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5 Reasons To Quit Sugar Even If You Do Not Have Diabetes!

Sugar sits pretty not just on your tabletops- with your morning tea and coffee, but is a part of almost every meal and snack. Your morning cereals, low fat or oil-free snacks you pick up from the shelves, most ready-to-eat sauces, spreads, even low fat yoghurt, all come loaded with sugar. Sugar is a highly processed food and all its damaging effects quietly sneak up in our diet.

5 Primary Reasons Why You Should Quit Sugar:

Starving Your Body

Most ready-to-eat foods are loaded with sugars and constitute a significant portion of on-the-go foods. Substituting a healthy meal with sugary foods means that we skip on essential carbohydrates, proteins, vitamins, and minerals that should have made up our calories. We replace cereals, protein-rich pulses, and vegetables with zero nutrition foods that are high in empty calories. The body is thus literally starved of the nutrients it requires. Therefore, it is a must to quit sugar.

A 2014 study published in Nutritional Neuroscience explains how a high-fructose diet causes hippocampal insulin resistance while also exacerbating memory deficits. Another study published in Molecular Neurobiology found a link between sugar consumption and negative changes in the brain’s frontal cortex — changes associated with additional cognitive problems. If you want to stay sharp and on top of things, especially as you age, stop eating sugar. Your mind will reward you in spades.
Dr. M.G. Kartheeka, MBBS, MD

Instant High Followed by a Sluggish Feeling:

Refined sugar is instantly absorbed into the bloodstream that causes the release of the hormone insulin. Insulin helps the body to utilize the sugar and blood sugar levels crash leaving you feeling lethargic. Therefore, a lunch packed with sugary treats leaves you feeling sluggish and tired much earlier than eating fruit or meal containing vegetables. Your productivity declines, you feel sleepy and irritated.

Foods such as bread, biscuits, readymade sauces, fat-free yoghurt are all high in sugar content, even though they do not fall into the traditional ‘sweet’ foods category.

Opt for meals with lots of raw vegetables, fruits, cereals, pulses, and other protein-rich foods to keep you energetic throughout the day.

Affects Your Alertness:

The yo-yo effect of blood sugar levels does not just leave you feeling sluggish and tired physically but affects your mental alertness too. You feel disoriented and are unable to concentrate. It can even give headaches to many of you. You need to limit your sugar consumption if you wish to improve alertness at work.

Also Read: Is Sucralose Bad for You? Unraveling the Truth Based on Research

Causes of Weight Gain:

Is sugar fattening? You bet. We have believed for a long time that its fats that make us fat. This is not entirely true. Sugar is metabolized by our liver, where it is converted into fat and released into the bloodstream. This is the harmful fat that makes us gain weight and is the cause of several diseases.

Most products sold in the market as ”Fat-free” or ”low fat” have fats replaced with sugar to maintain the taste, flavour, and texture. Thus leading you down the very road of weight gain you are trying so hard to avoid.

Prediabetes is a condition that means a person can have a higher-than-normal blood sugar level. It’s not high enough to be considered type 2 diabetes yet. But without lifestyle changes, adults and children with prediabetes are at high risk of developing type 2 diabetes which is usually inevitable.
Dr. Ashish Bajaj – M.B.B.S, M.D.

Also Read: What Causes Low Blood Sugar In a Non-diabetic: Research-Based Analysis

Makes you Hungry:

Sugar and foods containing sugar have no healthy carbohydrates or proteins in them. The insulin spike that follows the consumption of foods high in sugars quickly lowers blood sugar levels and leaves one feeling hungry again. This makes us hungry between meals, which is usually unplanned, makes us binge on whatever is readily available. More sugar and fat!

To quit sugar, it is essential to plan your meals such that they contain adequate essential nutrients required by your body. Moreover, to quit sugar, now can save you from a gamut of future complications like heart disease, diabetes, and stroke.

How To Manage Weight Gain Caused By Insulin?

Insulin in layman terms is the key that unlocks the cell for sugar to get in, which in turn allows your body to use the food that you eat. Sometimes, the key has difficulty getting into the lock or either get stuck. Hence the term ‘resistant’ is used to describe the condition when your body is unable to breakdown food properly. If your body develops a resistance to insulin, you will be unable to make use of the food you take in, which can raise your cravings for ever-increasing amounts of carbohydrates and induce a feeling of fatigue.

Weight Gain and Insulin

If your insulin is not working properly, it sets up a flow of effects that don’t work in your favour. This increases cholesterol or triglycerides which can lead to a fatty liver and the ability to store fat more easily. The typical insulin-resistant body has thin legs and arms and stores much of the fat in the abdominal region, which is usually referred to as ‘belly fat’. This type of body is also notorious as apple-shaped. If you have a different body shape, you may still be insulin resistant, but to a smaller degree compared to the apple-shaped types.

In addition, once you start taking insulin injections (if you suffer from type 2 diabetes) and start getting your blood glucose manageable, you now have sufficient insulin circulating in your blood to aid the glucose get into the body’s cells where it can be made use of as energy. So the glucose created by the food you eat is no longer accumulating in your bloodstream and being excreted out as urine. This also results in you gaining weight.

Some people quickly connect taking insulin with weight gain. They will sometimes cut back on their insulin injections and let their blood glucose run high once they find out they can lose a few kilograms in a few days time by doing so. Regrettably, when they go back to using the right amount of insulin to maintain proper control, they are disappointed to discover that they gain the weight back – and perhaps even more – in an equally speedy fashion.

Influencing insulin intake to drop weight is an unhealthy pattern to get into. Letting your blood glucose run high can lead to long-term complications – and erratic weight problems when you try to get your blood glucose back to a standard range.

Managing Insulin Related Weight Gain

A proper diet, achieved by eating regular, nutritionally-rich meals is very effective at calming down the system. Include healthy sources of protein and balance them with natural carbohydrates, such as vegetables and fresh fruits. Carbohydrates coming from vegetables and fruits seem to have less of a consequence on insulin resistance than starches, even if they are whole grains.

Research shows that regular exercise can make your insulin work up to 50% better. Exercise quite literally opens up the floodgates of the cells and allows the sugar or glucose to get in.

If you are lacking sleep, ghrelin, the hormone that increases your appetite, increases. Higher levels of ghrelin in combination with insulin resistance are a perfect combination of fatigue and weight gain.

Also, consult your doctor to arrive at a plan specifically made to control your diabetes and insulin-related weight gain.