> When I returned from my trip, my fridge was empty, so I resisted the temptation to buy those products.
This has to be my reality. If I buy treats, no matter how good my intentions are to make them last, they just don't survive in the cupboard more than a couple of days. I have to leave my kitchen mostly empty apart from: diet soda, meat, cheese, yoghurt, peanut butter. Everything else is just too addictive and I keep eating it until it's gone. I do have other stuff, but have to buy it as and when I need it in a quantity that will only last one meal.
One suggestion I can give if you like chocolate is to buy some 90% or 95% chocolate. It's hard to eat more than one piece at a time without your mouth feeling quite dry, and a 100g bar can easily last a week. After a while, if you have anything else, even 80%, it'll taste really sweet. But it only take a bar or two of the really easy to eat sweet variety before you'll be hooked on it again.
Much alike a recovering alcoholic, it's easier just not to go into a bar.
I do exactly the same thing by not having a phone. I know I would be that guy always looking at it instead of engaging with the real world. So I just don't have one. It's better that way.
Sometimes I consider dumping the phone in a drawer.
While I haven't quit cold turkey, I've found life much much more peaceful since I uninstalled most of the apps on my phone. Email, chat, maps, and music. I think I left notes and a password manager.
Now it isn't trying to get my attention all the time. Even disabling notifications would have helped.
A couple of my friends and I host our own Matrix homeservers, so even that is pretty quiet.
I tried this and eventually started binging on higher and higher percent chocolate. Eventually I was sitting at work stuffing a handful of crushed toasted Cocoa nibs into my mouth ... I suppose I did end my craving for sweets though. I can't make hard cheeses last more than a couple days either. Leaving the kitchen empty works pretty well for me. But I'll binge on pretty much anything that is left if the hunger hits me.
Big difference is hard cheese is nutrient dense and leave me without hunger for a far longer time than empty calories simple carbs that basically bypasses the body checks. Lot of times when I am hungry my body just wants protein. 1000kcal of sugars can leave me hungry after one hour. I eat ton of 80% chocolate and hard cheese and don't get any weight. On the other hand with simple carbs and white flour based things (pasta, bread, pastries...) I have to consciously limit myself to a few per weeks otherwise kg starts piling on fast again.
I found that sourdough from local restaurant did not raised blood glucose level significantly (well below the threshold of high blood glucose), looked for a research and voila! here's one. There are others, also showing benefits of sourdough compared to yeast leavened bread.
Also, making sourdough at home is easy and fun. ;)
Out of sight, out of mind. It's the only thing that works for me.
My wife has the ability to have a pantry stocked full of treats and never eat them. I on the other hand have zero willpower in such cases. A pack of oreos will be destroyed in 24 hours, 1 or 2 innocent cookies at a time. Same with chips. These foods just completely break my brain.
Yet if I simply don't have those things in the house, I have no cravings for them at all.
They also probably have fat and I think that makes them have a synergy that neither fat nor sugar have separately for -some- human brains, including mine. I can have skittles in the cupboard for months. But chocolate chip cookies, even cheap store ones? They aren’t gonna last, so I simply don’t buy them. I depend on the occasional friend dumping a couple on me, but otherwise try to keep them many miles from me.
This used to work for me. I'm also fairly frugal by nature, so it was very easy to just not buy the stuff while grocery shopping.
But then I got married, and had offspring. I don't do the majority of the shopping any more, and no longer have absolute control of what enters my pantry. And so now I eat everything.
Quitting cold turkey after a change of environment (moving somewhere else) is a good tip not just for addiction, but for any change in habit.
However, a more practical approach is to reduce the dosage slowly. That works especially well for sweet drinks. If you have a soda maker, you can slowly reduce the amount of syrup you use.
After a while, your tolerance for sweetness goes down, so things that previously felt not sweet enough feel just right, and things that felt just right before will now feel overly sweet. This will then also help with reducing sweet food.
I go for very low sweetness drinks too. I don’t have a soda maker but I buy cans of plain sparkling water and add a dash of store bought kombucha to the can. Usually I take one sip off a fresh can and then pour in a little kombucha. You can buy flavored sparkling water but the flavorings they tend to use don’t sit well with my stomach. The right flavor of kombucha does the trick for me nicely though.
I would feel sick if I ever tried to drink a Coca-Cola. It’s incredible how much sugar they put in those things.
I switched to diet cola, my sugar intake easily went down by 2/3 or more. I’m not sure I can quit cola though :) . I don’t really drink, I eat fairly healthy, I exercise, so if zero coke is my only vice, maybe I can be forgiven by the nutrition gods
I found that kombucha is an excellent, really low-calorie alternative to sugary drinks. Actually, to sugar in general. I have a sweet tooth and I have difficulty managing it some times.
Kombucha is filling and most times one can is enough to make the cravings stop completely. I suspect it's a combination of the slightly sweet taste with the good gut bacteria.
You unfortunately need to be fairly careful about the kombucha you select. Many of the big/common ones sold at grocery store chains oftentimes anywhere from 10-20mg sugar for a 12/14oz bottle (I've seen them with more than that too!). Better than soda but worse than many smaller brands or even local kombucha you might find at restaurants around town or a farmers market. My favorite kombuchas hover around 5mg per 12oz serving which is perfect.
I'm in the UK. I always check the nutritional information labels. So far I haven't found a single brand of kombucha that has more than about 20kcal/100ml. Most are around 1-5kcal.
For example, this Lo Bros [0] flavour has <0.5g of sugar, and only 3kcal/100ml.
Isn't kombucha basically the same as soda? High acidity (which is bad for dental health), which is offset with sugar (which coincidentally is also bad for dental health).
(At least, as a water drinker, they both taste equally strong)
i stopped drinking soft drinks out of spite for my siblings. now they taunt me but i dont feel any urge to drink regardless of how it takes. for me it tastes like sugar water
I love sugar water. On my new ADHD meds I finally managed to kick soda for a few weeks, but I think I'll limit myself to one can a week on Saturdays because I miss the feeling. It's the only drug I do and all my friends are stoners, so..
