I always listen to podcasts while I exercise and have found many that I have been very helpful. These two podcasts are my top choices at present:

Dr. Andrew Huberman, a neurobiologist at Stanford University who delves into a variety of topics related to the brain and what, when, how we do various things can be helpful or sometimes harmful. Along with YouTube, Apple podcasts, you can find his weekly topics by go directly to https://hubermanlab.com.

Dr. Bret Scher, a cardiologist at DietDoctor web site, is one of the best interviewers for covering the subject matter succinctly and keeping guests on point. https://www.dietdoctor.com/video/podcast

Yes, it has been a long time since I posted, but that’s life in the Covid19 lane. So much has been going on in the last many months and keeping up with a blog can get put on hold.

Sadly, nothing has changed in the war against sugar and processed foods; things just keep getting worse. Over fifty percent of US citizens are overweight and obese. That would have been unheard of prior to the 1980s when the trend began to rapidly move upward with the addition of high fructose corn syrup (HFSC) and processed vegetable seed oils that didn’t exist in our diet prior to the 1900s (think about that!). We have a diseased population. Further, it’s no accident that most people dying of the covid 19 virus have been overweight and have the various co-morbidities that go along with obesity, especially diabetes and its disease cohort.

We all need to be vigilant in avoiding highly processed foods which is the majority of what is to be found in a supermarket. If a package has more than 3-4 ingredients, it’s most likely highly processed, although with sugar foods you may find that, like soda pop, it’s nearly all just sugar and water.

Food is medicine, but medicine is not food. A healthy person should expect be live a long life free of most medicines. All too may of us are on a half dozen daily meds by the time we reach age 70. That’s not a happy outlook for old age.

Update on my last venture of ADF, or Alternate Day Fasting: I found it worked but real life seemed to get in the way too often so I stopped. I’m currently working to keep my protein at a proper level, still keeping carbs very low, but also monitoring fats which can stall my weightless.

More on all these things to come.

I am happy to say that Alternate Day Fasting (ADF) is going very well eleven days in. I’m having no issues or hunger on the fasting days; if a food thought does arise I just drink something like tea or ice water.

I feel a surprising lack of interest in food in general on the fast day, and have had no desire to over-eat on eating days; in fact, I seem to be eating less and feeling full faster.  I’ve been reading ADF posts on Reddit, and the people who struggle are carb eaters; their brains are always in “eat” mode. When you eat a very low carb diet, that just doesn’t happen.

Now approaching the middle of the month, so the time flies; I suspect I will just continue after May is over. This form of Intermittent Fasting (IF) is to my mind easier, and more productive. I’ve had a lot of energy on fast days; less on eating days, and I don’t need to worry about making meals. I make enough food on eating days for my spouse to have meals the next day without my help.

Our anniversary is coming up on a scheduled fasting day so we’ll celebrate the next day. I don’t feel any compunction to break the momentum. With the current covid-19 situation, we won’t be going out to restaurants any time soon, anyway.

ADF is for me a better form of IF. I’d encourage those who have weight still to lose to consider it.

May 5, 2020

It’s been a while since I posted anything. I have been taking more time for myself and not doing as much social media. When I do go into Instagram, YouTube, Twitter, Facebook I’m pleasantly surprised to see how far this latest low carb movement has come. With half of our US population overweight/obese, people are finally realizing that sugar, in all it’s forms, it the problem. You are not at fault for the addictive quality of highly processed and fast foods; made that way quite deliberately. Look up “bliss point” to learn how this happened. Prior to the 1970s the portion of the population overweight was far smaller, in fact the obesity rate has more than tripled. So people are desperate to find a solution.You only have to look at how much the no/low-sugar or low-carb movement has come in the last couple years; there has been an explosion in ketogenic diets, carnivore diets, and intermittent fasting.

