How to Get Rid of Your Sugar Cravings

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The number one question I get asked about is sugar. Seems most people are either controlled by sugar or confused by it. So it's time to stop beating yourself up. If you can't fight the cravings, it's not your fault. Sugar can be overwhelming, and it's sneaking in everywhere. So if you're struggling, I know you want to break sugar's hold on you. And today I'm going to show you how you can get rid of cravings and get your life back in just two weeks. Here are five things that work. Hey, it's jj. I'm so happy you're here. Now, whether you're just starting your journey or you want to take your health to the next level, this channel is focused on delivering tips and tools you can use to get healthy, feel better fast, and lose weight. So hit like and subscribe to make sure we stay in touch. Now back to sugar. When people reach out to me, they're frustrated and ready to give up because they feel like they're doing everything right. But then sugar cravings hit, and they feel like a failure when they cave. Well, let me tell you, this is not about willpower. When sugar cravings hit, they can be as powerful as cravings for a drug. In fact, research has shown that we become addicted to sugar in the same way we can become addicted to alcohol and cigarettes. And the withdrawal can be pretty miserable, too. Headaches, fatigue, anxiety, mood swings, gut issues, and even brain fog. You can't beat all of that back with willpower. Now, you may wonder what's happening because you think you've already cut out the sugar. If you don't think you're eating that much, you may be surprised. You're probably eating way more than you think, because sugar sneaks into everything. Food manufacturers know you won't buy a food if the first ingredient is sugar. You're too smart for that. So they've come up with more than 50 different names for it. So let me tell you the stats that translates into. We've gone from eating 5 pounds of sugar a year in 1800 to now over 152 pounds of sugar per person a year. And here's the challenge. Exposure equals preference. Just one regular soda a day means an extra 30 pounds of sugar over the course of a year. But it's not only about volume. There are a lot of different reasons you might get hit with cravings. So there's not one cure all, and you have to know where they're coming from. If you're ever going to get out from under their control. So let's talk about what's going on. Why do you have them and what can you do to get rid of them so you can finally feel better, get healthier and drop some belly fat? Alright, first, one of the main reasons you can't ignore is genetics. Blame your parents. You may have just been born with a sweet tooth, plain and simple. And what that means genetically is that you could be a sweet taster. So the more sweet you eat, the more sweet you want. Am I describing you? Can you relate? Now, to be fair, we all have a little bit of that exposure equals preference effect, but you can literally be trained to want more sweet sugar. And we're all hard wired to want some sweet just for survival. Our ancestors used to gorge on honey and fruit during the summer so they could store enough body fat to survive the winter. But this is beyond that. If you have a genetic sweet tooth, it's way more amplified than wanting some sweet for survival. Alright, second, we've got training, meaning you're addicted. A major cause is the Standard American diet or if you've been duped by the idea that you should eat low fat, because low fat equals high sugar. And of course this is where things like artificial sweeteners and fructose can be really problematic because they're super sweet. And again, the more sweet you eat, what do you want? You got it. More sweet. So you're actually training yourself to want more and more sweet and you're desensitizing your taste buds to it. You also train yourself to want it all the time at every meal. So you end up starting your day with dessert, which just makes me nuts because it sets up this thing called a second meal phenomenon that basically is what you ate is going to impact what you eat next. So when you have something that hijacks your blood sugar first thing in the morning, guess what's going to happen for your next meal? You are wrecked because now you're feeding the beast and you can't get off that blood sugar roller coaster. Now, the third thing that can be a source of your cravings is that you've trashed your microbiome. And there are a lot of ways that this can happen, like overuse of antibiotics for one. But the biggest one, again is our crappy Standard American diet. If you're eating a typical western diet, you're probably not getting enough fiber. Soluble and insoluble types and resistant starch. Fiber is a prebiotic that feeds those good bacteria in your gut and helps get rid of the bad guys. Those bad bugs, like the yeast and funguses, feed on sugar and they're screaming to be fed all the time. So they can be the source of your cravings. All carbohydrates, except for fiber turn to sugar. So I'll hear people say, well, if it's going to turn to sugar anyway, what's the difference? Well, the difference is whether you're mainlining it or making it slowly from the food you eat. And fiber will help slow down what's released from your food even more still, there are foods that turn to sugar really quickly, like processed foods and refined carbs, breads, muffins, cookies, all that kind of junk just turns to sugar pretty quickly. So just be aware. All right? The fourth reason for cravings, and this is a big one, and it's stress. Now, stress lowers your serotonin and your brain gets fixated on relief. And asparagus just isn't going to cut it, at least not very fast. Chronic stress also makes your gut leakier, meaning it's more permeable. So then you react to more foods. It becomes a vicious cycle