Eat Shrink And Be Merry

If you have a raging sweet tooth, chances are you’re gonna have a jelly belly, too!

Sugar is probably THE worst culprit when it comes to fat storage, especially around your middle, the most dangerous spot for fat to accumulate. Thing is, the more sugar you eat, the more sugar you crave. And that’s not a good thing! Sugar is an “anti-nutrient.” It actually takes away from your body, robbing it of vitamins, minerals and nutrients (like calcium, for instance) rather than contributing anything to its well-being, and it’s also hard on your liver. Plus, it can almost “paralyze” your immune system for a short period of time, making you more susceptible to disease. Not good.

Sugar also feeds the “bad bacteria” in your gut. They love the stuff! It’s a feast for the yeast! And when bad bacteria overtakes the good, health-promoting bacteria in your gut, it can get ugly. A pot belly will be the yeast of your worries! Allergies, asthma, skin problems, extreme fatigue, arthritis, brain fog, depression, irritable bowel syndrome, autoimmune disease and other chronic disease can creep up when the balance of good bacteria to bad bacteria in your intestinal tract is upset. This is officially called “dysbiosis,” in case you were looking for another good Scrabble word:)

For optimum health, it’s best to develop less of a taste for sweets in general. The less you eat, the less you’ll crave. At first, if you’re a rampant sugar-holic, your body will go through a bit of a withdrawal when you don’t eat the sweet. Cut it all out and you cut off the food supply for the nasty, evil critters in your gut. They won’t like it one bit, and they’ll cry out big time for a Hostess Ding Dong or a party pack of Tootsie Rolls. Cravings will be most intense first thing in the morning because the evil yeast creatures haven’t had any nourishment for hours and hours. They’ll make you pay! That’s usually why most people turn to coffee and sugar as a pick-me-up the minute they roll out of bed. Gotta silence those gut ghouls!

If you want to give up sugar, it’s important to increase your intake of protein and fibre in order to steady your blood sugar and prevent intense cravings. Good fats also help keep blood sugar steady, so try adding olive oil, fish oil, coconut oil, or flax oil to your diet each day. (The supplement “L-glutamine” is also something you can take to help ease sugar cravings. It works really well. You can find it in powder form at most health food stores.)

As a nutritionist, people always ask me for advice about how to lose that stubborn blubber around their waist. I usually tell them to try a little experiment: For two full weeks, don’t eat any sugar or sweets. You don’t have to do anything else differently. Try really hard to read labels and make sure you’re not having any sweets whatsoever. No glucose, glucose/fructose, high fructose corn syrup, molasses, honey, maple syrup. And absolutely no artificial sweeteners (unless you want to GAIN weight, then go ahead and indulge!) Two servings of fruit each day is okay, but other than that, no sweet nothin’s. What they usually report is that the the love handles start melting away. The saddles bags hit the road. The jelly belly starts to disappear, almost like magic! Flabra-cadabra!