The goal is to aim for 5 days with no artificial sugars of any kind, including processed and packaged foods, for example vegan burgers. I will be encouraging you to eat as many seasonal veggies and fruits as possible.
You may wish to continue for longer, or you may do 5 days, take a couple days off and then repeat. It is also possible that you do 5 days, have one glass of wine Friday and Saturday or a small piece of cake, and then repeat 5 days. Should you adopt this approach for January, the benefits will be great and it shows you that it’s possible to get back on track after a weekend treat, which is completely normal.
If you do follow for 4 weeks you can completely transform blood sugar regulation.
Natural sugar found in fruit and dairy is fine to consume.
Please consider completing the questionnaire on your membership page prior to the start of your challenge!
Use the private Facebook forum to post questions and inspire each other with your meals/drinks.
I will make short posts related to the topic of sugar now until the 20th January as well as answering any questions you may have.
Over the next few days I will also include some hacks that you can incorporate to help with blood sugar regulation.
Does what we eat matter?
This may seem like a strange question as everything we eat is broken down by the actions of the gut into sugars, amino acids (small parts of protein) and fats. So if everything is broken down to the same 3 classes of substances, why should it matter what we consume in the first place?
Unfortunately once we reach 40 years of age our body no longer metabolises what we eat and drink as well as it used to.
The problem with sugar is the body loves it and today, much processed food has sugar added – this includes the “healthy bars” you will see in many stores. Breakfast cereals are loaded with sugars (and heavy metals – more of this in my Cleanse programme).
We have access to vastly more sweet foods and drinks than our ancestors, yet our biological make-up is the same. For our guts which are still the same as those before the pre-industrialised time, all this extra sugar is creating a lot of extra work for the body and feeds the non beneficial microbes in the gut, creating inflammation.
Sugar is fuel. A surge of instant energy. To cope with this sugar, the body also has to produce an equivalent rush of hormones, particularly insulin, to cope with the sugar. We rarely need this much sugar energy so the body has to do something with it. The first thing it does is chain the sugars together again to make another compound called glycogen which is stored in the liver and becomes an “energy store”.
For those trying to reduce body size this is where the body need to learn to be “metabolically flexible” in using fuels. Our bodies will always go to glycogen stores first and only after these are used up (which is after about an hour of exercise) the body then starts to burn fat as fuel. Some of us burn sugars more easily than others. The same goes for fats. This depends upon our genetic make-up.
Unfortunately the body can turn sugar into fat more easily than any other substance – even more easily than the fat we eat.
Good fat sources should not be avoided and are more beneficial than a spoonful of sugar (a fruit yogurt will contain several spoons of sugar!) Fat protects our nerves acting as an insulator, and coats every cell in our body as the main constituent of the cell membrane. 60% of our brain is fat.
Nourish yourself with extra virgin olive oil, avocados and seeds.
Enjoy your sugar free journey and SHARE, SHARE, SHARE thoughts, recipes and more!