You won’t like any of them out of the gate, but if you drink it for a month you won’t notice it much at all. It’s how I got 2/3 to 3/4 of the sugar out of my life along with dropping processed foods.
Cold Turkey has always worked best for me. Quitting smoking by gradual reduction just never seemed practical. If it works for others, more power to them!
What I learned from my weight loss journey is that good sleep does wonders for my brain. It helps me remember my long-term goals and resist those pesky urges for sugary, fatty snacks.
Plus, when I'm well-rested, my brain seems to actually register when my stomach isn't empty, so it doesn't send out those annoying craving signals.
And after all that health talk, I'll probably still end up scrolling through Reddit for a couple of hours before bed.
> And after all that health talk, I'll probably still end up scrolling through Reddit for a couple of hours before bed.
Going for a long walk, especially in an interesting/stimulating place like a pleasant city, does something similar for my brain. It entertains in a general, unchallenging way. Instead of scrolling Reddit past your thumb, you scroll the world past yourself. It's not like going for a run where you have to get over a wall; it's easy to just lapse into by default, especially if you put yourself into a walkable environment. Plus, after you've gone about three miles, your body just goes on autopilot and you just sort of naturally keep moving. It barely counts as exercise, but it will do something for your lower back, and it does burn about 100 kcal per mile, which if you keep it up all day will add up. So, I can heartily endorse, for the person who scrolls a representation of the world past their nose, to instead translate their body through the world.
Since I was a teenager, a mild but persistent acne has plagued my daily life.
Up until the age of 30, I always believed that only medications, impeccable hygiene and weekly physical activity could help reduce the effects.
Then, after a complete change of diet due to my move to Asia, I realized that the main factor was sugar.
By going completely sugar-free in my diet, I no longer have acne at all as long as I keep away from it.
It really got me thinking that most people should explore how their bodies work, without necessarily relying on what works for others or what modern medicine advises, and also that severe fasting is a good way to start the comparison.
That image looks like unscientific nonsense. Craving sugar means I need carbon? Carbon is the building block of every organic chemical, and elemental carbon has very little use in the body. It's near meaningless to say you need carbon.
The answer is fortunately simpler, craving sugar probably means your blood sugar is low, or that it crashed after a spike. Counterintuitively, people can avoid this by eating things with less sugar overall or with complex sugars. Requiring the body to break complex sugars down into simple sugars takes time, which keeps your blood sugar from spiking too high.
Isn’t that the point? Your body needs calories! Nuts are a great way to get filling healthy calories so you don’t go around eating junk.
M&M’s are 492 calories per 100g, so slightly less than your figure for walnuts, but I can’t imagine that eating candy is healthier. And similarly, steak has many negative health effects.
What are the many negative health effects of steak?
I eat a ~1lb pan fried strip steak with steamed broccoli for breakfast 7 days per week.
It’s the easiest and most consistent way to help me meet my protein and fiber goals.
My GP does my bloodwork twice per year and the only thing he has ever told me is that I need to take a Vitamin D supplement. But he also said that he tells all of his patients that.
Many? There are some, but I wouldn't say many if consumed in moderation, and maybe depending on what animal (elk, deer, vs cow) and how it was raised (grass fed). Most of the negatives are associated with red meat are focusing on saturated fat or on processed red meat. The other type of study is usually looking at groups who have other potential lifestyle factors that might affect the other issues (like diabetes).
The heart disease part is basically what I said about the saturated fat.
The diabetes and cancer risks are generally tougher to track. There are other factors at play that are had to control for. For example, you could grill your red meat and increase cancer risk from that (just like other grilled meats). Processed red meat is also usually included in these studies and that has known cancer and diabetes risks (just like other processed foods).
Many of these are high level observational studies which are unable to fully account for all the factors (because we still don't know all the factors). We can show correlation, but there are things like consumption varying by age group, people earing red meat are more likely to be eating other saturated fats as well. People choosing healthy diets are also making other changes than just not eating red meat.
There have been some smaller studies about stuff related to this. Things like plant based diets reducing high risk interorgan fat. So it may not be the red meat itself, but rather the impact of the red meat on things like that interorgan fat. Or how more red meat in a diet can impact gut bacteria, which we are just learning about how important these gut bacteria are. So it's one factor that can influence that.
At this point, I'm not convinced that we know enough of the factors and mechanisms to say the risk is fully linear at the low end of consumption. I do believe it increases as consumption increases, but only beyond a certain point and likely in some logarithmic way.
I’m vegan, but for animal welfare reasons, so this discussion is mostly academic for me. I follow this guy for suggestions on what food I should eat as a vegan, but I’ve noticed he has a lot to say about the risks of meat consumption and he seems to be qualified and have relatively straightforward motivations (I think he lost his mother to cancer or something and says he just wants to find the truth). Everyone is flawed and as you say science is still investigating a lot, and we can’t do double blind or placebo trials with much of this stuff. But I’d be curious what you think of the studies!
Lots of studies there. I had access to a few of them, others I did not. Some I read the abstract, others I read the whole thing. They seem to be the type of stuff I was already talking about. For example, many of the articles looked at various categories that crossed over (unprocessed with processed, red meat with all meat, etc). Many of the studies are pointing more heavily towards the processed meat being the bigger problem. The other thing is how the food is prepared. For example, there are mitigation strategies such as reducing the formation of AGEs in some studies that focus on that part, but no mention of that in some of the other studies.
Based on the evidence available, my opinion for my own life is that moderate intake appears to have little to no risk if other mitigations are in place (cooking practices for lower AGEs, other healthy diet like saturated fat and sugar intake regulation, etc). I also believe that there are a number of non-diet related factors that influence if a diet is "healthy" for a specific individual, including activity level, genetics, family/cultural histories, etc. To me, the data doesn't support either of the extreme statements - that red meat is bad, or that red meat is good. There are so many factors at play that the best we can do is say that here are some potential positives, and here are some potential negatives.
