This Blog Is For Women

Do you think you should eat less?  Many of us would answer ‘yes’ to this question.

In the hustle and bustle of our daily lives we have lost touch with our body signals.  Are we eating to satisfy hunger?  Or are we eating out of habit or some emotional drive?

Food is delicious and enjoyable.  We eat to be social.  We eat at set times of the day.  How often do we eat because our body asks to be fed?

It is vital for us to become more connected to our body’s signals when dealing with hunger.  This takes only a few simple steps.  Before eating take a moment to consider the following:

• Why am I eating?
• How hungry am I?
• What are my emotions?
• Check your portion size and the nutrition of the food before you begin eating.

Sugar, it’s found its way into an alarming number of the foods that we consume on a daily basis.  We’re often completely unaware of how much sugar we’re eating.  If you’re eating food that is packaged, or prepared by someone else, you can bet that it’s high in sugar.

Recent changes to the recommended daily intake of sugar have resulted in a much lower upper limit for dietary “added sugars.” We’re not talking about the sugars found naturally occurring in most fruits and vegetables, we’re talking about the kind that are added to foods to make them sweeter, sugars like glucose, fructose,  sucrose — beet and cane sugar, whether white or brown — and high-fructose corn syrup.  It’s all sugar, and it’s all bad – if not consumed in moderation.

Moderation is the key.  But, it is also the problem.  As a society, we have lost the ability to gauge moderation in sugar consumption.

The American Heart Association recommended sugar intake for adult women is  20 grams of sugar per day, for adult men, it’s  36 grams daily, and for children 12 grams a day. Wow.   Let’s see how that might work.

• 1 teaspoon of granulated sugar:  4 grams of sugar
• Multigrain Bagel from Dunkin Donuts:  9 grams of sugar
• Newman’s Own Tomato & Basil spaghetti sauce, 1/2 cup = 12 grams of sugar
• Bull’s Eye Brown Sugar & Hickory BBQ sauce, 2 tablespoons: 14 grams of sugar
• Kellogg’s Smart Start Strong Heart Cereal, Toasted Oat: 17 grams of sugar
• Delmonte diced pears in light syrup, single serving cup: 17 grams of sugar
• Weight Watchers Blueberry Muffins: 18 grams of sugar
• 1 6oz serving of fruit on the bottom yogurt:  25 grams.  Oops!  That’s the whole day’s allotment!
• V8 Fusion Vegetable Fruit 100% juice, 8 ounces: 26 grams of sugar!
• Minute Maid lemonade, 8oz: 29 grams of sugar!
• 18 jelly beans:  32 grams of sugar!
• Glaceau Vitamin Water, 20 ounce bottle:32 grams of sugar
• 1 can of Barq’s Old Time Rootbeer: 39 grams of sugar
• A small Dairy Queen chocolate sundae:  41 grams of sugar

Some of the most surprising sources of added sugar are items like spaghetti sauce, and yogurt:  foods that we have come to think of as healthy.

Low sugar options

• plain or Greek style yogurt:  2-5 grams of sugar
• water:  0 grams of sugar
• home made spaghetti sauce: limited added sugar
• home juiced vegetables: 0 grams of sugar
• avoid muffins, ice cream, pop, bagels, and packaged fruit.

Eliminating added sugar from your diet really boils down to one thing:  Eat natural foods, in their whole state, prepared by yourself with little added sugar.  If it’s got a package, read the lable, chances are it also has more sugar than you’re willing to add to your diet.

Notice that we are not counting the naturally occurring sugar found in fruits and vegetables.  These bring fibre, minerals and vitamins into your diet that are essential for good health, and they also supply an adequate amount of sugar for healthy body function when eaten as part of a healty diet.  Fruits and vegetables are sweeter than they have ever been in history due to being selectively grown for taste appeal.  Consuming these natural foods will provide us with all the sugar we need to be healthy.

Want more information about sugar and it’s effects try the following:

Sugar- Are You Addicted?

60 minutes, Is Sugar Toxic?

Rodale:  Report Provides New Sugar Recommendations for Adults

FitWatch: Signs that you may be addicted to Sugar

The battle over diet and obesity rages on. More and more people  are struggling with maintaining a healthy weight.  The science is in on this one:  we have become addicted to sugar.

I’m not going to bore you with all the details about dopamine and receptors and addiction.  But recent scientific studies have proven that food, and specifically sugar, can cause the same effects on the brain as addiction to hard core drugs.

This might worry you, but it also might help you.  Drug addicts have found a way to recover from addiction and if you’re a sugar addict, you can too.

There are steps to take. But recognizing that you have a problem is the first one.     Some of the signs that you might have a sugar addiction can include:

• persistent sweet tooth
• sugar cravings that result in binge eating of sugary foods
• being unable to control your eating and feeling defeated and sabotaged after ward
• irritability when avoiding sugar

Once you recognize that you have a sugar addiction there are steps that you can take to help control your addiction.  These steps are different that then the simple will-power tactics you might have tried (and failed) in the past.  Will-power is important.  But you must take it one step further, ok 5 or 6  steps further.

1.  Avoid temptation: control your environment to the best of your ability to make sugar unavailable.  Don’t buy it, don’t watch other people eat it, if you’re at a party, stay physically away from the dessert table.

2. Plan ahead:  preplan your meals, and bring healthy snack alternatives with you when you’re on the go.  Nuts, seeds, and fruit are easy to pack.  And if you can manage a protein snack even better.

3. Distract:  when you feel the need for some sugar, do something else that will prevent you from eating.  Something like dancing, playing a musical instrument or other full body activity that makes it difficult to eat.

4. Exercise:  include a regular dose of exercise in your weekly regime.  Daily exercise that either gets your heart rate up, or builds or stretches muscles is great.  Think walking, dancing, yoga, pilates, or anything else you enjoy.

5. Hydrate:  insuring that your body is properly hydrated is a good step to stemming cravings.  Many times our body mistakes our thirst cue as a hunger cue.

6. Meditate: calming and enabling, meditation is a good way to quiet cravings and enable us to feel empowered.  It really is all in your head!

If you let sugar take you over, jump in on any one of these steps and then add the others in as soon as possible.  Before you know it, you’ll be a recovering sugar addict!

It’s a great idea to revisit those inspirational books/blogs/magazines that inspired you to take part in the Primal Blueprint in the first place.

For me a great source of inspiration and information is Mark’s Daily Apple.  This is Mark Sisson’s blog/website that contains a tremendous amount of information, evidence, suggestions and recipes to help you along your Primal journey. This post How To Succeed with the Primal Blueprint about carbohydrates, exercise and food intake is always a favorite for me.  I especially love the chart that reminds us to stay under 150 grams of carbs to maintain our current weight and under 100 grams of carbs if we wish to lose weight.  It’s really that simple.