As a vegetarian, do you crave for sweet foods when under stress?
To satisfy your craving, you tend to reach for vegetarian food high in refined sugars such as candies, dairy-free chocolates, cookies, egg-less cakes, sweetened beverages, white bread or white rice.
These foods contain loads of simple sugar, which can boost your energy level immediately, calm you down and make you feel better. They seem like miracle foods, don't they?
How Sugar Affects Your Weight and Health
Here's the truth. Simple (refined) sugar contains nothing but empty calories. One tablespoon of table sugar feeds 45 calories and ZERO nutritional value to your body.
Look, a piece of banana cake or a handful of chocolates definitely contains more than 1 tablespoon of sugar. So, think about the amount of calories derived from sugar that you stuff in your body each day, other than those foods containing carbohydrate, protein and fat.
Oh gosh, sugar sure is one hideous monster that makes you fat.
Not only that, refined sugar spikes your blood sugar to a high level (that's why you feel better right after eating) within short time, thereby stimulating your pancreas to release more insulin into bloodstream to remove excess sugar and stored as fat in your liver and elsewhere in your body.
When this happens, your blood sugar drops as fast as it rises and you feel tired right after. Soon, you crave for sweet food again to perk up. As you experience this yo-yo cycle repeatedly throughout the day, you've unknowingly pumped a lot more glucose than needed into your bloodstream.
To make matter worse, this yo-yo effect makes you too tired to exercise and most of the blood sugar gets stored away as fat. If you allow this cycle to repeat continually, more and more calories will get transported into fat cells, leading to fat and weight gain.
You won't want to suffer the consequences of the fluctuation between hyperglycemia (blood sugar higher than normal) and hypoglycemia (blood sugar lower than normal) because they can result in more complex health problems such as diabetes mellitus, stroke and atherosclerosis.
Furthermore, to digest simple sugar, your body uses up 27 precious nutrients such as calcium, Vitamin B1, B2, B3, B5, potassium, magnesium, manganese, sodium, chromium, zinc etc in the process that are mainly found in your liver's enzymes.
These important nutrients are essential to maintaining the normal functioning of your body's immune system and fat-burning capability.
Eating sugar excessively leaches your body of these precious nutrients. In the long run, your organs suffer permanent damages that could lead to many critical illnesses and diseases. And of course, make you grow fatter and fatter.
How to Control Your Sugar Intake
A normal vegetarian needs about 40 to 55 g of sugar, equivalent to 8 to 11 teaspoons daily. With cheap high fructose corn syrup being added to most pre-packaged foods these days, you can easily obtain the required quantity of sugar from the food and drinks you consume each day, without adding more to your food.
Sadly, most of us struggle with controlling our excessive sugar intake.
Beware, don't let your body build up a resistance to simple sugar. Once you lose control of your sugar addiction, you'll need more sugar each time to feel satisfied. And like all addictions, it's very, very difficult to kick it.
Exercise more vigilance in watching over your sugar consumption, so that it won't wreck your weight loss plan and inflict damages to your health.
Here I suggest some easy-to-follow tips to control your sugar intake:
1. Eat more complex carbohydrates like whole wheat food group comprising brown rice, whole meal, whole grain, oats, wheat germ, corn, buckwheat.
2. If you want to sweeten your food, choose molasses or pure maple syrup instead of table sugar. Avoid artificial sweeteners such as Nutrasweet or Aspartame.
3. Toss out all canned drinks. One 325 ml canned drink generally contains as much as 15 teaspoons of refined sugar. So that's a good start to cut down on sugar. Moreover, if the drink is carbonated, all the more you should quit completely because it carries so much carbon dioxide that when ingested, can kill most of your healthy cells that could have been needed for effective weight control.
That explains why 99% of people who drink fizzy drinks gain weight more easily than those who do not.
4. Read labels carefully. Watch out for these labels:
"No Added Sugar / unsweetened" - No table sugar is added but could still contain natural sweeteners.
"Sugar Free" - Contain less than 0.5 g of sugar for every 100 g
"Low Sugar" - Contain less than 5 g of sugar for every 100 g
"Reduced Sugar" - Contain 25% less sugar than normal product.
Though simple or refined sugar does you more harm than good, if you keep depriving yourself of your favorite dessert (made of refined sugar) like ice-cream or chocolate cake for too long, you might go crazy!
Hence, by all means, have your little indulgence once a week, or even better, once in a fortnight. However, you must not slack in your self-restraint from sugar, or your health and weight will pay a heavy price for it.
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