with food intolerances that also can cause leaky gut. And one of the classic signs of a food intolerance is that you start to crave the very food that's hurting you. So this is another thing that can make you crave sugar. And then the final reason you could be craving sugar is because you're insulin resistant. You have poor blood sugar control. So if you've got any issues going on, like hypertension, elevated blood sugar, elevated insulin, you're pre diabetic, or you have full blown diabetes, you're not able to access stored sugar for fuel. So when you eat, your body has to figure out how to store the foods. And the first priority is to raise insulin to get the sugar out of your bloodstream, because elevated blood sugar is flat out dangerous. So when your insulin is constantly up, triggering your body to store sugar, it causes your blood sugar to lower. And your body thinks it's running out of fuel and wants to bring the levels back up. So you're hungry and you're craving sugar even though you might have just eaten. Now, the good news is it's totally possible to retrain your taste buds to not want the sugar and to appreciate spicy and savory foods. Because I'm going to teach you how to retrain your body to use your stored fat for fuel instead. And what's cool is that when you get past all these cravings, you'll never Feel out of control again. It's like your get out of jail free card. Okay, so how do you fix it? Here it is. Almost every cause of cravings can be alleviated to some degree by fixing your diet. If you train yourself to be addicted to sugar, you've got to focus on tapering off sugar, not doing it overnight. Or if you have a microbiome imbalance, you've got to focus on healing your gut, like with low sugar impact swaps in your diet and adding in bone, broth and fermented foods and fiber and good fats and supplementing with probiotics. If you're insulin resistant, you have to train your body to be sensitive to insulin again. And if you have food intolerances, you have to make those swaps to get the offending, hurting foods out of your diet. Now, I'm going to tell you, if you have a genetic sweet tooth, it's going to be a little tougher, but you can still get it under control. So the number one fundamental approach to crushing cravings, this is the number one thing that helps and is balancing your blood sugar. And you do that by making healing swaps to get the benefit of the fat, fiber and protein trifecta. More on that in a little bit. I wrote the Sugar Impact diet specifically for this reason, to help you get rid of your sugar cravings and to help you retrain your taste buds to appreciate the natural sweetness of foods. The reason it's so effective is because it teaches you to taper. By using these swaps when you're getting off sugar, you cannot quit cold turkey. Going cold turkey is going to trigger cravings and withdrawal symptoms and set you up to fail. It took you years to become dependent on sugar, so you can't quit overnight. But the good news is you can quit in a pretty short amount of time. Now, when you taper, before you know it, the sweet you used to crave will be too sweet, and you'll begin to appreciate the subtle sweetness of things like berries and even savory and spicy and sour like fermented foods, which are amazing for your microbiome. And I know that's hard to believe right now, but trust me, I've seen it happen with thousands of people. It will happen. And this can happen. You can retrain your taste buds inside of two weeks. It's that fast. And it's dramatic, by the way, a great hack from my pal Donna Gates, the Body Ecology Diet Sour can take your sweet tooth away. More on that in a little bit. Now, you can do that and balance your blood sugar by eating from the Sugar Impact diet plate. Which brings us back to the fat, fiber and protein trifecta, because they all work together. Healthy fats are important because fat is insulin neutral and very satiating. It tells your brain you're full. The protein and fiber work together to slow down stomach emptying and help you feel full longer. Fiber is also great because it helps balance blood sugar and curbs cravings all on its own. And then protein. Protein is thermic, three times more thermic than fat and carbs are, and it helps boost your metabolism. Because of this, it requires more energy to be digested, so allows for a slow blood sugar release to the body. So maybe you'll have a loaded smoothie with my regalight Wellness protein powder and some berries and coconut milk and greens and avocado. Or for dinner, you'll have some wild salmon, a mix of cauliflower and wild rice, and a salad with extra virgin olive oil. Sounds pretty good, right? So the plate's going to give you the right portions of all three of these. Again, the clean protein, the healthy fats and the fiber. And it makes it super easy to get the fiber you need from non starchy veggies and a little bit of slow low carbs like squash or wild rice or legumes. Now, super important point, you want to make sure that you make your sugar from the food you eat, so it releases slowly, not that you're mainlining it from something like Skittles. Okay, here's another tip. Sometimes when you have cravings, you're actually thirsty. So try my lemonade. And this is a little hack. Again, sour can take your sweet tooth away. And that means fermented foods too, by the way. So my lemonade, you add lemon juice a couple tablespoons to some spring water, you can add a little glutamine powder because that can help with cravings and also is gut healing. And then you can also add a little bit of extra fiber, a little chia seeds, too, and then use a little bit of one of my approved sweeteners, which could be stevia or allulose or monk fruit or erythritol. Just the littlest bit, you want it to be sour, it just takes the edge off. But that's all you need to do. There's other drinks you can buy out there, like Suja Lemon Love.

