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- LenDentonThrive Letter #13
Reading time: approx: 8 minutes
LenDentonThrive Letter #13
Beating Your Sugar Addiction
In this newsletter, I’m going to show you how you can prevent your sugar addiction from crashing your weight loss plans.
But first, here’s a quick preview of what’s in the LenDentonThrive Letter #13:
The Big Idea - This week, we’ll discuss sugar addictions, what they are, and how you can beat your own sugar addiction into submission.
Tip of the Week - A quick tip or strategy to help you improve your health, fitness, and life.
News You Can Use - I’ll share two or three useful items from my reading stack for you to check out later.
I’m glad that you’re here! We have a lot to cover in eight minutes or less, so let’s get started!
1. The Big Idea - Beating Your Sugar Addiction
If you are an over-50 American man, there’s a good chance that you have a sugar addiction. Even if you don’t know it.
How do I know that? Because I have a sugar addiction. So do most of my friends. In most cases, sugar addiction isn’t debilitating. And as long as we keep a steady flow of sugar circulating in our bloodstream, we likely won’t notice that we’re addicted. But, most of us are functioning sugar-holics!
How Did This Happen?
Blame it on the Standard American Diet or S-A-D. The S-A-D is a catch-all phrase for the typical collection of highly-processed foods, excessive sweets, fast foods, and sugary drinks that pass as the normal American diet. The S-A-D is overloaded with hidden sweeteners, fillers, and highly processed carbohydrates.
These compounds cause the glucose levels in our blood to spike shortly after we eat them. The pancreas reacts to this elevated level of glucose by dumping more and more insulin into our bloodstream. This insulin signals the cells in our bodies to consume the excess glucose. That excess glucose then gets stored in our bodies as excess body fat.
The long-term effects of eating the S-A-D have resulted in the explosive rise in obesity, diabetes, and heart disease that we are seeing among the American population.
The S-A-D is slowly killing us!
More Addictive Than Cocaine
Sugar is highly addictive. Researchers have found that sugar is more addictive than cocaine. Some studies reveal that sugar is up to 8 times more addictive than cocaine!
It affects the same opioid and dopamine receptors in our brains. Simply put, it affects the same pleasure centers of our brains as the most powerful drugs.
So, whenever someone starts a new weight loss process, they probably cut back on their sugar consumption. And, that is when the Sugar Monster rears its ugly head and cranks up the demand for more sugar. So, it’s quiet as long as you are feeding it. But it quickly becomes a rowdy beast when you try to stop feeding it.
Taming Your Sugar Addiction
We know that sugar is highly addictive. We also know that it’s hiding in almost every commercially-produced food product that we consume. So, how do we harness our sugar addiction before it sabotages our weight loss efforts?
Here are six practical steps to allow you to take control of your sugar addiction.
Decide, then Act - Decide to start a 10-day sugar fast, during which time you will choose to consume no sugars in your diet. You are going to need several days of zero sugar consumption to overcome the cravings. If you mess up, start the 10 days over from the beginning.
Read Food Labels - Don’t consume any food products where sugar is listed as one of the first three ingredients.
Eat Healthy Meals - Increase your protein intake. Replace sugar calories with meats and vegetables. Don’t allow yourself to be hungry during this 10-day fast period.
Stay Hydrated - Sometimes, we can think we are hungry when we are actually thirsty.
Get More Sleep - sleep helps to reduce our levels of Cortisol (the fight-or-flight hormone). Ghrelin, the hunger hormone, also decreases with better sleep.
Reduce Stress - Food cravings are often triggered by stress. Lowering our stress levels also lowers Cortisol (as noted in #5 above). Avoid stressful situations and people whenever you can. Walking is an excellent way to reduce stress.
The key to success in dealing with your sugar addiction is to attack it head-on! Half measures will simply prolong the length of time you remain under its control.
A Quick Personal Story
I do a good job of managing my sugar addiction for 50 weeks every year. Then, there’s Christmas! My wife makes the best Christmas cookies in the world. So, every Christmas season, I take a short leave of absence from my sugar avoidance on Christmas Eve and Christmas Day to eat as many Christmas cookies as I want. And, just like clockwork, my sugar addiction comes roaring back to life. I spend the next 10-14 days to get it back under control. Then, everything is fine again until the next Christmas season.