To compare it to heroin is a horrible trivialization of something
that destroys a person and at time those around the person.
I feel that to make this statement in any genuine way, the author
should spend 6 months developing a serious addiction to heroin
then attempt to get clean.
I am blessed I have never done heroin and hopefully I never will.
I have gone weeks without sugar and had a craving, some mild
headaches and at times been a bit grumpier.
That is not even a measurable fraction of trying to get sober
from a heroin addiction.
The author did not imply that sugar addiction is anywhere as bad as heroin addiction.
They observed a technique that was shown scientifically to be effective for the more serious addiction and decided to try it for their milder addiction. That’s just good reasoning, and it worked for them.
> The main conclusion from the study is that a change of environment as radical as Vietnam’s during a war period compared to the US was critical for their recovery.
Obesity related deaths are the second leading cause of preventable deaths in the US.
Sugar addiction can lead to obesity. And obesity can absolutely affect the lives of others around you.
I’ve mentioned here before how I’m the only person in my immediate family who isn’t obese. Growing up with obese family members can affect your lifestyle greatly. It’s not fun.
You're wrong, actually, based on my conversations with my friends who are sober through Narcotics Anonymous.
Intuition may tell you that "softer" addictions like sugar/food, video games/tech, pornography/sex, etc. are easier to stop than narcotics, but reality doesn't bear this out from those I've spoken with, at least if you have a true DSM-5 criteria addiction to these "softer" substances (which if you have a true addiction, can readily destroy your life and even kill you).
The trivial availability, legality, lack of social stigma/shame and other factors cause such addictions to actually be much more challenging to become sober from than narcotics or alcohol, on average. That said, my sample size is quite small and skewed, since those I've talked to have achieved long-term NA/AA sobriety for the most part.
Don't get why you get into such criticism, the author did not compare sugar to heroin, he made an example of something indeed more dangerous and even more addicting that had a great benefit from the change of environment and stated he worked for him too.
I’m glad I’m not the only one that feels off about that. I feel like heroin as the standard measure of “really bad addiction” is at least an unhelpful choice.
I don’t think people walk away from an article like this thinking opiate addiction is any less horrible than they originally thought, but the usual refrain of “[porn|sugar|social media] is like heroin!” usually presented with a fMRI capture with circles on it, gives me pause. At best, it’s not communicating the actual effect of addiction on someone’s life, at worst it does trivialize it.
To be fair to the author, this article doesn’t follow that usual refrain.
Sugar is everywhere, cheap, legal and culturally important (birthday parties, weddings, farewell parties, etc). Very difficult to create isolation environment, unless one goes full Ted Kaczynski.
I don’t want to discourage the author, but i am old, so yeah been there, done that. But avoiding sugar like its evil is not healthy. Nor is it sustainable.
It appears that the author is probably young and single. That may help with this regimen. However, it is best to adopt a less extreme strategy for stress free happiness.
If you eat at home, it's actually pretty easy: Just go to the supermarket with a full belly. It's amazing how disciplined one can be in their groceries shopping when they shop with a full stomach.
When, eventually, your fridge and pantry aren't stocked with sugary junk, it's a change of environment! After that, it's pretty much out of sight, out of mind. The ocassional indulgence at a social event is not the end of the world.
The real problem is that many city people don't really plan their groceries, but just open doordash/flink/gorillas/whatever when they are already hungry and tired. No good choices are going to come from that habit.
It's pretty easy to avoid large quantities of refined or concentrated sugar on most days of your life, and that's the part that would be a big improvement to every diet that doesn't belong to an athlete.
You don't work in a very big office before there is birthday cake in the break room on the regular. Or the Girl Scout cookies someone's parents are desperately trying to get rid of. Or the left-over pastries from that executive meeting. Or your manager brought in a box of donuts to "boost morale"...
Dieting in an office setting is often quite difficult
Sugar is indeed ubiquitous but there’s an increasing number of people who regard it as poison, so it’s actually becoming more and more feasible (depending on what circles you’re in).
Yea, hadn't realized this till I had kids. People are basically constantly throwing sweets at them, and while Im not super-strict about regulating sugar, if I let them eat all the candy they were offered, it'd basically be all their calories in a given day.
I've decided that I won't eat anything sweet from a supermarket. It keeps all the low-hanging sugar away (chocolates, cakes, donuts, etc) while still leaving me able to enjoy a nice dessert at a restaurant, or similar rare occasions.
Low carb has been around for a while, enough that people are aware it's a thing, and it's not that hard to pass up on the celebratory sugar, if you want just say it's for a medical condition and don't elaborate further and people will generally respect that.
You aren't really telling us why this is unhealthy and unsustainable and stressful. In my experience avoiding sugar in the past, it's anything but.
To avoid sugar might not be impractical, but to avoid carbs altogether and go full keto? Very difficult for many, and would probably reduce my enjoyment of life quite a bit.
A smoker will say the same thing, smoking is a very pleasurable thing after all, the first hit in the morning can be almost orgasmic and if you go pack a day you get some of that sense of well-being more than once an hour.
It really takes the edge off things.
Yet it's quite possible to enjoy life without nicotine, as it is possible to enjoy life without high-carb foods.
Eating a slice of cake with coffee with your partner or friend or coworkers, enjoying a bowl of ice-cream with your children are important to a life well lived.
Of course, standard disclaimers apply i.e. eat good quality cakes and ice cream, etc.
Everyone's struggle with addiction is different. I'm glad this person found a good way for them and I'm sure it might help others as well. Don't be discouraged if it doesn't always work for you, maybe you just need to try a different approach.
Depends on your referential. Within humanity, addiction takes very different form. Compared to mosquitos, our addictions are probably still very similar, yes.
I think I fail to see your point though.
Are you saying people tend to exaggerate how different addictions are, for example to better sell some new addiction overcoming books or courses?