People who are always struggling with sugar addiction or binge eating soon find that there is only one effective way to deal with the extreme excess of sugars in the modern diet and that’s by eliminating them. The keto/carnivore diets both have next to none (keep in mind even shell fish have a small amount of carbs). My spouse and I have been doing mostly protein-fat foods for the last couple years, though we had been low carb for over a decade, so the transition wasn’t hard.

I’ve learned that with my low thyroid issues that losing weight is always a challenge. It’s quite possible to eat more than your body needs even of the healthy protein-fat foods. I counted calories for years, but that in some ways only made me more focused on eating; intermittent fasting (IF) removes the need to worry about how much by simply narrowing the window of time for eating. Though I had been doing one small meal and a main meal midday in a 4-6 hour window, I still didn’t lose much, so now I’ve started alternate day fasting (ADF), water/black coffee/tea on fasting days, then usually eating two meals on the eating days, avoiding snacking.

ADF is just what it says, eating every other day. I decided to make May 2020 my test month for ADF, and so far it’s been easy to not eat on the fasting days. I weighed at the first of the month, and will again on June 1st to see the results. Males and younger females report about a ten pound loss for a month; I’d be thrilled with that result and happy for anything over five pounds.

Surprisingly, I’m less hungry on my eating days so far, but five days in is not much time. We’ll see how it goes from here. While I do want a bit more weight loss, the most important goal is great health; and great health comes via keeping insulin low. All markers of aging improved when insulin remains low most of the time, and the only way to keep insulin low is to avoid excess carbohydrates.

FYI:

View at Medium.com

Dr. Jason Fung’s The Obesity Code – One of the best sources for information on fasting of all types.

Science is slow for a reason: it takes time to connect the dots of what is true vs speculation vs error vs lie. Here is a very useful summary of the science of recent decades. Yet another great site for information on why some of people struggle with sugar, and food in general.

https://foodaddictioninstitute.org/about/summary-of-work-to-date/

For latest information: https://foodaddictioninstitute.org/scientific-research/new-research/

https://wordpress.com/post/sugaraholics.com/24

Excellent article by Dr. Richard Friedman offering more possible reasons why some people can have a few carbs and turn away, and others can’t leave them alone.

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/30/opinion/sunday/what-cookies-and-meth-have-in-common.html

When I read the following article, I just shook my head. I suppose anything can be an excuse for a lawsuit, but it’s hard to fathom that anyone doesn’t know that candy has sugar. (Even so-called sugar-free candies rely heavily on sugar alcohols that have their own problems.) Perhaps the biggest issue for anyone wanting to get off sugars is self-deception and rationalization.

Sugar is all too readily available, and is often hidden under a variety of names meant to make it less obvious. For instance, many foods that once labeled high fructose corn syrup, aware of the bad reputation this hyper-sugar has these days, now simply label “corn solids” that’s corn syrup folks, and “evaporated cane juice” is sugar.

For your education or entertainment:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/california-lawsuit-jelly-belly-sport-beans_us_5927564fe4b0df34c35ad587

Yours in getting real,

Nan aka Sugarbaby

Another article on issues related to sugar cravings. I’m glad to see more and more information coming out to address the real problem of far too much sugar in our standard western diets.

Yours in learning,

Nan aka Sugarbaby

Everything You Need to Know About Sugar Cravings

Is sugar really addictive? Experts explain how to kick the cravings for good.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture estimates the average American consumes more than 130 pounds of sugar every year.

You just want something sweet. OK, you need something sweet. Some of us just have some really strong sugar cravings at times (or maybe all the time).

And with added sugar in everything from cookies and salad dressings to hamburgers, it’s no surprise that the U.S. Department of Agriculture estimates the average American puts away more than 130 pounds of the sweet stuff every year. The result? An increased risk of weight gain, Type 2 diabetes, inflammation, heart disease, Alzheimer’s and, yes, addiction.

