How much sugar do you really eat in one day? Even when making the choice to eat healthily, you could still be consuming an abundance of sugar whether you realize it or not. As one New Zealand mother discovered during her weight loss journey, even when choosing low-fat options she identified as being healthy, sugar can often be found hiding in a lot of deceptive places.
High Sugar in ‘Healthy’ Foods
After battling with weight her entire life, Amanda Tiffen sought to break free of the diet struggle, fad diets, and constant struggle to keep the scale under control. As she approached 40 years old, and the scale kept climbing to over 80.5kg, she began to question why she had been unable to lose weight, and keep it off, for the majority of her adulthood.
Sparked by watching the documentary Is Sugar the New Fat?1, Amanda began to carefully examine the amount of sugar she was consuming each day. While she had focused on low-fat foods she had learned were healthy for her, she uncovered that she had been consuming more than 30 teaspoons of sugar on a daily basis! Determining that all of this hidden sugar was, in fact, the hurdle keeping her from weight loss, she made dietary changes to adopt a low sugar lifestyle and shed 20kg in just 9 months after the change.
Where’s the Sugar Hiding?
We’ve been told for a long time that fat is the culprit behind the obesity epidemic and, as a result, the grocery shelves have been flooded with alternatives listed as low-fat, no-fat, or fat-free. However, these options are often highly manufactured substitutes designed to make us think we’re eating healthy.
Without fat, most of the foods we love would taste bland and inedible, so companies began engineering these alternatives with sugar to maintain palatability while keeping fat content low. From cereals to smoothies, yogurt and premade sauces, you may be unwittingly adding a tremendous amount of sugar to your diet all in the name of eating low fat.
Cut Sugar, Lose Weight
There’s been a shift over the last few years and the nutrition community is becoming more focused on the impact that sugar has on our diets. As Amanda Tiffen learned through her success going from a size 16 to a size 8, the simple act of cutting sugar from your diet can make a dramatic difference – not just in losing weight but also in keeping it off forever. To chronicle her success and inspire others to make the choice to be more mindful of the sugar in their own diets, Amanda wrote a book called ‘A Life Less Sugar’.
Ready to make the dive into a sugar-free life? Start by examining the sugar content of the foods you currently eat. Keeping tabs on your sugar consumption, and determining the total amount of sugar you take in on a daily basis, can be quite shocking – just as Amanda found out. Making small changes to reduce the amount of sugar you consume is a great start to beginning to live a healthier life. Remember, you don’t have to give up everything you enjoy to make changes. In fact, using sugar substitutes, like erythritol, can help you enjoy a sweet treat like Vanilla Bean Ice Cream while staying on track.
NUTRITIONAL DISCLAIMER
The content on this website should not be taken as medical advice and you should ALWAYS consult with your doctor before starting any diet or exercise program. We provide nutritional data for our recipes as a courtesy to our readers. We use Total Keto Diet app software to calculate the nutrition and we remove fiber and sugar alcohols, like erythritol, from the total carbohydrate count to get to the net carb count, as they do not affect your blood glucose levels. You should independently calculate nutritional information on your own and not rely on our data. The website or content herein is not intended to cure, prevent, diagnose or treat any disease. This website shall not be liable for adverse reactions or any other outcome resulting from the use of recipes or recommendations on the Website or actions you take as a result. Any action you take is strictly at your own risk.
Dr. Rosmy Barrios, MD is an aesthetic medicine specialist whose work focuses on patients who are treated for obesity, metabolic syndrome, and other weight-related issues through nutritional analysis, keto diet programs, and supporting medications.
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