They're likely just disagreeing to be pedantic. I struggle with this addiction just like coldtea does...although my experience with it is pretty unique ;)
I'm 254 days into switching to a ketogenic diet (complete with at home instant ketone finger prick blood tests using the very affordable keto mojo), and can't believe I waited so long.
I was roughly surfing sugar highs for 39 years.
Would highly recommend looking into this if you are a sugar/carb addict like I was.
My problem with keto is that most people on it eat so much saturated fat that their cholesterol goes through the roof, and that’s really bad for cardiovascular health.
(Keto communities deal with this by preaching an anti-science, cholesterol-denialist dogma, but that dogma has always been driven by wishful thinking).
- If I'm reading correctly, they classified someone's diet mostly based on 1 single prior 24 hour food questionnaire. This is a bit...weak.
- The LCHF cohort has significant pre-existing conditions (which they do correct for, but their headline is about the non-corrected number)
- They define LCHF diets as being <100g of carbs a day, and define VLC diets as being <50g a day, but do NOT publish any results for the VLC cohort. Why not?
- They then do NOT publish their data!
- BUT if you dig into their supplementary tables, they DO report that VLCs have lower rates of ASCVD than LCHF.
- They have conflicts of interest: "Dr Brunham has served on advisory boards for Amgen, Novartis, HLS Therapeutics, and Ultragenyx. Dr Iatan has served on advisory boards for Novartis and HLS Therapeutics and receiving honoraria from Novartis and Sanofi. "
Anyway, I give that one a C-. Well executed, but looks like their hands are tied. I would not bet on its associations to reproduce in an experiment.
We can pick apart studies all day long, but the link between saturated fat and cholesterol is hard to deny.
Were I you I would get my ApoB checked. If it’s low, then great! Keep doing what you’re doing! But don’t give yourself a heart attack following the latest fad diet.
I definitely do _not_ understand the first thing about cholesterol and adverse cardiovascular events.
Certainly high on my list of things to be able to model by the end of the year.
I have spent a fair amount of time in the lab (mostly dry, with a little bit of wet lab), so have good foundations, just that's an area I haven't had time to deep dive in yet.
It doesn’t happen for everyone, but most people on a high-saturated-fat diet will see higher measured cholesterol levels. This has been established in many studies. And anecdotally, it happened to me when I was on a low-carb diet
My biggest problem with Keto is that is that one bad meal and your out.
I found it was just such a pain in the as for other as much as it was for me. Every meal at someone elses house I had to make my specific nutritional requirements available to the host, which then puts them out.
Sure, you're out of ketosis. Anyone who says you have to be in ketosis all the time for low-carb to work at weight loss is confusing medical ketogenic diets (e.g., for epilepsy) with practical ones. Medical keto diets don't have leeway because they depend on the ketone bodies as an antiepileptic drug. Weight loss keto is more about taming the cravings and getting you away from junk food.
I lost my weight over a decade ago, before "keto" was a buzzword. I've become less strict, because I know that if my weight starts going up, I don't have a problem going very-low-carb to drop it again. It's still calories in, calories out, at the end of the day - but for me, it's a very sustainable diet. I like cookies, but if you offered me the choice between a sweet dessert and another steak, I would have taken the steak even when I was a junk-guzzling fatty.
I never asked anyone to do any special stuff for me after the first few weeks. Someone serves you pasta alfredo? Eat it; one meal isn't the end of the world. Unless your social schedule is very different from most, you're not going to eat at someone else's house more than once a week, and restaurants (at least in the US) can be counted on to have a chicken Caesar salad if nothing else.
Actually, there seems to be some benefit in having a "regular" meal every now even then, perhaps even once a week - I read once that your body can adapt too well to using Ketones and you stop losing weight at the speed you did at the start (although my caveat to that is that the first time I did keto, I lost pretty consistently a bit over 0.5kg per week for about 9 months apart from a couple of 2-3 weeks plateaus).
Every time I've come off keto, I've always had the intention of staying "lowish-carb" afterwards. It never works. Your body just gets used to whatever it has, gives you cravings before you really need more food, and so you have a bit more and a bit more, and before you know it, you're a full on sugar monster again.
I also think it's worth keeping a food journal. Not even for counting calories or grams of carbs, more that the act of writing it down makes you think "did I really eat that much today?" and gives you a prompt to be more careful.
I’m not you, so I can believe it doesn’t work for you, but I don’t have trouble with ditching carbs, probably because I’m almost never a sugar monster. Just not my thing. Lucky for me, sucks for you. Appetite is complex and while I’m not one of those people who can eat junk ravenously and be thin, I don’t have that to deal with. Best wishes.
Oh, sorry, I wasn't trying to give you advice as it sounded like your result was pretty stable - was just replying for others reading to let them know that sometimes a carb break in the middle of keto actually helps, and it was meant to agree with your sentiment that you don't need to worry about the odd thing here and there.
The rest was just my experience of after I'd got to my goal weight on keto, of trying to stop keto and do something midway between keto and not keto. For me, that never works - some carbs each day, leads to more carbs, leads to lots of carbs. That was never an issue while on keto - I'd just go back to my highly restrictive diet, just that I never found re-introducing carbs easy to moderate. FWIW it's worth, I'm starting keto for the 4th time now. The first 2 times were effective, until I stopped. The third time I tried to be less restrictive than the previous two times, and I didn't really achieve any weight loss.
The "you" in that paragraph about sugar monsters was actually me, but I used the "you" form because I though it could probably generalise to whoever was reading, not specifically you in particular. Sorry for the confusion.
Same thing with intermittent fasting. One deviation and the appetite comes back with a vengeance and you have to restart from scratch the process of getting used to fasting (which is the hard part, the appetite is what makes the caveman go out chase the mammoth, it's a strong force).
Experimenting with Mounjaro right now + intermittent fasting. So far so good, but only one week into it. I am hoping to use it as a guardrail in case of any accidental deviation.