Why You Get Addicted to Sugar

While sugar occurs naturally in healthy foods ranging from dairy to fruits and veggies, added sugars such as table sugar and high-fructose corn syrup do more than tickle our taste buds. They tickle our brains. “Data from experiments and controlled studies show that our brains respond to sugar much in the same way as they respond to drugs of abuse,” says research neuroscientist Nicole Avena, assistant professor at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in New York and author of “Why Diets Fail (Because You’re Addicted to Sugar).”

Avena’s research, published in Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews, shows that, similar to addictive drugs, sugar-bingeing spikes levels of feel-good dopamine (a neurotransmitter your body releases in response to pleasurable activities like sex) and opioids (natural pain-squashing substances that act like morphine and codeine) in the brain. It also sparks heightened activity in the nucleus accumbens, the brain’s pleasure center, which is linked with addictive behaviors. In fact, a 2015 University of Pennsylvania study reported that deep brain stimulation of the nucleus accumbens can mediate both cocaine and sugar addiction in rats.

“Sugar hijacks the brain, in a sense. It makes you feel great, then the come-down makes you feel terrible,” Avena says. Sugar crash, anyone? “This cycle leads to tolerance and needing more sugar to get the same reward or to taste something as being sweet.”

The Origins of Sugar Cravings (or Why You Really Want It)

Just because you crave sugar from time to time doesn’t necessarily mean you’re addicted.

After all, we eat sugar for more reasons than addiction. The big, nature-intended one is for energy. A simple, easy-to-digest carb, sugar is the fastest way to perk up your body when you’re fatigued, sleep-deprived or just feeling hangry, explains Toronto-based registered dietitian Abby Langer. So if you go on a no-carb crash diet that leaves your fuel gauge on empty or you have a bad night’s sleep, yes, you’re going to crave sugar for energy.

Even on a normal day, though, you might experience your energy drop and want sugar. “Around 3 or 4 in the afternoon, the body experiences a drop in alertness due to the fact that the stress hormone cortisol is falling. This decrease leads to a feeling of fatigue, which many of us feed in an effort to increase alertness,” explains registered dietitian and certified diabetes educator Laura Cipullo, author of “The Women’s Health Body Clock Diet.”

But you probably aren’t going to crave an orange. You’re going to crave chocolate. For starters, that’s because a single piece of chocolate has more sugar than an entire orange. A whole orange contains about 12 grams of sugar. A bar of chocolate? About 78. Plus, that orange contains more fiber, which is responsible for slowing the absorption of sugar into your bloodstream, so you don’t get the same sugar spike with an orange that you would with that chocolate bar.

At the same time (and this is when we start to flirt with addiction), a lot of us mow down on sugar to improve our moods. “Think about it – it’s almost culturally accepted to want sugar when you’re stressed. After someone breaks up with you, what are you expected to do? Eat a pint of ice cream,” Langer says. However, the occasional stress-induced binge can easily turn into emotional dependency and addiction.

How to Overcome Your Sugar Cravings

If you think you reach for sugar due to low energy, simply make sure your body is fueled in the first place, Langer says. Getting seven to nine hours of quality sleep per night, eating a balanced diet that doesn’t remove whole carbs like whole-wheat pasta and apples, and staying active can all help to reduce cravings. If you believe you’re reaching for the Ben & Jerry’s for emotional reasons, fill the void and practice other, healthy activities that naturally increase dopamine, Cipullo says.

For instance, research from the University of Muenster in Germany shows that running increases levels of dopamine in the brain and, the higher the intensity, the higher the reward. Meanwhile, research published in the Journal of Psychiatry and Neuroscience shows that mindfulness practices such as meditation increase levels of dopamine and improve mood over the long term.

But if your cravings are a bit more intense, there’s another way. Some people can have full-on withdrawal when they eliminate sugar from their diet. Irritability and headaches are the main ones, but shakes and tremors aren’t uncommon, Avena says. That’s why it’s so important to not go cold turkey.

Plus, since sugar is so rampant in our food supply, telling yourself, “I’m never going to eat sugar again” is unrealistic. “The truth of the matter is, I don’t think it’s possible to remove all sugars from your diet if you want to live like a normal person,” Avena says. “We don’t all have the ability and time to prepare every single item of food we consume and make sure it has zero sugar.”

