The Sugar Smart Diet: Stop Cravings and Lose Weight While Still Enjoying the Sweets You Love by Anne Alexander, Julia VanTine Read Free Book Online Page A

can be broken, and the Sugar Smart Diet can help you do it. What makes the Sugar Smart Diet unique is that it helps you get at sugar in
all its guises and from all angles
. You learn to identify and cut back on Straight-Up Sugars, Secret Sugars, and Sugar Mimics. You learn to face and manage the physical and emotional pull of sugar. Our 32-day plan combines the power of healthy, whole foods, physical activity, emotional coping strategies, and sugar know-how to help you outsmart sugar cravings without feeling hungry or deprived—and lose weight and improve your health in the process. It will get you off that sugar merry-go-round and quench those nearly unstoppable cravings once and for all, by showing you how to hit your sugar reset button.
RESETTING YOUR SUGAR THERMOSTAT
    Next to the lid-up, lid-down discussion, many couples engage in small-scale thermostat wars. He likes the house toasty. She prefers Arctic-like temperatures. Or vice versa. To make peace, you agree to set the thermostat to a temperature that keeps your environment neither too hot nor too cold.
    You can think of your desire for sugar just like this. When you settle on that perfect number—and this plan will help you do that—your attraction to sugar isn’t so “hot” that it contributes to belly fat, weight gain, and a higher risk of disease; and isn’t so “cold” that you’re deprived of the pleasure of a square or two of exquisite chocolate after dinner or a couple of cookies during the day.
    This plan’s gift to you is sugar freedom. To receive it, you must reset your sugar thermostat. This helps you achieve sugar freedom in two ways:
    It dials down your body’s physical attraction to sugar and cools your emotional connection with it. On this plan, you reduce your sugar intake in stages, then cut it out completely for less than a week as you learn practical tools that temper sugar withdrawal and replace the reward of a sugar rush with healthier pleasures. This strategy resets your taste buds. Once you reintroduce sugar to your diet, it will taste intensely sweet, and you’ll be satisfied with less (way less).
    It sets the stage for metabolic harmony. Dramatically curtailing your sugar consumption also resets your metabolism. Your insulin levels will fall, and your body’s ability to burn fat will improve. Levels of the hunger hormone ghrelin will drop, and your response to the appetite-quelling hormone, leptin, will improve. As insulin, ghrelin, and leptin once again work in concert to manage hunger and cravings, metabolic harmony is achieved, the sugar belly flattens, and the risk of disease falls. (We’ll explain exactly how these hormones can go awry and affect your appetite and cravings in the next chapter.)
    Once you begin to introduce sugars back into your diet, you’ll add them slowly and in a particular way, so you can determine how you feel without all that sugar in your system. You’ll learn how to enjoy it without triggering fatigue,weight gain, or negative health effects—and how to keep the physiological/emotional pulls of sugar at comfortable levels.
THE SUGAR SMART DIET PLAN
    How will we get you to this point? The Sugar Smart Diet is a 32-day plan that ensures your success through a diet based on whole, natural foods, physical activity, emotional coping strategies, and other tips to outsmart sugar cravings without feeling hungry or deprived. It gradually weans you off both obvious and hidden sugars and refined carbs so you can reintroduce sugar in a healthy, balanced way.
    How do we define success? Of course, you’ll see desired changes in your weight and measurements. But you will also achieve so much more—more energy; better sleep; improved cholesterol, blood pressure, and blood sugar levels; and fewer cravings. When it comes to sugar, we’re lovers, not fighters, so our plan is designed to help you make peace with sugar, not banish it from your life forever. Take a look at what’s ahead, and you’ll see that it