Just be hungry dude. It's not hard. I notice I'm much more productive while I'm hungry. Also food is so much better when you have been actually hungry for a while.
why would protein kick you out of ketosis, on Keto alot of people, especially athletes load up on as much protein as they can and use fat to get the rest of their calories.
My biochem is a little rusty but basically your body can create glucose (carbs) from amino acids (proteins) in a process called gluconeogenesis. Because your body will preferentially use glucose over fat and ketones for fuel, it will prioritize this pathway and turn down/off the one that produces ketones... hence dropping you out of ketosis.
Your body doesn't prefer glucose over fat. Too much glucose is toxic, so your body will focus on reducing it first. Too little is also dangerous so your body will make some from protein if necessary. But only as much as it needs.
Fat adaptation is about shifting your hormonal balance and response to retrain your body to maintain a lower level of glucose, and to retrain your cravings and hunger.
I'm not talking at the higher organism level, I'm talking at the very low-level chemistry in mitochondria. Glucose is "easier" to produce energy out of and so that happens preferentially from a chemistry perspective. Your body also needs a minimum level of glucose to survive.
When there isn't enough glycogen, the chemical balances in the mitochondria change and the liver mitochondria will produce glucose from whatever they have. This isn't a "decision" just the relative amounts of the chemicals change leading to one chemical pathway becoming more likely compared to another. This is all mediated by the random collisions of molecules in your cells. If you have a lot less of one molecule compared to another, the frequency that molecules find each other to do one thing v/s the other will change leading to different chemical pathways becoming more or less active.
There are many routes for your body to produce glucose. It is "easier" for your body to produce it from gluconegenic amino acids (not all amino acids can be used to produce glucose) than it is from fatty acids. It's the process of converting fatty acids into glucose that generates ketones. So when you have excess amino acids that can be turned into glucose, the chemistry will prefer this pathway over breaking down fat into glucose and this will lead to lower ketone production overall and kick you out of ketosis.
(I think I've gotten the gist of this right but any biochem experts feel free to correct me)
I can't speak to whether or not it's true, but I heard the response to this question being that this process is quite precise, and functions specifically to meet the brain's glucose needs and nothing more.
> on Keto alot of people, especially athletes load up on as much protein as they can
This only works because athletes tend to have pretty insane protein (and calorie!) demands.
If you as a regular, non-athlete person load up on protein (while neglecting to consume sufficient fat), your body will be forced to convert the protein into glucose, and you'll fall right out of ketosis
All the tips given in the article are very useful, but for me it was also useful learning how to make different types of jam or cakes helps you understand the amount of sugar and butter used. Replacing store-bought sweets with homemade options gives you a sense of appreciation and a 'ritualistic' aspect when enjoying something sweet, which may reduce how often you indulge in sugary treats.
My girlfriend works at a hospital, where ironically there's always a steady supply of sugary treats on hand. It's a crutch as they're constantly dealing with truly unpleasant situations, but ultimately very unhealthy. I wish they had something to kick them out of the cycle. Years ago, I pitched the idea of armbands for staff that pledged abstinence. It fell flat. I don't have a problem with sugar but probably only thanks to my weird environment and being extremely active.
I cut out sugar for a month recently and my sleep cut in half and my depression really worsened. Really affected my job performance. I didn't think it would last that long or be that bad. It's crazy.
I went back to eating bit of sugar and the same night had a great sleep.
Not sure what to do now. I find it easy not to eat it but the side effects are very difficult to deal with
When I'm working on the computer late, eating chocolate or other sweet things was a real crutch. Not doing it required a lot of willpower, so I could sometimes limit my consumption for some periods, but I gave up on quitting sugar in the long run.
For other health-related reasons (migraines) I went keto since a few months ago and had no problems at all quitting sugar altogether. Nuts, cured ham are great for occasional nibbling. My sweet thing is a 'keto cream' with a blend of cream and yogurt whipped to be fluffy and topped with peanut butter and crushed nuts.
I do have some very occasional cravings for fries or chocolate, but it is very very rare, almost nothing compared to a normal high-carb diet.
(I break the ketosis for a carbful meal from time to time, so it's not like alcoholism where seeing carbs or sugar is a problem that would cause a relapse either.)
A decade ago I got into intermitted fasting and forced myself to drink my coffee black at work. Going from a double-double (x2 cream, x2 sugar) at timmies to black. big change but the IF motivation for mental clarity, and increasing my metabolism worked out so well that I didn't mess with the regiment until recently adding oat milk to my coffee, or butter. its really about dealing down the dark coffee flavour.
beyond the benefits, I find that my palette rejects anything too sweet now. my wife's family loves mangoes and its one of the first things they eat in the morning. I just can't. grapes, mangoes, lychee.. all way too sweet for my liking.
if it comes to sweetening a summer lemonade for guests, real maple syrup over sugar and it really helps when your circle of friends are also on a similar kick. no one brings donuts to gatherings any more.
After not eating sweet food for some time, i noticed usual food like milk becomes sweet. And mango is just not palatable. Too much sugar, for no benefit.
For me the solution has been blackberries + peanut butter (natural).
No sugar, when I really get a craving for something sweet, I eat about 50g of blackberries with 2 teaspoons of high quality peanut butter. Delicious and the craving stops. Also, about 100 calories at most
I'm not sure I believed in sugar as an addiction at first. Then I tried this keto diet because I had seen my friend try it and he lost a lot of weight.
And then I had this phenomenon that was so strong that I still remember it years later - I started having fantasies about soda/milkshakes in the middle of a workday. Like so intense/ongoing that the only thing I can compare them to is a teen's sexual fantasies. Mind you I wasn't even somebody who drank soda every day or week.
I found some voice in the back of my head saying "We could literally go get a cherry coke in under 4 minutes, there's a CVS around the corner, or a root beer? Or a root beer float? Dr pepper? We could get two." I ended up drinking diet soda for a few weeks (which I normally find disgusting).
Anyways after a certain point (3 months?) the cravings died and never came back the same way. Your mileage may vary.
Several others have mentioned that after cutting back on sugar, many foods taste overly sweet, but they're probably still eating way more than you do when you're on Keto.
