind of two way street where what comes out goes back in, through writing.

I would love to hear about any such tricks you’ve used successfully.

Trying all the means at one’s disposal,

Nan aka Sugarbaby

We have been told that diabetes has doubled worldwide since 1980, we know the sales of high sugar, starch, and artificial sweeteners have so impacted our national palate that even little children, once practically immune from over weight, are now obese in great numbers and Type 2 diabetes is being found in children not yet teens. Boys and girls who once left high school lean as they ever would be, now often are obese, and if lean have the tell-tale pot belly that comes with over consumption of refined carbohydrates.

Just recently read the following, and checked out at the government’s website:

Annual refined sugar consumption in the United States: 1750: 4 pounds per person, per year 1850: 20 pounds per person, per year 1994: 120 pounds per person, per year 1996: 160 pounds per person, per year According to the USDA’s Economic Research Service (www.ers.usda.gov/Data/FoodConsumption), global sugar consumption continues to increase by about 2 percent per annum, and in 2006 and 2007 was expected to reach almost 154 million tons. Note: This does not include the use of other industrial sweeteners such as high fructose corn syrup! High fructose corn syrup is now estimated to be the number-one source of calories in the American diet! Increases in obesity, heart disease, cancer, and diabetes correlate almost perfectly with the introduction of HFCS nearly thirty years ago. The average person is consuming 1/3 of a pound of sugar each and every day, which is 5 ounces or 150 grams— half of which is fructose (sucrose is made up half and half of glucose and fructose). This is roughly 300 percent more than the amount that can trigger biochemical chaos.

Gedgaudas, Nora T. (2011). Primal Body, Primal Mind: Beyond the Paleo Diet for Total Health and a Longer Life (p. 122). Healing Arts Press. Kindle Edition.

Now that we are in the more sociable summer season many of us tend to be eating outdoors, eating out  at restaurants, more often, and in general sharing food with friends and family or on vacations when and where we are not in our regular control of food.  This does not have to become an excuse for giving in to eating foods that we know will set us off on a binge for several days–or even weeks.

Strategy and planning can keep us on track while enjoying all the non-food benefits of gatherings and vacations where we feel more vulnerable. If it is a sharing event, then take your reliable tasty dishes that everyone will probably praise to the rooftops.

Before going to a restaurant you can help to steer the choice of where, like a good steakhouse or seafood place; most restaurants now posts their menus on line, and you can find a few safe choices. My daughter always enjoys at trip to PFChang’s since there isn’t one near where she lives, and I combed their menu and found around ten tasty options I can enjoy there. I take advantage of those hot sauces to get more out of my dishes like steamed Buddha’s Delight.  But planning makes a difference!  If you decide that this occasion you will enjoy a rare treat, decide how you will do this; I opt to share with my spouse or ask for a bowl of plain berries. Most restaurants can provide berries at the cost of a regular dessert.

We are hosting some family members to stay at our house, and I have asked them in advance if they like the kind of protein diet we eat, which means I don’t have an excuse for buying junk that would unduly tempt me, like cold cereals.

A very minor amount of thinking and you will be proud of being in control. Staying sugar sober is more important than any food we might eat. A minute on the lips, a lifetime on the hips is a well-known saying, but may a sugaraholic would add, and days or  weeks out of control on a sugar binge.

Working the plan,

Nan aka Sugarbaby

I read a few blogs faithfully and on each one will be two or three people, more women than men to my dismay, who have more excuses than Bayer has pills.  They can create more scenarios for why they can’t quit sugars, artificial sweeteners, starches than you can offer helpful hints. Why is that?

I believe it is related to my last post which  is they have infantile desires to hold on to their behaviors for reasons we cannot fathom, but in some way serve them.  We know that locked in a room and given the kind of non-sweet wholesome foods recommended by paleo-primal diets these people would not starve, or go crazy, or exhibit most of the symptoms they list as sure things if they change their behaviors. Further, why do they frequent sites that advocate doing the things they really don’t want to do, then?

Most likely somewhere in their inner wisdom they know they are fooling themselves, and maybe hope that the truth will eventually set them free. Or–they crave the attention, for they often do dominate these sites with long involved posts that engender sympathy from many readers.

We can make strides to help ourselves, but only if we accept that we must give up the things that keep us fat, sick, and miserable–and quit hoping and hoping for some magic pill that will allow us to continue eating foods that make us fat, for we know that does not exist.

Yours in honesty,

Nan aka Sugarbaby

Many of us who have binged keep our shameful secret close to the chest. We don’t want people to think we are weak, bad, gluttonous, stupid, or any of the likely things people might want to put on us. We actually do a very good job of castigating ourselves, and don’t really need others to tell us how stupid, foolish, counterproductive our actions are.

Everyone slips up and everyone needs to remember that that is part of being human. The surest way to avoid slip ups is to be honest about them. To write them on a journal, tell a loved one about the mishap, and why you think it happened. This provides knowledge, and out of the knowledge we become less likely to repeat the behaviors again.

I had a few missteps recently going to a wedding, and then not tackling the cravings head on when I got home.  After a few days of eating that I did not enjoy, and feeling awful, I got back up on the wagon. C’est la vie!

I don’t know if it is true or just wishful thinking, but it does seem to me that I do far better for longer after I’ve had a bad experience; so maybe nature that programed us for feast and famine is at root. That, though, is not an excuse or license to go out and pig out whenever.  There is a happy balance between our failures and successes. Learn from both, get stronger from both. That seems to me the best way.

