Sugar Addicts’ Diet

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What to Look Out for in Your Food Diary

At the end of each day, take a look at your food diary to see exactly what you’ve eaten. Turn to Chapter 8 (#litres_trial_promo) and see which list you’ve picked most of your foods from: ‘Foods you can eat’, ‘Occasional treats’ or ‘Foods to avoid’. It might help you to photocopy these pages for quick reference or mark them with a sticky note so you can quickly flip to them. Don’t be down if you’ve picked most from the ‘Foods to avoid’ list – that’s what happened to Nicki, too! The aim of this book is to show you how you can make choices from the ‘Foods you can eat’ list (plus occasional treats) without feeling like you’ve been hard done by.

After a few days, you may start to see patterns. Look for the following:

• Are you eating regularly?

• Are you eating at least five portions of fruit and veg a day?

• Are you having sweet snacks?

• Do you have sugary drinks (e.g. canned fizzy drinks)?

• Are you doing any exercise?

• How many hours do you spend watching TV each day?

It could well be that you start to see things in your eating habits that you never noticed before. With this information, you’ll start to build up a picture of how you eat, why you eat, when you eat and what bad habits you may have got into. Don’t worry – we’re going to help you put these right.

Nicki’s Diary: How She Used to Eat

Here’s an example of Nicki’s food diary to help you see how it might look. You’ll notice that in some boxes she puts just one word and in others she puts more. This is down to personal choice – do what you think will help you most.

The times listed reflect Nicki’s routine at the time. Yours might be different – for example, you might have breakfast at 6am or perhaps you don’t have it at all! If you skip a meal, you should still write it in because it will provide you with important information about how this makes you feel physically and emotionally. Don’t forget to put the date at the top of each diary day. And if you’re feeling lazy and are tempted to let the whole diary thing slip, remember this: weight management experts say that people who don’t keep a regular food diary don’t tend to lose weight. One study found that heavier women were also more likely to under-report their daily food intake than those who were lean, so if you’re reading this book to lose weight, the diary will help you stop kidding yourself about how much you’re eating!

From this we can see:

• When Nicki didn’t eat, she felt dizzy, weak and edgy.

• When she ate something really sugary, like pick ’n’ mix, she felt happy and full of energy. But just 15 minutes later, she felt tired, edgy and a bit sad (as soon as the sugar ‘high’ has worn off).

• When she didn’t eat a proper lunch, she needed another sugar lift within an hour, suggesting that her blood sugar levels were low. The result? She went for the sweets again.

• When she grabbed a lunch, it didn’t satisfy her for long and she ended up having crisps and chocolate to stave off her hunger mid-afternoon.

• It was only following a proper meal at 7.30pm that she felt ‘contented’ – and continued to feel happy a couple of hours later.

• We could also see that she wasn’t eating enough fruit and veg.

• On a more positive note, she was getting some exercise, wasn’t watching hours of telly and wasn’t having fizzy drinks.

This was Nicki’s eating regime before she started the Sugar Addicts’ Diet. By looking at this diary, Nicki was able to see exactly how the foods she ate affected her physically and emotionally. By filling in your own diary, you can do the same. You don’t have to do it forever, but try to keep it going for at least the 21 days of the plan.

Nicki says, ‘I’ve eaten like this for years, and until I wrote it down, I had no idea of how food could affect how I felt. Now I can see how certain foods affect me – for good and for bad – I can decide what to go for and what to avoid. I hate feeling ‘low’, ‘edgy’, ‘grumpy’ and all those other negative words. I only ever want to put positive words in the diary!’

4 (#ulink_d973e156-5b7a-5f44-b01e-d2dd1ee2b157)

Why Do I Need to Break My Addiction? (#ulink_d973e156-5b7a-5f44-b01e-d2dd1ee2b157)

So you’re addicted to sugar – what’s the problem with that? Well, for starters, if you’re reading a book with the word ‘diet’ in the title, it’s likely you’re carrying an extra pound or two. In other words, you need to lose some weight. For many people, this is their first reason for wanting to overcome their love of sugar. There is a range of other medical conditions that are aggravated or even caused by eating too much sugar. The sugar industry disputes this and, to be fair, we’ll tell you what they say so you can make your own mind up. We think the facts speak for themselves but it’s up to you to decide whether you think the pursuit of giving up sugar is a worthwhile one.

