How to Lose Weight? Don’t Use Sugar Substitutes
Okay, you need to lose weight and so you decide that you need to cut out sugar. No more sugar in your coffee, no more soft drinks containing sugar, no more ready meals with sugar on the label. You’re on a mission, and sugar has got to go! You start to examine every label you can find to try and eliminate all sugar from your diet. But is it the right thing to do?
What exactly is sugar? Well, it’s a chemical. That may sound a bit odd, but it puts it in its rightful category. It has no protein, no carbohydrate, no fiber and no enzymes. In fact it is made up of ‘empty’ calories.
Our bodies like sugar because it is associated with high density calories, but it finds sugar difficult to deal with. In order to metabolize it the body has to borrow other nutrients from other cells. This causes a message to be sent to the brain to say that there is a deficiency. These signals are all too often taken as being hunger signals and are answered by more high-calorie food. The result is weight gain.
You reaction to stop eating sugar isn’t a bad one. If you decide that you can’t do without that sweet taste and decide to use a sweetener like saccharin or aspartame and buy foods containing sugar substitutes, then you’re making a mistake.
What has been puzzling scientists is that the obesity crisis has continued to grow despite a massive increase in the use of sugar substitutes.
Recent studies have found that far from helping you to lose weight, artificial sweeteners actually help you to put on weight!
At Perdue University scientists carried out experiments with animals - some were fed food containing natural sweeteners and others food with artificial sweeteners. The results were alarming. The animals that were fed artificial sweeteners actually gained weight. The reason this happened is that our/their bodies associate sweetness with food loaded with calories. When the body recognizes that the food containing artificial sweeteners is not loaded with calories, it compensates by sending out hunger signals and we eat more to make up the shortfall - the result is weight gain.
You can’t fool your body! The interesting thing about this experiment is that it could have highlighted one of the main reasons why we continue to put on weight despite eliminating sugar from our diet. Clearly to replace sugar with artificial sweeteners makes things a whole lot worse!