I love that one.

But it's so easy to make this lemonade, so make sure that you keep it handy and make sure you have lots of water all day. Between your meals. Now, if you're really hurting as you taper, you can have some berries for dessert or you can use one of my approved sweeteners I just listed. But I do not want you to go overboard with these. Right? And it's worth mentioning that artificial sweeteners are not the answer here and will not help you curb cravings. They can, in fact, make them worse. They can be as much as 300 times sweeter than table sugar. So they can actually cause you to crave more and more and more sweet and cause calorie dysregulation, which is another way of saying they're going to make you overeat. They also mess with your microbiome in your gut, and they can lead to insulin resistance, which of course is going to give you more cravings. And so it becomes a really vicious cycle. All right, good news, though. I have a couple of options out there, as I've already mentioned. And again, those are allulose and stevia and erythritol, monk fruit. Now, these are all natural sweeteners. And again, don't go crazy with them. Little bits of those are okay. You can also use xylitol. I just find a lot of people get a little gassy from those. So, you know, don't really want to add something that's gassy. So see how you do with it. All right, let's talk timing. Number two, the timing of when you eat can help with cravings because it also helps balance blood sugar. So I want you to try intermittent fasting. Now, one easy tip to get started is to stop eating at least three hours before you go to bed. Okay. Because we're going to look at shortening your eating window and then start eating breakfast a little bit later in the morning. My perfect thing would be you stop eating dinner three to four hours before bed. You get up in the morning and do a fasted workout. A little bit of high intensity interval training, a little quick brisk walk before you have breakfast. So you push breakfast just a little bit longer. That's going to help you convert from being a sugar burner, where you have to eat every two to three hours, to being a fat burner, where you can go four to six hours between meals and maybe even forget to eat. Number three, this next thing helps a ton, is adding in resistance training. In fact, One study in 2018 showed that resistance training was associated with a reduced likelihood to eat and that cravings were not increased with exercise in general. In fact, most studies show that cravings are dropped with Exercise. So just getting more movement is going to help. But of course, when you do resistance exercise, it can suck the sugar into your working muscles, right, and use them as fuel and it helps you become more insulin sensitive. Both those things are super important. Okay, number four, if your cravings are triggered by stress, you gotta look at what's going on, what's the source of the stress and then ideally eliminate it or at least reduce it. You know any of those things your life that are creating that and then look at where you can start to add in. Some stress reducers might be eft tapping, meditation, yoga and could be some high intensity interval training. See what works for you. And then number five, work on getting more restful sleep. Sleep is a huge help with sugar cravings and it also helps restore insulin sensitivity. Now there are a lot of things you can do from taking a hot Epsom salts bath before bed to making the room dark and cool. But if you're still having trouble, you may want to try my sleep candy. I take it every single night and I sleep like a baby. All right, those are five things you can do to get rid of the cravings. You'll eat by the plate to balance your blood sugar and heal your gut. You'll go longer between meals with some intermittent fasting. You're going to add some resistance training, lower your stress and sleep better. Now, don't forget to hit like and subscribe to. Join me for my next one and that is the top do's and don'ts of detox. See you there. For more info on this and other health topics I cover or to rate.

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