I Found My Perfect Diet!
Part 2 of 2… Staying (Nearly) Sugar-Free
There’s a feeling of success… that comes from finding a diet that works for you and actually leads to weight loss over a period of time… and at a decent pace. My height is 5’7”, and I’m now down 13 lbs (from 200 to 187) since August 3.
Some might say that’s not a lot. But I’m sure that many people who have personal experience with dieting would say that’s a pretty good track record. I concur with that latter group. Especially considering that my weight has remained the same or increased over the past three or four years. Thus I’m ecstatic to see a significant weight loss again!
My Plan
This is what I’ve done:
1I have engaged in resistance training (otherwise know as weight training) with a trainer since April of this year. That alone does not effect weight loss, but used in conjunction with diet modification, it aids and assists weight loss greatly.
I bought a book by Sal di Stefano: The Resistance Training Revolution. It extols the myriad benefits that come with resistance training. Although it sounds counter-intuitive, I was surprised to learn from his book that doing tons of cardio is not a good way to lose weight. This is because it causes your body to get more efficient at burning calories. At first glance, that sounds great! “More efficient” sounds like “Burn those calories, baby!”, but what it really means is that your body learns to perform cardio while expending fewer calories to do it. — Not good.
“You don’t want an efficient metabolism; you want a metabolism that burns a lot of calories, even if you just sit at your desk at work… The bottom line is that tons of cardio erodes muscle and slows down your metabolism, making long-term fat loss very difficult.” — Sal di Stefano in The Resistance Training Revolution
On the other hand, resistance training does the opposite. It builds muscle (obviously), and that muscle has high caloric demands, requiring your body to burn calories all day (even while resting) in order to build and maintain that muscle, and thus your metabolism is sped up. — It’s the magic formula!
And what’s more, the other benefit of resistance training is that it causes your existing body to be more aesthetically pleasing as your body begins to gain a more toned shape and muscles start to reveal themselves.
2But resistance training alone won’t do it. I had to change my diet as well. I recently decided to give up sugar. Sugar is not essential or necessary for bodily function. So it’s harmless to slash it from your diet. You just have to get used to having the taste of sugar in your life much less often. And you may have some withdrawal symptoms as I did. See my prior story below.
Sugar tastes heavenly, but is notorious for the amount of bodily harm it causes… from increased risk of heart disease, diabetes, and cancer to depression, poor dental health, signs of aging, and cognitive decline. — Yes, all of that. Not to mention that dreaded sugar crash.
So nearly cutting out all sugar is what I’ve done. I cut down the sugar and the pounds immediately started to drop off in rapid fashion. It was an epiphany!
But just to clarify, I’m not obsessively sugar-free. I don’t go to restaurants and demand an ingredient list of every entrée and salad dressing to confirm the lack of any sugar molecules. However, I do avoid the obvious stuff like barbecue sauce or honey mustard or teriyaki sauce. And I still eat blueberries almost everyday. — I’m not opposed to natural sugar, but I don’t eat a lot of it. I mainly avoid added sugar, and I reduce the other innate sugars as much as practically possible.
3Unfortunately even with my initial weight loss, I began to see my weight loss completely stall. I lost 10.2 lbs over 25 days, and then I remained at the same weight for like two weeks. I was crestfallen at the abrupt halt to my progress, so I had to figure out how to trigger my weight loss again.
I realized I had to reduce my other carbs too.
I thought my multi-grain bread and no-added-sugar granola were ok to eat and still lose weight, but my body said ‘Nice try’. I restricted my eating of carbs to my initial breakfast meal in the morning and almost none the rest of the day. And my weight loss resumed again!
I started the reduced carbs on September 15 and lost 4.4 lbs over three days… I gained 4.4 lbs in two days (due to a cheat day at my beloved Crumbl), and then I lost 4.4 lbs again over the next five days… so a net loss of 4.4 lbs in ten days since I reduced my carbs. (But a summed loss of 8.8 lbs!)
4I did divert from my original plan by adding back artificial sweeteners to my diet again. But not to the vast extent that I used them before. I was simply not able to tolerate the taste of barely sweetened tea or coffee. So now I do use Splenda in my tea, and when I order a latte, I request the sugar-free syrup. At first it tasted chemically to me, but I have adjusted. And I’ve found that the sugar-substitutes do not hinder my weight loss at all. I had thought that they would because I had read that the taste of sweetness stimulates your insulin production, which in turn stimulates weight gain… but I guess that’s not true after all.
5Another diversion I made was to allow myself to have sweets once a month — a cheat day. Probably not the best idea considering my Crumbl cheat day debacle above… but I don’t want to restrict myself to never eating sugar and dessert again. As I mentioned in Part 1, I love a cookie store called Crumbl, and now I allow myself to get dessert on the 16th of the month, and only from there… because it’s the best!
But I must admit that after eating three big cookies on my last cheat day, I felt like sh**. And not just a general tummy-ache or heartburn. I mean my heart was beating harder and I had to rest on the couch for a while just to recuperate.
So lesson learned — My body hates sugar now! I won’t be splurging on my cheat day to that extent again!
So after two months of it, I’ve decided being (nearly) sugar-free is definitely for me, and I recommend it!
Hence this article. :-)