But you can significantly cut your sugar intake – and your cravings – with a few simple steps. First, identify the biggest sources of added sugar in your diet. For some of us, they’re obvious (e.g. soda and other sugar-sweetened beverages), but don’t overlook salty foods like chips or even bread. Check the label for sugar and any of its aliases, including anhydrous dextrose, cane crystals, corn sweetener, corn syrup, crystal dextrose, evaporated cane juice, fructose sweetener, fruit juice concentrates, high-fructose corn syrup, malt syrup and molasses, Langer recommends.

Once you identify the top sugar source in your diet, work to phase out that one food. Sub it out with a no-added-sugar healthy alternative. For instance, if you usually drink soda, try tea with lemon. Give it a couple of weeks, check in with yourself and be honest about how you’re doing, Avena says.

Ask yourself: If someone offered you a soda right now, could you turn it down without remorse? If so, it’s time to think about the next sugar-packed food you want to eliminate or cut down on. “As you wean yourself off of sugar, you’ll find that things taste more sweet with less sugar, so it will become easier to consume less,” Langer says.

And back to that orange: Don’t remove fruit from your diet. Most people need to be eating more, not less, of nature’s vitamin-packed candy.

Aleisha Fetters, MS, CSCS, is a freelance Health & Wellness reporter at U.S. News. As a certified strength and conditioning specialist with a graduate degree in health and science reporting, she has contributed to publications including TIME, Women’s Health, Men’s Health, Runner’s World, and Shape. She empowers others to reach their goals using a science-based approach to fitness, nutrition and health. You can follow her on Twitter or Instagram, find her on Facebook or the Web or email her at kafetters@gmail.com.

[http://health.usnews.com/wellness/food/articles/2017-05-12/everything-you-need-to-know-about-sugar-cravings]

I keep seeing ever more articles from people like Dr. Schopick who know that indeed sugar is addictive for many people. Always worth theread.

Do you have a sugar addiction?

By Dr. David Schopick

Many of us have a sweet tooth and enjoy a nice dessert or indulging in the occasional candy bar. There is nothing wrong with a treat now and then, but for some, eating sugary foods is a true addiction, and one that can lead to an assortment of health issues. Let’s talk about how to tell if you have a sugar addiction, and how to best treat it.

How do I tell if I have a sugar addiction? Those with a sugar addiction find that they have a serious craving for sugar throughout the day. They may start the morning with a sweet pastry, coffee drink or sweet cereal, then find that by mid-morning they need a soft drink or another sweet snack, and that this pattern repeats throughout the day. In fact, the more sugary foods they eat or drink, the more they need to eat to maintain that sugar “high.” And, as the addiction progresses, they not only need to eat more, they need to eat even sweeter foods to get their “fix.” If they do not eat these foods, they may feel sluggish, grumpy and out of sorts.

Why do we crave sugary foods? To some extent, we are born preferring sweet foods. According to the American Dietetic Association, humans prefer sweet tastes from birth. Sugar also stimulates the same parts of the brain as hard core drugs such as heroin and cocaine. It temporarily provides a “feel good” high, and a burst of energy, but as time goes by, more sugar is needed to produce the same effect. We also see sweet treats as a reward, so eating sugary items plays into this mindset.

Why is a sugar addiction a problem? Sugar is the number one culprit when it comes to weight gain and heart disease. The American Medical Association reports that people who receive more than 25 percent of their daily calories from sugar are more than twice as likely to die from heart disease as those whose diets only included 10 percent added sugar. Consuming excess sugar can lead to diabetes and disrupt the healthy levels of triglycerides in your bloodstream. (These are a type of fat found in your bloodstream and in your fatty tissue.) High triglyceride levels can increase your risk of heart disease. Sugary foods also provide only “empty” calories, meaning these calories are not combined with fiber, vitamins, minerals or other nutrients that benefit the body. When you fill up on sugary foods, you are less apt to eat healthy foods.

