The Sugar Intervention: helping yourself to health

The Sugar Intervention (SI) is the upcoming book about a mini nutrition course disguised as a sugar detox (well not very well disguised!) that ran for nearly ten years. Most importantly it’s a cookbook, putting the SI guidelines into action. It entails:

– getting rid of sugar and eating real food for two weeks to create long lasting healthy habits for your body.

– resetting your go to meals, cutting alcohol and coffee and other ‘habits’: rethinking your food not just for the season but for a reason – you.

– rethinking your next bite using nutritional therapy and digestive strengthening aids, to start your journey back to helping yourself to health.

– loving everything about feeling fantastic when you wake up each morning and staying that way all day long.

But…

Sugar isn’t just sugar.

‘Sugar’ is every food that cause a blood sugar response. Grains. Legumes. Starches. Coffee. Alcohol. Grey areas foods and allergens. Lack of sleep. Stress. In fact they’re all stress to the body and all stress summates: our body doesn’t realize if it’s sugar or toxins or stress that’s causing the stress, it just elicits a blood sugar response. And our brain hates blood sugar spikes of any kind. It has to send out insulin each time, and then massive amounts of glucagon to counteract the insulin (which like stress summates so needs more glucagon to ‘come down’ which we do in a BIG way.) Cortisol release from our adrenals works much the same way, where we also end up craving sugar, and need more insulin and more glucagon. No wonder it’s called the blood sugar roller coaster.

Thankfully getting back to a more even keel can start with food. starting with just two weeks dedicated to making more mindful choices to our sugar responses can be all you need to get going

Except even the healthiest meal each day becomes boring to the dopamine receptors in our brains’ rewards system, acting like sugar on this roller coaster, looking for more of a buzz! Because our brain evolved to pay attention to new and different tastes. First to detect food that’s gone bad and second because the more variety we have in our diet the more likely we are to get all the nutrients we need. And more importantly, we need to want to keep eating new foods and that’s why dopamine levels off when a food becomes boring.

But luckily you’ve three new chances each day to see how your body feels, what it needs and doesn’t and what you’re blocking out with go to eating and reaching for sugar in your rush to eat.

So…

If not sugar what then? Simply more room for what you need first. You’ll realize what you can do without, the bad things that have crept into your diet. With new, quite ‘convenient’ ways to cook (and think!) you may refresh more than your food habits.

Also…

The Sugar Intervention does not mean quitting sugar for good. We all pretty much went low fat for so long that it’s tempting to feel the need to go low sugar. We cannot vilify one nutrient to quit for weight loss and health success forever (oh and it’s not ‘no carb’ either. Many people suffer detrimental health effects from removing whole food groups from their diet completely!). A one-size-fits-all diet can never work: for as many people as that diet works for, there will be just as many as it doesn’t. For humans, who grow, change, get sick, heal and age throughout our life, so must their diet. We’ve actually a primitive need for sugar, it’s just that through over consumption (& stress adds to that consumption), we can’t access the benefits.

Because…

Nothing good or bad just in or out of balance. There is no one nutrient or one diet for weight loss or health success – if someone says there isthey’re either misguided, selling something or both. That said, getting sugar out of your meals for two weeks lets you put other things back in, change up your go tos, refresh your recipes and shopping to rethink your meals and most importantly start noticing how you feel.

There’s a lot of people out there are recommending ‘diets’ that have worked for them, without getting to know a person and what is happening in their body at a biochemical and cellular level. This is not the Sugar Intervention. I think we need to start teaching ourselves to be conscious about how food works. One man’s food is another man’s poison: you know too much sugar is yours, what’s your ‘food’ then?

The Sugar Intervention: guidebook and cookbook, coming June 2023!