When I stopped Keto, entire categories of food become intolerably sweet. It was at least a year or two before I could eat a burger. They're basically a meat cake!
McDonalds is actually OK for Keto. The restaurant is built on the principle of trying to trick you to have carbs so you still feel hungry and buy more, but actually the meat on its own isn't terrible. A couple of double cheeseburgers without buns in a stack makes a good meal. If you're really after the burger feeling, get two mayo chicken burgers without mayo or buns and use the lightly battered chicken burger as your "bread" and in the middle have a double cheeseburger without buns. Fortunately this combo doesn't have the nickname in the UK as it does in the US, but I'm always a little self-conscious when I'm eating it, just in case anyone around does know and what they might think of me! Also, in the UK at least, 3 items from the saver menu costs roughly the same as a normal meal deal, is much more filling and obviously keto friendly.
Replacement works for me. Replaced all added sugars stuff (drinks, ice cream, cookies) with fruit and the difference was very noticeable. Fruit also has its own kind of sugar, but my body runs differently on that compared with food with added sugar.
I use a GCM and one thing I've noticed about fruits in general is that the glucose spike is short. Things level off on the graph fairly quickly with berries. Although there are some fruits that do cause a significant spike. Fruits like grapes, pineapple and bananas are the worst ones.
With every fruit you get healthy dose of fiber that helps digestive system to push residuals out. 3 bananas that will make you full equals 2 cans of 330ml cola and i bet you still will want to eat after that.
The parent poster is right in that pure fructose is probably worse for you than an equivalent amount of pure sucrose. But the way that fructose is delivered to your body by digesting fruit - slowly, and in conjuction with other materials, in a way that we have evolved to tolerate - is entirely different from eating the pure chemical.
The amount of fruit you’d have to consume to ingest unhealthy levels of fructose is astronomical. Worrying about whether fruit is unhealthy is most likely causing you more harm than the fructose in fruit. Don’t worry about eating fruit.
What exactly do you mean by "this topic"? Fruits being bad for you, which is the comment you're replying to?
This is the only mention of fruit in the linked paper:
> Fructose is a simple sugar that is the primary nutrient in fruit and honey. However, in the western diet, its main source is table sugar (sucrose), which consists of fructose and glucose bound together, and high fructose corn syrup (HFCS), which consists of a blended mixture of fructose and glucose, often with slightly higher concentrations of fructose as testing has suggested humans prefer slightly more fructose as it is sweeter than glucose. Today these ‘added sugars’ account for ≈15% of overall energy intake, with some groups ingesting as much as 20% or more.
> Fructose is also generated in the body from glucose. This occurs when glucose levels (i.e. the substrate) are excessive, such as in diabetes, following the ingestion of high glycaemic carbohydrates, and by high carbohydrate diets.
Similarly, the grandparent comment "Fructose (the sugar that comes from fruits)" should read like this: "Fructose (the sugar that comes from fruits, but these days it's primarily from table sugar and processed foods)"
As a sugar addict the only thing that has ever worked for me was doing a 3 day fast.
For about 6 months afterwards I just seemed to not need sugary things as much and I didn’t crave it in the same way. I also had a lot more control over my hunger, being able to ignore it for longer, so I guess that probably helped.
Eventually it wore off and I was back to being an addict again, but I thought it was interesting because I never expected that to happen. I guess it was a ‘cold turkey’ episode.
I was in Florida. The nitrogen runoff created an algae bloom that suffocated thousands of fish and manatees. As a joke at the hipster coffee shop I picked up a packet of sugar and said I was boycotting sugar because what the big sugar did to the environment. I didn’t make any difference except I’ve had perfect blood work and zero cavities since. I also lost a lot of weight. Maybe I didn’t make the environment healthy however I sure am a lot healthier.
This was a great, uplifting post. I'm happy for the author.
I love sugar. Sugar cereals, sugar snacks, and especially anything that has peanut butter. But I've recently started to cut back. (i.e. Greek yogurt with fruit for a snack). So far, about a week in, things feel good and I've dropped about 6 pounds. (!!) I hope I can find more ways to make it easier.
I tried not buying food with added sugar but it’s surprisingly difficult. Here is an interesting analysis I did some time ago which shows that for half of the food items, sugar is the main ingredient: https://scrapingfish.com/blog/scraping-walmart
I started a strict Keton diet back in April. I started by doing a 48 hour fast to completely eliminate stored glycogen stores. I also began with intermittent fasting by skipping breakfast. It was hard at first, but thankfully I never experienced the "keto flu" that some people do. I wonder if the initial fasting helped with that.
Sugar is one of my downfalls, but unfortunately I have to keep some sugar around for when I have a blood glucose low (I'm diabetic and have a pump). Of course, I could focus on more healthy versions of sugar (like juice instead of candy), which I almost never do.
Fruit juice is basically liquid candy. For most people there's nothing wrong with drinking a little bit but the effects on blood sugar are similar to eating candy. (This is not medical advice for diabetics.)
Of course - the idea is to have something that will boost my blood sugar in the event of a low. I'm more concerned about what's in it other than sugar. A lot of the candy I get is filled with dyes, HFCS, etc.
Before I go shopping, I drink a full glass of water. This has helped suppress or avoid the urge to making impulse purchases at the supermarket. Almost always I regret having bought them; and almost always, I eat them because I don't want to throw them out.
As the article stated, sugar consumption was a method of coping (when he felt stressed or overwhelmed). If you consider that the source of that stress is chronic or from something constantly being put away, then that repeated regular use over the course of decades becomes quite a tough pattern to break, since it represents a fundamental element of what keeps you sane. In these cases, the sudden removal is comparable to living a nightmare.
So I beg to differ that it's not (always) that simple.
Fasting wont take away the cravings, if anything it will make them worse (after a few days you feel very hungry and all you can think about is food, then there's a period where you don't mind, then you are starving again, and so on).
