During the month of January The House of O’Brien is breaking up with refined sugar. We aren’t breaking up with carbs all together, just refined sugar. Breaking up with Sugar is one of the most difficult habits to overcome.

• Regular table sugar
• Brown sugar
• High-fructose corn syrup
• Evaporated can juice

The body’s preferred fuel source is sugar!! Becoming hooked on it doesn’t take long at all. We are going to give you tips to slowly kick the habit even if you only eat small amounts of refined sugar.

Tip #1

Replace refined sugar with a piece of fruit.

Fruit has fiber that moves slowly through the body, which may help you feel full longer. That slow movement means it digests gradually and is absorbed by the bloodstream slower.

To put it simply, if you eat the piece of fruit instead of the piece of candy, your blood sugar doesn’t spike as fast. When you eat fruit your blood sugar rises slowly because you are disgesting slowly thus controlling your bodies response to the sugar in the fruit.

As opposed to refined sugar that spikes your blood sugar quickly and then drops the levels quickly leaving you craving more and more sugar. In fact, eating refined sugar raises not only your blood sugar levels but your insulin levels, usually too much insulin too quickly to bring down the blood sugar levels slowly.

What happens then: over time your body reacts by performs something called rebound hypoglycemic. It releases fat (lipids) into the blood stream to compensate for the blood sugar/insulin spike. Excess fat in the blood stream is known as high cholesterol. If this happens for extended periods of time you can develop heart disease and many other cardiovascular problems.

Eating fruit doesn’t trigger the same body response.

Habit Hack:

One way we have found to curb the cravings for refine sugar is not having any cookies, candy, cakes or brownies in your house causing friction when you crave it.

Having bowls of fruit on the counter and fruit cut and ready in glass containers, so you can see it in the refrigerator, make the habit of replacing fruit for refine sugar easier to access. It is a simple way to implement your success in this very difficult habit change.

Replacing fruit for refine sugar by making it obvious and available helps you to succeed in changing one of the most difficult habits we all possess.

Good Luck!!