Reduce Your Sugar Intake: My Top Tips That Helped Me To Cut Sugar Effectively

Sugar can be hard to reduce in your diet. It’s literally everywhere, and sugar cravings can be tough to manage. I know because I used to be a sugar addict. In this post, I’m going to share my top tips to reduce sugar in your diet without going crazy. If you’re interested, keep reading.

Hi guys! Welcome back to THE WHOLE HAPPY LIVING

Today’s topic is sugar and how to reduce it in your diet. I’m going to give you practical tips to reduce sugar. These are things that I have learned from my own experience because I was a sugar addict at one point, and these are also things that I have learned from my friend’s experiences. So I hope these things work for you. Now before we dive in, I need to mention two things. First is this post is talking about tackling added sugar -not natural sugar in whole foods. So I’m talking about reducing sugar in things like breakfast cereals, processed foods, snacks, candies. I’m not talking about reducing your sugar in things like tomatoes, carrots, apples, oranges. I think sugar in natural foods is not a problem because they have fibre and have many vitamins and minerals intact.

The problem really is added sugar. Now….

How much added sugar should you have per day?

What is the limit?

Well, the World Health Organization (WHO) actually has a limit. So their limit is 50 g per day. They recommend staying below that. To put that into perspective, that’s not a lot. If you were to have a can of soda, you would have roughly 40 g. So that doesn’t leave you much room for more sugar. Now, if you’re looking for maximum health benefits, the recommendation is below 25 g per day. Now that you know the details and the background Let’s dive into the tips.

Number 1: Read the labels on all of your processed foods.

So I’m not really a big fan of eating processed foods. I try to stick to whole foods, but sometimes you’ve got to eat the processed foods. How can you tell if you have too much sugar or not? Learn to read the labels. On the ingredient list, all the ingredients that were used to make the food are listed.

The first ingredient is typically the one that is used the most and the last.

The ingredient is the one that is used in the least quantity. So look through the ingredient list and try to look for words that signify sugar.

Now The problem is sugar actually has 60 different names! I don’t know all of them, and I don’t expect you to know all of them. I have them in the chart below. The most common words you want to look for are sugar – obviously. And syrup – so brown rice syrup..malt syrup. Then you have high fructose corn syrup. So look for the word syrup and also look for words that end with -OSE. ose. Glucose, fructose, dextrose.

Those are all sugars, so try to avoid foods that have a lot of sugars in them.

Number 2: Try not to drink your calories. 

One of the easiest ways to have too much sugar is to drink it. Because it doesn’t feel like we’re getting that much, and it’s just very easy to overdo it. So whenever I am drinking something, I am very mindful of the amount of sugar in it. I try to ask for unsweetened beverages whenever I am going to a cafe whenever I go to a cafe. If I’m getting an iced tea or an iced coffee, I try to get it unsweetened. And if you’re going for bottled beverages, refer to point 1, which was to read the label. So try not to drink all of your calories in the form of sugar.

Number 3: eat more protein.

When you don’t eat enough protein with every single meal, your blood sugar tends to be a little bit erratic. So let’s say you have breakfast. It’s a sugary breakfast cereal with a little bit of milk. And you’re out the door at around 8 o’clock. So you’ve had your breakfast around 7:30. By the time 10:30 rolls around, you’re probably going to be hungry. That’s because your breakfast didn’t have enough protein, and it had too much sugar. So your blood sugar went up, and then you had that dip, and during that dip, you have that sugar craving. If you want to prevent that sugar craving, the good idea is to get enough protein with every meal. So I recommend at least 15-20 grams of protein as a minimum per meal, so you’re getting your protein throughout the day, and you’re stabilising your blood sugar levels, and you’re not going to have those cravings.