And even if it did, once you stop the fast you get the cravings again.
Willpower, propensity for addiction, susceptibility to sugar, etc. aren't equally distributed.
The people you're preaching to have tried all those things. Your advice cashes out into "land better in the distribution like me and then confuse it for a character trait like I do".
Usually when you increase exercise, your body decreases its non-exercise calorie burn (NEAT), so your total calorie needs don’t change much. As a result, exercise is usually a wash for weight loss, unless you’re working hard to maintain your NEAT.
(Exercise is still extremely good for you though!! Highly recommend!!!)
I also find it challenging to put on weight when exercising, but to make this comment more accurate you may want to caveat that this is how your body responds to exercise.
Many people appear to experience a commensurate increase in appetite after exercise such that they do not lose weight unless they also consciously restrict calories.
With low intensity endurance training (cycling in zone 2) I find my appetite adjusts accordingly, and remains high for a period even if I'm not doing the exercise, and that's when I gain the weight.
Resistance training (bouldering for me) seems to have little effect one way or the other.
If I'm doing High intensity interval training (usually stair sprints) on a regular basis, it's hard to eat enough, my metabolism gets absolutely jacked.
I feel like this is an oversimplification. Exercise has compounding effects. That 1 hour of effort doesn't just burn 800, even if that's all that is used in 1 hour. The increase in metabolism ups your burn for the rest of the hours in the day (some at least, trailing off presumably). And any increase in BMR or muscle mass will keep that per hour calorie cost even higher.
My diet used to be as bad as Hansel and Gretel's. A long-term keto diet neutralised the habit for a few years. But after it returned, what worked for me in changing it was to rigorously substitute plain foods for the richly processed stuff (meals and snacks) until I learned to appreciate simple tastes. For instance snacking on fruit, nuts, crackers and ryvita, buttered toast, cottage cheese and natural yoghurt. I wasn't able to shake my chocolate cravings, but over time, the pull of intensely sweet stuff died back, to the point where the sugar rush from ice cream or wedge of chocolate cake makes me feel sick enough for me to prefer to avoid them. To anyone who tries this approach, good luck.
I quit sugar after a stint volunteering in a homeless shelter, where I saw how people were with sugar. I was horrified, so I went cold turkey! Some say that going to an abattoir means becoming an instant vegan, seeing zombies with sugar at three in the morning had a similar effect on me.
I don't see sugar as the root of all evil, the master of all addictions. However, it is easy to quit and, if you can do that, you can quit anything else, including addictive substances. The reason is that, if you are avoiding all added sugar, then you have to cook. It means no more processed food and an improvement to the metabolism.
However, the quit sugar idea does attract people that want to lose weight, which is a noble goal, but not the same thing as wanting to live an active life at a healthy weight.
This means that most people drawn to no sugar are on a keto diet with all that this entails. For the keto diet person all carbohydrates are the enemy, with fat and protein as the allowed macronutrients.
I was open to completely changing my diet as, until the eye-opening experience, I had always put employers or others first and not really thought a great deal about nutrition. My 'intellect' was more concerned with programming languages than what I should be stuffing my face with!
Knowing nothing about the subject, I did want to know why I felt so much better from giving up sugar. So I investigated diet and nutrition. I developed new habits including when shopping. I mostly buy vegetables and supplement vitamin B12. The experiment is going very well. I quit coffee and much else, to arrive independently at a 'whole food, plant based' diet, which is 'closet vegan'. I clung on to butter for quite a while, but cut that cord to reject a lot of the 'anti-carb' thinking that goes with the keto diet.
I don't eat a lot of 'evil carbs', as viewed by the fat eating keto people. This is because I usually have so many leafy greens, legumes and other vegetables that I just don't have the need for a plate full of rice, pasta or whatever else is 'evil carbs'.
The thing is that every calorie has to have nutrition, so sugar is 'empty calories' with no nutritional value. I seem to be fine without it, I can go cycling for all the daylight hours in the day and not need anything more than a few pieces of fruit and a sandwich made with the help of a bread machine.
I don't think that not eating sugar is that big a deal, but it can be a very useful stepping stone towards arriving at a sustainable lifestyle that is not a 'diet'.
Much of the 'science' regarding why sugar is allegedly bad is not as clear cut as it should be. I have heard all about 'fructose' and 'ketosis'. I have also learned a little bit about history and how we came to be living a pastoral life in the UK before the Romans arrived. There has always been conflict between the people that farm grains and the people that eat animal products, with an overlap between the two camps. This is why we have people insisting that full keto, whale blubber only, is the way to go, then we have people insistent on vegan as the way to go, with the majority being okay with 'everything in moderation'.
In conversation I have mentioned that I 'quit all processed food' and that does not seem to trigger anyone. I really did manage to quit everything I was addicted to, but I don't see sugar as an addiction, even though I ate it every day for decades.
I did take sugar for granted and I would eat things in front of the TV without truly savouring the taste. I can't quite remember what those sticky toffee puddings tasted like, or some chocolate bars that I had thousands of times. I would recommend quitting sugar, however, you must be open to the possibility that you really will want to quit for good, to be eating fruit out of choice, and to want herbs and spices rather than biscuits and chips in the supermarket. If you get a figure that you enjoy living in and see cancerous moles vanish on your skin, then it can be hard to want to go back to a diet that includes sugar. There are no upsides to it once you get the health gains.
Hence, before you quit sugar, compile a list of your favourite things and spend a solid month savouring them, as a farewell tour. Enjoy with the TV off, in that way, when you have gone past the point of turning back, you can remember what these things tasted like, to not miss them or wonder.
I always keep my receipts for my grocery shopping. I would not be full of shame if someone were to read them and try to mock my food choices. Everything is healthy.
I have not used my fridge or freezer with this experiment, so they are turned off at the wall. My food is always fresh. It turned out that everything in my fridge was just trying to kill me and vegetables prefer being outside the morgue that is the fridge. My food waste is almost zero, although I did throw half a turnip out recently. Even my recycling bin is getting to zero, that has not seen plastic in a very long time, glass jars are rare and even tins are getting rare.
