Immediately or gradually?
Suppose one fine morning you decide to give up sweets. And in a fit of enthusiasm, they drank coffee without sugar. Then tea. Next, the cookies were removed from the table and a can of half-eaten condensed milk was thrown away. What’s next? “I made the decision to eliminate sugar from my diet one day. And this despite the fact that I have not eaten sugar in its pure form for a year and a half. But during self-isolation, the Groundhog Day format was brightened up with sweet food. Eat a couple of dates – and the mood seems to be better, and the future of the world does not seem so terrible. In a word, any sweet food has become an antidepressant. That is, I admitted to myself that I had a clear addiction to sweets, but I don’t like it. Knowing myself and my body, I did not consider the option of gradually reducing the amount of sweets.
I changed my diet, but I didn’t change my lifestyle. That is, I still worked hard and still ate little, and now low-carb foods, because I tried to exclude all foods that contain glucose, fructose, and other sugars. And the body did not understand what was happening.
In the following days, Valentina switched to the menu of the Soviet kindergarten, with the same first, second and third courses. Moreover, the portion size is also “childish”, since there were also small snacks between the main meals. And from that moment on, life began to improve.
“The intake of hot water also helps a lot,” Valentina shares her advice. – I think this is a fundamental point – to drink more during the transition period, and it is hot water. In a sense, it replaces the tea that I used to drink several times a day. I know that any habit is formed in 21 days. This milestone has already been crossed. And I hope that now the habit of living without sweets will become the norm.
And a nice bonus has already appeared: the skin has become noticeably better. Spot redness and inflammation are gone.
When willpower hurts
Curiously, not all nutritionists support a strong-willed rejection of sweets. “Every cell in our body needs glucose, especially the cells of the brain, eyeball, kidney tubules, which “feed” only on glucose. That is, in principle, they cannot be saturated with other substances and compounds. Therefore, it is unsafe to abruptly, in one day, interrupt the intake of the usual dose of glucose into the body.
Moreover, according to the expert, the body does not care where the glucose came from: from a cup of tea with granulated sugar, a spoonful of honey, a handful of dates or a serving of buckwheat porridge. The main thing is that it be delivered to the cells.
As the nutritionist explains, there are mono-, di- and oligo-carbohydrates. Mono is very primitive, for example, glucose. The notorious granulated sugar or refined sugar, which consists of glucose and fructose. And there are sugars that are made up of complex chains, like a glucose molecule attached to something else. The result is starch. Or fiber – it also refers to sugars. Fruit peel contains complex carbohydrates. Milk contains natural sugars called lactose. As a result, this is where the confusion comes in. And the statements “I don’t eat sugar anymore” most often have nothing to do with reality.
Find the golden mean
When a person decides to give up sweets, he must be prepared for the fact that the brain will begin to rebel. And there is an explanation for this, explains neuropsychologist Irina Khvingia. “It is correct to say that the brain needs glucose. It is she who provides the metabolic process and gives us the so-called energy boost. Glucose stimulates intracellular interaction, the normal course of biochemical reactions. Therefore, if we ascribe some emotions to the brain about glucose, then it simply cannot live without it.
Any fanaticism regarding nutrition does not lead to good, if it does not apply to strict diets for medical reasons. Everything needs a measure. Too much sugar is bad for a variety of reasons. Until the development of diabetes. But not using it at all is even worse.
There are norms, expressed in numbers, for the use of any substances, and not only glucose. As for glucose, its norm for a healthy person is 37-38 grams. This is about 50 grams of dates.
A healthy person can not buy sugar in its pure form, but at the same time there are fruits and berries containing glucose – dates, bananas, figs, persimmons. In this case, the rejection of sugar will not have an impact on health. If one wants to reduce the dose of glucose coming through fruits, one can find those that contain the least amount of sugar. These are blackberries, raspberries, watermelon, avocados – there is less than one gram of sugar. That is, if we are talking about sugar as white pieces, then it can be safely removed, but if we are talking about glucose, then its level must be maintained. Because hypoglycemia is dangerous. In order not to encounter this condition, you need to know what is happening with the level of glucose in the body at the moment, that is, regularly monitor its level in the blood.
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