How To Reduce Sugar Intake When Dieting

As with many things, a little sugar in your diet is fine. Have too much, however, and you’ll start to notice the ill effects that an overload of the sweet stuff can have on your body.

If you don’t have a particularly sweet tooth and don’t find yourself eating a lot of desserts, cakes or confectionery, you may think that you don’t take on board a great deal of sugar. You may also be surprised to learn that this might not be the case in reality.

Sugar appears in the foods we eat in various surreptitious ways. You’ll find it in plenty of savoury snacks and in all sorts of processed foods and ready meals.¹ It’s also found in high amounts in most alcoholic beverages and soft drinks.²

So if you’re dieting, you’ll want to swerve sugar wherever possible. Let’s look into just why that’s the case and investigate some of the best ways to cut it out of your diet…

How to reduce sugar intake – 5 Ways

Quit the sweet treats

A blindingly obvious first tip, but it’s one worth bearing in mind. It couldn’t be simpler – the first step is ditching the obviously sweet foods. So you stop buying sweets, cakes, chocolates and desserts. Easy.

Get into the habit of looking at the ingredients list

It’s vital you don’t forget about the hidden sugars that lurk in so many places. The sugar may be hiding, but it’ll be detailed in the ingredients list. Have a look before putting any item into your trolley.

Check the packaging for sugar warnings

Nutrition labelling is a handy tool when assessing the healthiness of any foodstuff. Especially the traffic light system on packaging, which alerts you to sugar content by colour.

Be conscious of how sugary drinks can be

You’ll probably be aware of how sugary many canned soft drinks are. What you may not realise is that many healthy-seeming drinks contain a large amount of sugar too – especially fruit juices.¹⁴ Always check the label.

Pick the low-sugar or sugar-free alternatives

Thankfully, due to pressure and emerging markets, the food and drink industry has responded to health concerns surrounding sugar consumption. There are now lots of different low-sugar or even no-sugar versions of our favourite treats, snacks, meals and drinks.

How sugar can ruin your weight loss plans

Sugar is calorific

The simple rule for weight loss is this: You need to burn more calories than you take on. As such, unnecessary or ‘empty’ calories are to be avoided at all costs. Sugar provides perhaps the emptiest of all the empty calories.

A tablespoon of sugar contains approximately 50 calories.³ That may sound reasonable. After all, how often do you eat a full three teaspoons of sugar? Well, the answer is this – much more frequently than you might think. For instance, unless it’s sugar-free, a can of cola generally contains around 2.5 tablespoons (7.5 teaspoons) of sugar.⁴

A lot of sweet treats don’t curb hunger

To lose weight, we need to fuel our bodies in a healthy way that doesn’t overload our systems with too many calories. Calorific sweet treats might be slightly more acceptable were they to fill us up. But they rarely do. Not nearly as much as an alternative snack or meal that’s protein-focused.

So you’re taking on calories but remaining hungry. Meaning you’ll be tempted to eat more, taking on yet more calories. This is not an effective way to stop food cravings.

Fructose can cause leptin resistance

Excess sugar consumption (particularly fructose) has been shown in studies to create significant resistance to leptin,⁵ a key hormone that controls appetite and signals your body when to stop eating.

In other words, when you’ve eaten enough, you feel full. That’s because leptin is doing its job. Too much sugar inhibits the leptin and you don’t feel satiated as a result. The outcome? It’s very likely you’ll end up overeating.

Sugar’s effects on the body

Type 2 diabetes

Sugar can have a pretty detrimental effect on us in other ways too. One of the major health concerns associated with it is diabetes.

The number of people living with type 2 diabetes has doubled in the past 15 years.⁶ A heavy increase in sugar consumption is believed to be a major contributory factor to this.⁷

Not only does diabetes impact life expectancy, but it can cause a range of symptoms that can really affect a sufferer’s quality of life. Obesity is very often a factor in both of these.⁸

Tooth decay

We all know that eating too many sweets is bad for our teeth. But sugar’s effect on our pearly whites isn’t just limited to the ‘obvious’ sources of sugar. While cakes, desserts, sweets and sugary drinks are best avoided – or kept to a minimum – less obvious sugar sources should also be monitored and swerved.

Natural sugars are found in most fruits. Eat too much and it can cause tooth decay.⁹ One ‘healthy’ way many people find themselves taking on too much sugar is via fruit-heavy smoothies. Fruit can be good for you, but fruit juices should be limited.

Heart disease and strokes

Too much sugar leads to weight gain. Weight gain can mean obesity. Obesity is very closely linked with a heightened chance of developing very serious heart disease.

Research has demonstrated that people with high sugar diets are at a much greater risk of poor cardiovascular health¹⁰ and strokes.¹¹

Dips in energy levels

Sugar’s impact on our energy levels is something of a paradox. While sweet treats can offer something of a boost to us in terms of energy, long-term it can prove draining. The initial spike in insulin and blood sugar can give us a quick hit, but the following dip can be much more noticeable.

This swing in blood sugar levels is often known as a ‘sugar crash’ and can seriously impact any exercise regime that you’ve built into your day.¹²

Low mood

Research has shown that excessive sugar consumption has been linked with anxiety and depression. It seems as if it can interrupt the brain’s built-in reward signalling system and disturb the flow of dopamine.¹³