Maybe this year I’ll skip the cookies. Hmm, probably not!
Summary
Most Over-50 Guys are unsuspecting sugar addicts. This is caused by consuming the Standard American Diet for decades. The S-A-D is overloaded with calories from hidden sweeteners and highly-processed carbs and fillers. The S-A-D is driving an unprecedented rise in obesity and related diseases across America. The S-A-D is slowly killing us!
Sugar is more addictive than cocaine, and affects the pleasure centers of our brain in a similar way. Addiction to sugar can sabotage our efforts to lose weight by creating intense cravings.
The antidote to this slow death-by-food is to aggressively manage the sugars out of our diets. Six useful steps are:
Start a 10-day sugar fast
Read food labels
Eat healthy, balanced meals
Stay hydrated
Get more sleep
Reduce your stress
The key to success in addressing a sugar addiction is to attack it head-on.
Want to Go Deeper?
Do you want to dive deeper into ThriveAge and what it can do in your life? If that sounds like a smart move for you, then consider subscribing to the LenDentonThrive Letter. It’s totally free!
As a bonus, new subscribers will receive a free .pdf version of Chapter 1 of my upcoming new book, The ThriveAge Way (The Over-50 Way To Lose Weight, Get Fit & Stay Fit For Life).
ThriveAge is the roadmap to your custom-built ThriveLife!
2. Tip of the Week: To Become More Fit and Healthy, Rebuild Your Identity First
How we see ourselves (our identities) is how we will express ourselves. Our current behaviors are a reflection of our current identity. We act based on who we believe we are.
Identity is an essential tool that we can use to recast our health and fitness.
If your identity says that you’re too busy to work out and get healthy, then you ARE too busy. Think you aren’t the athletic type? Well, then you won’t be.
However, if your identity says that you’re a person that cares about your own health and fitness, then you’ll also be a person who finds the time needed to BE fit and healthy - even if you’re not an athlete.
Add this to your personal identity statement: I’m a person who is committed to being fit and healthy.
3. News You Can Use
Here is some “news you can use” from my research:
What Happens to Your Body if You Gave Up Sugar for Two Weeks? - in this YouTube, Dr. Eric Berg covers 9 changes your body experiences when you give up sugar for two weeks. A bit long, but very useful info.
Viewing time: 15:19
Here’s How to Break Your Sugar Addiction in 10 Days - another YouTube where Dr. Mark Hyman from the Cleveland Clinic shares info on how to eliminate sugar addiction. An oldie, but still super-relevant.
Viewing time: 3:11
Follow me on the socials for daily tips and strategies for living your ThriveLife:
I’m Writing A Book!
I’m a busy Over-50 Guy who has spent the past ten years building a practice of personal health and fitness that relies on real food and smart exercise instead of crazy diets and killer workouts. This process, called ThriveAge, helped me to lose 70 pounds and keep it off for going on ten years. Now, I want to share what I have learned with other Over-50 Guys. So, I wrote the book!
In The ThriveAge Way (The Over-50 Way To Lose Weight, Get Fit & Stay Fit For Life), I share everything I’ve learned about the principles and practices necessary to create and sustain a healthy lifestyle. I call it my ThriveLife.
New subscribers to the LenDentonThrive Letter will receive Chapter 1 of my new book for free. To get your free copy of Chapter 1, just subscribe to the LenDentonThrive Letter.
Thanks for your time and attention. Have a great weekend. See you next Saturday!
Thrive & Prosper,
Len
Hey, Before You Go…
First, are you a subscriber to the LenDentonThrive Letter? Please share this with someone you know who might benefit from it. I’d appreciate that! And, I bet the guy you forward it to will too!
Second, did someone forward you this copy of the LenDentonThrive Letter?
You can get your own free copy by subscribing today. And, I’ll throw in Chapter 1 of my upcoming new book as a bonus.
Thanks for visiting!
See you next Saturday!
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