I Quit Sugar for Life (5 page)

STEP 1

A quick snapshot: choose foods with less than 5 g of sugar/100 g, or 5% sugar.

This quick reading should keep you roughly in check and will wipe out 90% of processed foods. This low-fat yoghurt is 15% sugar.

STEP 2

But if it’s dairy remember the first 4.7 g of sugar/100 g is lactose.

Lactose is fine to consume, but anything on top of the 4.7 g is added sugar. Here, the amount of added sugar/100 g is 10.4 g. (15.1 g average quantity of sugar per 100 g minus 4.7 g.) This is the amount you work with in your calculations.

STEP 3

And if it’s a liquid: it must contain no sugar.

A serving size for a juice can be 375 ml, some servings can be up to 750 ml (at those juice bars). Pasta sauce can be 250 ml, which means the per 100 ml quantity of sugar needs to be multiplied by about a factor of 4, 7.5 and 2.5 (respectively) to work out how much sugar it actually contains. Even if it’s only 5% sugar, a liquid’s massive serving size renders it a sugary dump. Here, for instance, you need to multiply the 10.4 g (see step 2) by a factor of 1.7 as you’re not eating 100 g. You’re eating 170 g. That’s 17.7 g in the one serve.

The take-home: never drink anything containing sugar!

STEP 4

To calculate the sugar content in teaspoons, divide the sugar content by 4.2.

So 4.2 g of sugar = 1 teaspoon; 8.4 g = 2 teaspoons. Work out how much you’re eating in a serve by dividing the serving size by roughly 4 to get an idea of how much you’re eating. I find it easier to visualise amounts in teaspoons. You too?

Here we take the 25.7 g (or 17.7 g if you want to take the lactose-free figure) and divide it by 4.2. Thus, 6.1 teaspoons of sugar per serve, or 4.2 teaspoons lactose-free.

STEP 5

Allow for bigger serving sizes: double the amount if you have to.

I personally eat more than an average serve of most foods. You too? Check out how many serves there are in a packet and round your figure up if you’re eating more than the suggested serving size.

REMEMBER: It’s recommended we consume no more than 5–9 teaspoons of sugar a day.

But don’t we need sugar?
Sure, we need glucose. It’s a building block of life and can be
found in our vegetables, meat and fats (yep, 58 per cent of protein and 10 per cent of fat changes into glucose once in the body, which can be used as needed). But we don’t need fructose. As
Dr Robert Lustig says, ‘There is not one biochemical reaction in your body, not one, that requires dietary fructose, not one that requires sugar. Dietary sugar is completely irrelevant to
life.’ So quitting it – for the reasons I bang on about – just ain’t going to leave you deficient in any way.

THE SECRET INGREDIENT TO QUITTING SUGAR FOR LIFE IS EATING MORE FAT AND PROTEIN,
which will get your body rebalanced and burning
the right kind of fuel. It will also nip blood sugar dips and see you eat less – and less often. And very possibly lose weight.

TO RECAP FROM LAST TIME:

Fat fills us up.

Fats (and protein) have corresponding hormones that coordinate with our brain to switch off our appetite when we’ve eaten enough. Fructose has no such corresponding
‘off-switch’ hormone, and so we can keep eating and eating it. Which is why we can drink 750 ml of apple juice or soft drink; try drinking that much full-fat yoghurt. Actually,
don’t; it’s impossible!

Fat isn’t addictive.

Fructose is; indeed, studies show it’s more addictive than cocaine and heroin.

Fat is burnt as fuel, not stored as fat.

Fructose, however, is mostly processed in the liver. The liver doesn’t recognise it as a valid foodstuff, gets confused and stores it as triglycerides, which are bad fats
(the short story).

We’re designed to get fat on sugar.

This fact brings me comfort. It means our bodies are doing what they’re meant to be doing, and nothing is amiss. Back in caveman days, when sugar was so very rare, it was
evolutionarily advantageous to get fat from sugar. Fat meant survival. It was therefore also advantageous to have no fructose on/off switch, so that when we did stumble upon a rare berry bush or
beehive, we could binge on it and stock up on fat reserves. All this also explains why sugar is addictive – again, it was evolutionarily advantageous to be obsessed with sugar – so we
could get fat on it.

SUGAR IS NATURAL. GETTING FAT ON SUGAR IS NATURAL. LET’S THINK ABOUT THAT FOR A MINUTE.

THE AMOUNT OF SUGAR WE NOW EAT, HOWEVER, IS NOT NATURAL.

Fat fuels our metabolism.

Indeed it’s actually required to activate metabolism and to absorb essential vitamins A, E, D and K from the vegetables and fruits we eat. Eating (good) fat can actually
help you lose weight. Fact.

LET’S TRY THIS

EAT THE RIGHT FATS
To continue sugar-free successfully for life, you need to switch from being a sugar-burning machine to a fat-burning one (logs
instead of kerosene). But this is not a licence to eat fries and corn chips. Only some fats are good. And most need to be eaten in particular ways:

Pour or dollop (cold) with:
Saturated fats (butter) and mono-unsaturated fats (olive oil and nut oils like macadamia or avocado) are great. Even at room
temperature the poly-unsaturateds (the so-called vegetable oils like rapeseed, soya bean and sunflower) are problematic because once in our warm bodies they heat up and become unstable.

Sauté with:
Again, any saturated and most mono-unsaturated and nut oils are great at medium temperatures. The vegetable oils should never be heated
– they’re unstable and at high temperatures they oxidise, leading to inflammation.

STOP ’FRYING’ YOUR VEGETABLES
Most everyday fats, even butter and olive oil, should only be cooked to medium-high temperatures. When
fried at super-hot temperatures they, too, become unstable – and oxidise. Instead ‘sweat’ them
slowly
at a lower temperature. Take a good 15 minutes with your onions, for
instance. This is how the long-living folk in the Mediterranean cook their vegetables. They know that pushing the heat higher renders the oils unhealthy. Slow and low also best precipitates the
Maillard and caramelisation reactions that provide the luscious sweet flavours from meats and vegetables.

Fry (if you must) with:
ghee and coconut oil. Or lard if you have it. My favourites: I fry chicken, ‘sweet’ vegetables (like pumpkin) and foods
(like curry) in coconut oil. I use ghee for most other frying and olive oil occasionally (where I can keep the heat a little below a robust fry).

Don’t touch (ever):
poly-unsaturated oils (rapeseed, soya bean, sunflower). I also advise against consuming omega-3 oils. Even with small temperature
fluctuations, they can turn unstable (and convert into the unhealthy omega-6); eat fish instead.

EAT
MORE
FAT
I find those who don’t up their
good
fat content generally struggle to get results on the IQS programme. Their
cravings aren’t curbed, they’re not maximising their nutrition and they don’t lose weight. What I’m suggesting isn’t about getting all Atkins-extreme and eating
bacon-wrapped sausages every other meal. It’s about sensible, nutritious tweaks: