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If you’ve found that munching sugary snacks just makes you crave more sugary snacks, you’re not alone. Eating lots of simple carbohydrates without the backup of proteins or fats can quickly satisfy hunger and give your body a short-term energy boost, but they almost as quickly leave you famished again and craving more.
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If you’ve found that munching sugary snacks just makes you crave more sugary snacks, you’re not alone. Eating lots of simple carbohydrates without the backup of proteins or fats can quickly satisfy hunger and give your body a short-term energy boost, but they almost as quickly leave you famished again and craving more.
Why We Crave Sugar
There are many reasons why we go for sweet things. Sweets just taste good, and that preference gets reinforced by rewarding ourselves with sweet treats, which can make you crave it even more.
Sweet is the first taste humans prefer from birth. Sugar is a carbohydrate, and carbs stimulate the release of the feel-good brain chemical serotonin. The taste of sugar releases endorphins that calm and relax us, offering a natural high.
The problem comes not when we indulge in a sweet treat now and then, but when we over-consume them, which is easy to do when sugar is added to many processed foods like breads, yogurt, juices, and sauces. Americans are notorious for over-consuming sugar, averaging about 22 teaspoons of added sugars per day. According to the American Heart Association, we should limit added sugars to about 6 teaspoons per day for women and 9 for men.
What Happens When We Consume Sugar
When you consume starches & refined sugar, these foods enter the bloodstream quickly, which causes a sugar spike. The body then produces insulin to push sugar from the bloodstream into the cells. Over time, excessive levels of insulin can make your muscle cells lose sensitivity to the hormone, which leads to type 2 diabetes and heart disease. Fat cells are different, and always remain sensitive to insulin. So these insulin spikes lock the fat cells so you can't use them for energy.
To break this cycle and get your body to work optimally again, you shouldn't go on an extreme diet. The first step is just to reduce the blood sugar spikes that produce sharp increases of insulin. The substance in our diet that's most responsible for these surges is starches like potatoes, rice, flour, corn, or other items like white pasta, white bread, doughnuts, cookies, candy and cakes.
While we could cut out these foods entirely, wouldn't it be great if there were a way to solve the problem without completely eliminating these carbs? It turns out there is.
You can blunt the blood sugar-raising effects by taking advantage of natural substances in foods that slow carbohydrate digestion and their entry into the bloodstream. No matter what kind of sugar blocker you use, your waistline and health will win in the end.
Have a Fatty Snack 10 to 30 Minutes Before Meals
This amazing trick allows you to remain fuller longer because at the outlet of your stomach is a muscular ring called the pyloric valve. This valve regulates the speed food leaves the stomach and enters your small intestine. This valve is all that stands between the carbs in your stomach and a surge of glucose in your bloodstream. However, you can send your pyloric valve a message to slow down by eating fat as it triggers a reflex that constricts the valve and slows digestion. As little as a teaspoon of fat that can be easily provided by a handful of nuts or a piece of cheese will do the trick, it you eat it before your meal.
Start Your Meal With a Salad
This tip helps the body soak up starch and sugar. This happens because soluble fiber from the pulp of plant based foods like beans, carrots, apples, and oranges, swells like a sponge in your intestines and traps starch and sugar. Soluble means "dissolvable", so when soluble fiber eventually dissolves, it releases glucose. However, that takes time which makes the glucose it absorbs to seep into the bloodstream slowly, then body needs less insulin to handle it. A good way to ensure that you get enough soluble fiber is to have a salad before the meal, rather than after, when you eat starches.
Eat Plenty of Protein With Your Meals
If you do this you won't secrete as much insulin. You want to blunt insulin spikes, so you need to start secreting insulin sooner. Even though protein contains no glucose, it triggers a "first-phase insulin response" that occurs so fast, it keeps your blood sugar from rising as high later. This reduces the total amount of insulin you need to handle a meal, so be sure to have meatballs with your whole grain or veggie spaghetti.
Try Some Cooked Veggies
Both fruits and vegetables contain soluble fiber, but you digest veggies more slowly. As a rule, vegetables make better sugar blockers, because they have more fiber and less sugar than fruits. Just make sure you don't cook your vegetables to much. Boiling vegetables until they're limp and soggy saturates the soluble fiber, filling it with water so it can't absorb the sugar and starch you need it to. Crisp vegetables are chunkier when they reach your stomach, and larger food particles take longer to digest, so you'll feel full longer.
Pour On The Vinegar
This slows the breakdown of starch into sugar. The high acetic acid content in vinegar deactivates amylase, the enzyme that turns starch into sugar. (It doesn't matter what kind of vinegar you use.) Because it acts on starch only, it has no effect on the absorption of refined sugar. In other words, it will help if you eat bread, but not candy. But there's one more benefit: Vinegar also increases the body's sensitivity to insulin. You should consume vinegar at the start of your meal. Put it in salad dressing or sprinkle a couple of tablespoons on meat or vegetables. Vinegar brings out the flavor of food, as salt does.
Sip a Glass Of Wine With Dinner
If you follow this tip, your liver won't produce as much glucose. Alcohol has unique sugar-blocking properties, and your liver normally converts some of the fat and protein in your blood to glucose, which adds to the glucose from the carbs you eat. But alcohol consumed WITH a meal temporarily halts your liver's glucose production.
A serving of any alcohol like beer, red or white wine, or a shot of hard liquor will reduce the blood sugar load of a typical serving of starch by approximately 25%. Now this doesn't mean you should have several drinks, as not only does alcohol contain calories, but it also delays the sensation of fullness, so you can overeat if your not cautious. Be especially careful about avoiding cocktails that are made with sweetened mixers because they are a huge source of sugar.
Save Sweets For Dessert
If you eat sweets on an empty stomach, there's nothing to impede the sugar content from racing into your bloodstream because there is no fat, no soluble fiber, no protein, no vinegar to slow it down. But if you confine sweets to the end of the meal, you have all of the built-in protection. If you want to keep blood sugar on an even keel, avoid between-meal sweets. When you do indulge, don't eat more than you can hold in the cup of your hand. But a few bites of candy after a meal will have little effect on your blood sugar and insulin.
Eat Regularly
Waiting too long between meals can set you up to choose sugary, fatty foods that cut your hunger. Instead, eating every three to five hours can help keep blood sugar stable and help avoid irrational eating.
Move Your Body
There are other ways of blunting sugar spikes, and exercise is one of the best. Your muscle cells are the biggest users of glucose in your body and the target of most of the insulin you make. When you exercise, your muscles need to replenish their energy stores, so each cell that you work out begins making glucose "transporters."
These sit on the surface of the cell and allow glucose to enter. In the meantime, while cells are still making the transporters, they also open up special channels that allow glucose in. So to reduce sugar spikes after your meal, go for a walk after eating.