How do I fight a sugar addiction? There are a number of ways to help wean yourself away from the excess sugar habit:

Indulge just a little. Try reducing your sweet snacks to just a small cookie or a mini candy bar. Enjoying a little of what you crave can sometimes ease the transition to a healthier diet.

Combine a sweet food with a healthy one: Try mixing small candies like M&Ms with nuts and raisins, or dipping a banana in honey. Again, the overall goal is to transition away from sweet snacks, but reducing sweets while adding healthier foods is a step in the right direction. Try to reduce the sweets to no more than 150 calories.

Quit cold turkey. This approach is not for everyone, but for some it works the best. If you feel that eating even a small amount of sweet foods will trigger you to keep eating more, then the cold turkey approach may be a good fit. Be prepared that the first two or three days may be hard, but your cravings will diminish. Once you’ve cut out the excess sugar for a few weeks, your taste buds will start being satisfied with less.

Chew gum. Chewing gum can help reduce food cravings, but be aware that this practice can be harmful to teeth.

Stock up on healthy snacks. Have fruit, nuts, granola bars, apples with peanut butter, veggies and hummus and other things on hand to feed your cravings. In time, you won’t miss the sweet snacks, plus these kinds of snacks give you fiber and nutrients.

Take a walk. When that sugar craving hits, instead of reaching for a soda, get up from what you are doing and move around. Taking a walk is great because it takes you away from the place where you are used to munching on sugary foods; it gives you exercise — which also releases feel-good hormones, and, if you go outside, you are distracted by the change of scenery. If your job does not allow you to go outside, then try getting up and walking around the building for a bit.

Remove temptation. To truly kick the sugar habit, try not to have too much in the way of cookies, candy, soft drinks and other sweet snacks in the home or at your office. Remember, excess sugar can also lurk inside yogurts, cereals and store-bought goods. If you want a treat, try to bake something yourself where you can control the amount of sugar used. If your typical route to work regularly takes you by the drive-through with those tempting sweet coffees, alter your route.

Savor small bites. When you do indulge in something sweet, make it a small treat, and really savor it. Eat slowly and let all your senses enjoy the texture, taste and smell. Truly enjoying a good dessert will satisfy your brain and make you less apt to grab for more. (Indulging now and then is actually better than total deprivation, as you are more apt to break your fast and binge when desired foods are withheld.)

Make sure you eat regularly and drink lots of water. Getting too hungry can make you more apt to opt for sugary foods. Similarly, people often feel sluggish and tired because they are dehydrated, so keep the water coming and you’ll keep your energy up — and won’t need that candy bar.

Avoid artificial sweeteners as these will not lessen your cravings for sugar.

Plan your meals and snacks. This will help you map out healthy alternatives in advance.

Reward yourself for successfully reducing your sugar intake. If you can make it through a week without excess sugar, treat yourself to movie or other outing. Give yourself an incentive to keep kicking the sugar habit.

What if I need more help? In some cases, there are mental health issues behind the sugar addiction, just as there can be mental health issues behind other food issues. Depression, anxiety, abuse — all of these can lead to issues with food, including sugar addiction. If you have tried repeatedly to reduce your sugar intake without success, it may be time to talk to a mental health professional or a nutritionist. Sugar addiction can be overcome with the proper guidance.

Remember, no one becomes addicted to sugar overnight, and that this is a true addiction. It may take time to undo years of a bad habit, but it is possible and you will be healthier for it. Better choices will help you feel more energized and put you on the path to a healthier life.

Dr. David Schopick is a psychiatrist in private practice in Portsmouth. He is board certified by the American Board of Psychiatry and Neurology in adult, adolescent and child psychiatry and has been serving patients in the Greater Seacoast area and beyond for more than 25 years. For information, call 431-5411 or visit www.schopickpsychiatry.com.

[http://www.fosters.com/news/20170416/do-you-have-sugar-addiction]