Sometimes I think about quitting my peculiar lifestyle, to turn the fridge and freezer back on, to stock them with sticky toffee puddings, vast slabs of cheese and everything else laced with fat and sugar. I could toss the vegetables out and put ready made meals in the microwave, or frozen pizza in the oven.
I found that we put the horse before the cart with 'exercise'. I found that, get the nutrition right, and the physical activity comes naturally. But, playing devil's advocate, I think about going to fizzy drinks, sticky toffee puddings and beer. I could get man boobs and a beer gut, maybe with an extra chin or two. I would never need to spend twenty minutes chopping vegetables ever again, oh, it could be so easy!
But no, I am staying off the sugar. However, it is no big deal, I just live in a parallel universe of vegetables with no processed sugar or silly science about the evils of fructose. Sugar is not evil, I just prefer the whole food, plant based life as a 'closet vegan'.
My son is struggling with this right now and it's entirely my fault.
I've never been outside of 15 pounds what I weighed in High School and I was underweight in High School. As a man in his 40s, I'm in better shape than I was back then, lower body fat, slightly more muscle, triglycerides/LDL/HDL better[0].
I eat how a 10-year-old kid would eat if he didn't have parents. All of my breakfast foods (which I never eat in the morning) have cartoon characters on the box. Fruity/Cocoa Pebbles, Honeycomb, Cookie Crisp, Lucky Charms, Cocoa Krispies, Fruit Loops, Frosted Gluten-Wheats, (of course) Cap'n Crunch ... actually, worse -- I buy the Malt-O-Meal generic versions of each that come in the cement bags.
I can't think of the last time I drank water. I drink Coca-cola, instead. At least twice a week I make a half-gallon chocolate malt and consume the entire thing. Sometimes that's dinner. It's the only reason I own a blender. It's the reason blenders last about 2 years, tops, for me -- typically with dead motors or a shattered carafe[1]. I make the whole carafe for myself (the kids split half of one). I rarely eat Breakfast or Lunch. Dinner is something frozen and tossed in an Air Fryer or ordered. I often add a meal just before bed that consists of several bowls of one of the previously mentioned cereals.
I do none of this with any sort of planning. I get hungry, I find food, I eat it. If I'm depressed, I don't eat. If I'm busy doing something else I might forget to eat. When I'd travel solo for work, I'd go through my receipts and find out I ate twice at the airport on the way out/in, and spend an hour looking for meal receipts until I figure out that -- yes, I actually did only pay for three meals that week. Yes, one of those "meals" was an Arizona Peach Tea, half of which was left somewhere and for some reason I felt it necessary to both get and keep the receipt for the $1.00 purchase but at least the expense department will be satisfied ... if not a little surprised.
My 16-year-old son is having success with a restrictive Low Carb/No Sugar diet and I've found myself at a loss as to how to help him, but many of the things the author mentioned (short of a vacation I can't afford) have worked very well.
My observation is that the author's top two items are the most effective parts if you can do the first.
My alternative to the "vacation" for him is distraction. He's a lot like me: an indoor cat who likes computers and video games and doesn't like sports. I focused on things he really liked that were active and upgraded him -- he got a better VR kit and we upgraded the OneWheel[2]. He learned the first few days that when he gets hungry, the best thing to do is use one of those and the one that gets him out of the house is the one that works best. Though we could have taken a vacation for the cost of the upgrade, he wouldn't be putting in ten miles on it every day.
And I think that's part of it: finding something he loves to do which involves a lot of exercise. So far, that's the OneWheel GT (and I feel the same way). He uses the VR. It's about what you'd expect. The few games he enjoys aren't much exercise and the ones that are exercise focused aren't any fun. Luckily he doesn't get motion sick, but that was a pointless purchase for these purposes. And I assumed it would be: I've been through all of the previous attempts to make exercise fun with video games: Wii, every version of Kinect, various others dating back to the Nintendo floor pad with their weird Olympics game, both of which I destroyed in my youth. They usually make some form of exercise less effective while making "wanting to do that form of exercise" slightly more attractive for a brief period of time.
The optimal situation would be a game that can be played at home with low-cost equipment which "people want to play because it's fun to play" that happens to require a reasonable amount of physical exercise to use. Ideally, it'd be something that wouldn't be "more enjoyable with a more common control scheme", nor would physical strength greatly improve ones ability to master the game (so, like most video games, they're more mental strategy vs precision muscle memory) and would be multi-player. I've yet to encounter something that doesn't fall over on all of these points so badly as to make it worse than traditional exercise.
[0] I was a kid during a brief period when they advocated giving children as young as 10-years old cholesterol tests and then putting them on low-fat diets when they (generally) had "High Cholesterol".
[1] Which is only a problem if the carafe is for an ALDI Aisle of Shame $39 blender and finding a replacement is either impossible or almost as expensive. After every expensive blender I owned failed, I'd somehow end up finding a crappy one at ALDI figuring "The $200 one died quickly, might as well save the money this time."
[2] We had a Pint and we've gone through a few tires and about 9K miles on that one. When ridden hard, you come home soaked head to toe in sweat, but it's one thing that he enjoys as much as (if not more) than playing video games.
This has to be my reality. If I buy treats, no matter how good my intentions are to make them last, they just don't survive in the cupboard more than a couple of days. I have to leave my kitchen mostly empty apart from: diet soda, meat, cheese, yoghurt, peanut butter. Everything else is just too addictive and I keep eating it until it's gone. I do have other stuff, but have to buy it as and when I need it in a quantity that will only last one meal.
One suggestion I can give if you like chocolate is to buy some 90% or 95% chocolate. It's hard to eat more than one piece at a time without your mouth feeling quite dry, and a 100g bar can easily last a week. After a while, if you have anything else, even 80%, it'll taste really sweet. But it only take a bar or two of the really easy to eat sweet variety before you'll be hooked on it again.
reply