OVERWEIGHT AND OBESITY

• Nearly two-thirds of men and over half of all women in the UK are now overweight

• One in five of us is obese – at least 2–3 stones overweight

• Two-thirds of adults over 45 are overweight or obese

• Almost 1 in 10 6-year-olds and almost 1 in 6 15-year-olds is obese

• Obesity is linked to around 30,000 deaths a year through heart disease, strokes and diabetes

As you can see, obesity is a huge problem in the UK, and it’s on the increase all over the world. The level of obesity has gone up three times in the past 20 years, and it’s still rising. At this rate, one in four adults will be obese by 2010 and one in three by 2020. Just imagine it – as you sit with two of your friends or family members, one of you will be not just overweight but obese.

But excess weight doesn’t just mean not being able to fit into the clothes you want – it can seriously affect your health, too. Among other things, it puts us at greater risk of diabetes, osteoarthritis, high blood pressure, coronary heart disease, stroke and some cancers. In fact, recent reports suggest that obesity may soon overtake cigarette smoking as a serious health risk. The International Obesity Task Force estimates that 1.7 billion people across the world may be at risk of weight-related health problems.

The standard measurement for weight is the body mass index (BMI), which is weight in kilograms divided by height in metres squared:

For example, if you weigh 10 stone and you are 5 feet 6 inches tall, you would work out your BMI by finding your weight in kilos (63kg) and your height in metres (1.68m):

Overweight is a BMI of 25–30 while obese is 30–40. So, for example, someone 5 feet 6 inches tall (1.68m) becomes obese at 13 stone 4 pounds (84kg) and morbidly obese at 17 stones 7 pounds (110kg). Obesity becomes ‘morbid’ when it significantly increases the risk of one or more obesity-related health conditions or serious diseases.

A simpler way of measuring your health, however, is by your waistline. The World Health Organization recommends a limit for waist circumference of 102cm and 88cm in men and women respectively. Want to know how to measure yourself and what this means? Visit the National Obesity Forum’s Waist Watch Action Campaign website at www.nationalobesityforum.org.uk (http://www.nationalobesityforum.org.uk) and visit the Public Info area.

The Role of Sugar

You’d be hard-pressed to find a doctor who’ll say a diet high in sugar is a good thing and doesn’t increase your risk of putting on weight. The problem is that high sugar consumption coupled with increasingly low activity levels (as we now have in the UK) equals weight gain. Recent research published in the British Medical Journal found that when children avoided cans of pop, obesity levels fell, but it rose among those who kept on drinking them. Excess sugar consumption can increase insulin levels, leading to overweight and obesity plus an increased risk of Type 2 diabetes and other conditions we’ll tell you about in this chapter.

DIABETES

• Diabetes affects 1.4 million people in England

• Diabetes UK says there may be as many as another million people who have diabetes but don’t realize it – the ‘missing million’

• The number of people being diagnosed with diabetes increases each year

• It’s estimated that five per cent of all NHS expenditure is on diabetes

Type 2 diabetes is where the body fails to produce enough insulin or doesn’t know how to use the insulin it has made. It used to be called ‘late’ or ‘adult onset’ diabetes because the average age of diagnosis is around 52. But rising levels of obesity has led to Type 2 diabetes being seen increasingly in younger people – even children.

Diabetes UK says the fact that as a nation we are increasingly overweight and less active is key to the rise in diabetes. Central body fat – being ‘apple shaped’ – is strongly linked to insulin resistance, where the body produces insulin but isn’t able to use it properly. Studies show that diabetes increases the risk of ill health from conditions such as heart disease, stroke and kidney failure and shortens lifespan. One study says Type 2 diabetes doubles or trebles the risk of dying prematurely.

The Role of Sugar

Although laboratory studies have failed to show a direct link between diabetes and normal sugar consumption, diabetes is linked to obesity which is, in turn, linked to sugar. And as our nation gets fatter, so our levels of Type 2 diabetes increase. Also, very high levels of sugar consumption (more than 200g per day) are considered a possible risk factor for developing diabetes.