Sugar Busters! - Cut Sugar to Trim Fat (Paperback)

By avoiding sugar (a principle component of the modern diet), my wife has lost 30 lbs and is having no trouble continuing this process. This reverses a 10 year trend of weight gain. I have joined her on this diet to keep her company and expected to lose a few pounds, but not too many as I keep VERY fit through a variety of regular hard sporting activities and have done so for the last 16 years. So far I have lost 26 lbs and also see no signs of this process stopping - unless I choose to eat differently. I will do so soon - I am getting too thin! Both my wife and I have found that because the diet allows you to eat and does not involve feeling hungry we have been able to sustain continuous weight loss at 1-2lbs per week for about 3 months now. We both feel this way of eating could be a way of life, rather than a just another diet. One aspect of the diet that helps is that by understanding what foods are bad and why, you are able to break the diet occasionally without too much impact (although it would be wrong to say no impact). So we still go round to friends for dinner and have a couple of bottles of red wine a week.

The only thing to add is that the diet, whilst easy to follow once it has been understood, is relatively complex. The book will need to be read carefully from cover to cover to get the full benefit. You will learn what you can eat, what you should eat, and when to eat which foods. And no calorie counting is involved. By the way, eating "allowed" foods is an expensive activity - our food bills are up 25-50% as fresh vegetables replace rice/pasta and red wine (expensive) replaces beer (cheap).

If you have tried all the other diets and find them hard to stick too, get this book and give it a go!

One of the interesting factoids in the book was that middle-aged men around 50 have only 18 months more of life expectancy now in the United States than they did in 1900. This is true despite all of the advances made in health care that should extend life for those with cardiac disease and cancer. For example, did you know that eating excess sugar causes the body to make more cholesterol. Many people may be able to reduce cholesterol more with sugar reduction than with cholesterol-lowering drugs.

Although it would have been nice to have taken a broader look at nutrition in this book (you can get that in Eating Well for Optimum Health), it is my understanding that it is correct that excess quickly-absorbed sugars (whether from Coca-Cola, corn or a candy bar) drive up your blood sugar level, cause your body to create insulin to store the sugar as fat, and suppress the glucagen that causes your body to burn stored fat. There are excellent tables to show how these results vary after a high carbohydrate versus a high protein meal. Carbohydrates are turned by your body into sugar, even if they start out as starches. So you have to beware of baked potatoes (before you add the sour cream and butter) as well as beer.

Clearly, our health can stand a lot of improvement. It stands to reason that eating changes should be an important factor. While tens of millions diet, few actually succeed in keeping the weight off. This is one more sign that we are doing something wrong. The authors point out that sugars have been available to the masses for only a few generations. Prior to that, only the richest people suffered from too much sugar, bleached flour, and beer. As the rest of the world becomes wealthier, we face the risk of creating even more harm.

I found the lists of what to eat more of and what to eat less of easy to follow and understand. I am not competent to comment on the recipes, fourteen day diet, and restaurant recipes. But if you are interested in such things, they are in the book.

Be sure to learn the important lessons about avoiding excess sugar from this book. Then use that a springboard to learn more about what other nutritional changes can help you. I suggest Dean Ornish's book, Eat More, Weigh Less, as another good resource. He takes on the fat side of the intake equation in a thorough and useful way. Live Right for Your Type is another excellent resource that helped me a great deal. After you have learned all about nutrition, go on to Dean Ornish's book, Love and Survival, on how human connections affect our health even more than nutrition does.

Overcome as many stalls as possible about how you eat and relate to others to have the fullest, most energetic, happiest, and most healthful life!