Yours in the struggle,

Nan aka Sugarbaby

More and more information is coming out to support one’s conviction that not only sugars are a problem for those who have become overweight or gaining, but that substitute sugars are as bad and maybe even worse.

The best advice is to steer clear; or has the late Jack LaLanne said: If man made it, don’t eat it.

Link: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/health/healthnews/8603394/Diet-drink-consumers-put-on-more-weight.html

Most of us have to go through making the decision whether to cheat or not. It actually does not happen unless we do make the decision, regardless of the excuses we may make to justify it.

The only way to succeed is to make friends with the truth. If you want something, say a piece of birthday cake, then plan for it. Fit it into a scheme that allows you to have it without feeling guilty.  Though we know that abstinence is the best policy, it is better to work a plan that says: I can have one small piece of cake for the birthday. I will make sure it fits into my carbohydrate count for the day.  Otherwise, if you give in, that usually starts a binge cycle.  So, while our goal may be  total abstinence, we will do better to acknowledge what we know to be the truth about ourselves than to say we won’t cheat, then give in to a massive sweet binge.  Just the act of thinking it through may be enough to make you decide it isn’t worth it.

Studies have shown that people are actually good at keeping promises, so promise yourself that you will plan and not allow the sugar to rule the way you eat. Make sure to have plenty of protein and fats before eating any sweet, which will mean your are more satisfied and won’t have the big sugar rush to the brain.

If possible, at most events, take something of your own making that allows you to feel a part of the fun without sacrificing your desire to be in control of the sugars. We can make good decisions, we do make all the decisions, the decisions are not being made for us. But we must remember the powerful effects of sugar, and do all in our power to not allow the sugar to run our lives.

Learning how to be,

Nan aka Sugarbaby

A recent study* showed that fructose is actually worse than plain sugar or glucose. But we know both are bad for us, despite the insistence on the part of many in the medical and nutrition camps that want to tell us to have all the fruit we want.

For people who have become insulin resistant (if you are over weight you are), and even more significant, leptin resistant, then sugar is not just negative, it is bad—regardless of the source.

Natural sugars from fruit, honey, maple syrup, sorghum, yacon syrup are still sugars. They will continue to cause the plague of constant cravings, and ultimately lead to abuse of the natural source. A few pieces of fruit, especially from high sugar varieties like melons, bananas, figs, and the like, are as bad or worse than the person who only puts a teaspoon of sugar in coffee, for the cravings for ever more sugars and starches get worse with time and age and stress to mention the most common.

Fruit, sugars may be controlled for some people, but I doubt they would make their way to this blog or others that decry the dangers of sweets/sweeteners for the population that is growing ever fatter and ever more unhealthy.

So don’t be persuaded by the fruit aka fructose is good for you argument. It is not if you are a sugaraholic.

Working towards better health,

Nan aka Sugarbaby

*http://www.drbriffa.com/2011/06/22/fructose-found-to-be-more-harmful-than-glucose/

Sugar is the enemy of weight loss for most people. That is a given on this webpage, but what makes that true is due to a complex set of factors well detailed by Gary Taubes in Good Calories, Bad Calories, among others. Further, starchy carbohydrates are sugar in the body, and artificial sweeteners keep the brain on high alert for food coming as promised by the sweet taste, hence cravings that frequently result in binges

There is much yet to be learned about how our evolution designed our nutrition requirements, and much just being discovered about how the processes of hunger, cravings, and the kind of eating the results in obesity. The old calories in-calories-out as a simplistic understanding of weight gain or loss is being disputed right and left, so that as time goes on we can expect a fuller and more accurate understanding of what leads so many of us to gain weight and/or have trouble losing weight.

In 1994 the hormone leptin was discovered, but in a very surprising place, the fat cells. Prior to this discovery, it was generally believed that the fat cells stored, but didn’t create. Then it turned out the leptin is in fact the Master Hormone, directing insulin and ghrelin, and others, since it tells the brain that we do or do not need to eat.

After years of eating too much sugar, starch, and artificial sweeteners, many of us develop not just insulin  resistance, but the concomitant of leptin resistance, so that it is no accident many of us feel like we have no reliable hunger or satiety signals. Until the leptin and insulin get re-sensitized, we will continue this struggle.

Leptin has been getting a lot of attention over at marksdailyapple.com, a blog emphasizing a primal, or more natural, way of eating, that reflects the way most people for most of our human history would have eaten. Ergo: meat, vegetables, fruit, no highly processed or manufactured food; food you could expect to find on a farm in the 1700s, though with grains that are now considered undesirable for many people.

I have been experimenting with the leptin protocol as designed by Dr. Jack Kruse, which borrows heavily from the work of Byron Richards, author of the Mastering Leptin. The object is to spend 6-8 weeks resetting leptin. Here is the protocol: 50-70g of protein within 30minutes of waking; three meals spaced 4-5 hours apart; NO snacking; less than 25-50g of carbohydrate daily; last meal within 4 hours of bedtime.  It is important to not eat outside the times set for that interferes with the leptin signaling to the brain. Most of the people on the threads report a significant decrease in hunger, no or few cravings, weight loss, improved sleep, greater energy and alertness. I am experiencing all these as well.

Below are some sites you might want to examine to learn more about how leptin is related to our compulsive desire for sweets and carbs. You can expect that I will report on how my eight weeks develops.

Mastering Leptin,  Byron Richards webpage: http://www.wellnessresources.com/weight/articles/what_is_leptin/

Why is Oprah Still Obese? Leptin Part 3

Dr. Ritchie Shoemaker: http://www.chronicneurotoxins.com/learnmore/obesityresearch.cfm

Learning the ropes,                                                                                                                               Sugarbaby