There are a whole variety of reasons why you might want to reduce the amount of sugar in your diet. Not only can it help you lose weight, but it can also reduce your chance of developing diabetes, help stabilize your mood, and assist in recovering from a range of other ailments such as eczema.
Cutting sugar out of your diet can seem like a daunting prospect. It tends to get worse once you start looking into your diet more closely when you realize just how much sugar you eat! The thought of not being able to eat all of those things can put you off the idea.
Fortunately, it’s not as bad as it seems. Firstly, it’s possible to replace many sugary things which you have to cut out of your diet with similar alternatives. Secondly, it’s worth remembering that you don’t necessarily have to cut out every sugary bit of food from your diet at once.
Here are a few simple suggestions for alternatives to eating your usual sugary foods. After those, we’ll take a look at some ways to help overcome the initial challenge of changing your diet, and how to stick with it once you’ve started.
Dried fruit
Most of us have probably tried dried fruit at some point in our lives. The most common dried fruit is probably the raisin. However, there are loads of other dried fruits available too: apricots, mangos, prunes, and many more dried fruits can be found in supermarkets and health food stores. Just make sure that they are natural, rather than sweetened dried fruits.
Although fruits are sweet, they contain a different kind of sugar than that found in normal cakes, etc. The great thing about dried fruits is that they are really sweet, which makes them great replacements for chocolate, biscuits, and other sweet things.
Fresh fruit
Fresh fruit isn’t usually as sweet as dried fruit, but it’s still very sweet.
Fructose-based products
Most jams and sweets are sucrose-based. Sucrose is standard sugar – the kind you bake with and the kind you find in sweets and chocolates (along with other processed sugars which are also bad for you). Fructose is the kind of sugar found in fruit. It’s sweeter than sucrose which means you need less of it to achieve the same effect.
Fortunately, it’s possible to find a range of fructose-based products in health-food stores and supermarkets. These use fruit sugar instead of fructose to make cakes, jams, and all those other tasty treats that you crave.
Fructose
Not only is it possible to buy fructose-based products, but you can also buy fructose itself. You can use it in place of any other kind of sugar which you would normally use daily for cooking or sweetening your drinks etc.
While these alternatives will help you to reduce the amount of sugar in your diet, you might still find it hard to adjust at first.
It’s also possible that you’d prefer not to have too much fruit sugar in your diet either, which means cutting out almost everything that tastes sweet. Here are a few hints on how you can deal with these issues:
Savory Treats
If weight loss isn’t your primary goal, then it’s possible to eat savory treats that give a similar kind of satisfaction to sweet treats. Things like crisps and chips are good for this. So are cheese, plain yogurt, or various types of nuts. Be creative: there are many savory treats that you can use as an alternative to candy, cakes, chocolate, and so on.
Fill Up
When we’re full we usually feel less like eating treats. A simple solution to reducing the craving for sweet things is to eat larger portions of savory meals. Make an extra salad or extra pasta. Just try to make sure you get your fill from the savory food that you eat.
Savory Drinks
A really good way to kill the desire for sweet things is to drink something savory that cleanses your taste buds. A good example of this is chamomile tea, which is very mild tasting and washes flavors out of your mouth. Drinking savory things like this helps quiet the urge for sweet taste sensations.
You can also try drinking things like ginger tea, or licorice tea. A unique feature of licorice tea is that, despite containing no sugar, it leaves a sweet aftertaste at the back of your throat. This can help satisfy cravings for sweet flavors.
Keeping to reduced sugar, or sugar-free, diet can be challenging, but there are lots of ways to help. Sticking with the diet is the real challenge though. It requires both willpower and motivation. Willpower is the hardest part of the equation: it can be very hard to resist strong urges. However, the more you resist, the better you get at controlling your desires. That means that over time, your willpower will improve.
Motivation is something that assists willpower and is also assisted by willpower. The two work together quite closely. Staying motivated requires that you keep in mind at all times why you are cutting sugar out of your diet. If it is for health reasons, such as diabetes, then remember that not only your wellbeing but also your life itself is at stake. You are doing this for yourself, not because someone else says you have to.
Motivation can also be sustained by gradually working your way into the diet. You don’t have to drop all sugary foods at once. You can start by eliminating one or two particular foods – say ice cream or biscuits – and get used to not having them. After a while, you can cut out another thing, and another. Take your time.
One more thing worth remembering is that your taste buds themselves can change. After a while of not eating chocolate, biscuits, ice cream, and so on, you start to taste the sweetness in other things that are more savory. Even something as plain as bread has some sweetness, and this can become satisfying once your taste buds have adjusted.
Cutting sugar from your diet isn’t necessarily easy, but it’s not the toughest thing in the world either. With the right attitude and knowledge, it’s not only possible but pretty easy to make this change. Just set your mind to it, and remember why you’re doing it in the first place.
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