Striking Sugar is wicked hard to do because most of the time, we don’t know where it is!  Who could blame you for feeling overwhelmed? How can you possibly avoid something so ubiquitous as this sticky sweet substance if you don’t know where it’s lurking?

Once so rare and expensive, sugar was called White Gold. First made in India over 2000 years ago, sugar has undergone a dramatic transformation in our diet, almost as complex as the process of making sugar from cane juice. The average person in North America today eats 170 pounds of sugar per year, and I’m not eating my share so someone else is!

There are somewhere between 50 and 100 different kinds of sugar, much of it unnatural, having been refined through a complex series of stripping, bleaching and engineering steps.  But refined sugar from cane plants or sugar beets, are not the only sugars of which you need to be aware.

Any food that is interpreted by the body as “sugar” or carbohydrate, triggers the Blood Sugar Handling response.  This means that insulin, in response to glucose, is released into the system.  Here’s what happens next:

1. The digestive system breaks down the digestible carbs into sugar.
2. Sugar enters the blood.
3. We blood sugar levels rise, the pancreas produces and releases insulin.
4. Insulin sends a signal to all cells to prepare to absorb blood sugar for more energy OR for storage.
5. As cells absorb blood sugar, levels in the bloodstream gradually fall.
6. When this happens, the pancreas starts to make glucagon, another hormone that tells the liver to start releasing stored sugar.
7. The interaction between glucagon and insulin, ensures that cells in the body, particularly the brain, have a steady supply of blood sugar.

The body reads any food containing carbohydrate as sugar.  This includes refined grain products. Think cold cereals, breads, cakes, cookies, candy, cough syrup, crackers, breads and more.  It’s not easy to know where to end the obsession with sugar.

If Striking Sugar feels like you are participating in a Monty Hall game show, “what’s behind door # 1?” you can’t be blamed. There are some twenty to thirty thousand new food products confronting us when we make the foray into the grocery store.  Of these, a whopping 68% have added sugar! (Reference here)

You also require a Sugar-To-English Dictionary. What the heck is flomalt?  Or isomaltulose? If you find these things on a food label, would you know what they are or to avoid them?  This makes purchasing food a task as complex as putting together a piece of Ikea furniture.

My advice? Strike Sugar.  Commit to a 4 week program that will clean you out and teach you where to find the natural sugars your body will thrive upon.  Then do it again.  It takes time to unlearn the habits that have gradually sidetracked us.  Don’t blame yourself.  Find one thing in your eating regimen you can change – maybe the two glass of wine per evening, habit – will have to go.  But find it and stick with it.

I’m an all or nothing kind of gal. When I decided to break up with sugar, I went cold turkey.  Hated the first few days, maybe even the first week but then it was magic. I couldn’t remember feeling so good in a very long time. Now I have been doing it for 17 years.  I can’t eat any other way. I feel too good.

And you will too.

Sign up for the program today. Get coaching and love and feel and look spectacular again.

Wishing you love and health,

Tosca

PS. Click here to Strike Sugar with us.

PPS.  Tell me all about your sugar addiction and why you want to quit in the COMMENTS section below.