Quitting Sugar – Anti-Inflammatory Diet
If your muscles are constantly stiff and you have chronic pain in your muscles, then most likely you have chronic inflammation in your body. Lately, I have been reading about anti-inflammatory foods from The Perricone Promise
Sugar. This commonly used, seemingly innocent additive is available in many of our packaged foods. Sugar has many names including raw sugar, turbinado sugar, sucrose, glucose, high fructose corn syrup, dextrose, maltodextrin, brown sugar, and maltose.
What sugar does is give you a quick burst of energy then gives you a low. Look at kids when they eat sugar, like my nephew. Right after having sugar, he will bounce off the walls, then soon after become angry, defiant, and difficult to deal with.
According to the book, Lick the Sugar Habit, a little known fact about sugar is that it prevents your body from fully absorbing the vitamins and minerals in your foods. So basically, eating a meal with sugar present means that you are negating some of the benefits of eating healthy foods!
Sugar also promotes inflammation in the body and weakens the immune system. Sugar is so easy to ingest because it can be found in seemingly healthy packaged foods like cereal, sodas, juices, marinades, salad dressing, vitamins, fruit yogurt, oatmeal packets, bread, granola, canned fruit, and more. It is such a challenge to find foods that don’t have sugar, but it’s not impossible.
Try eating more natural, whole foods and limiting packaged foods. I have avoided sugar for the past 2 weeks, except in one of my vitamins. I cannot avoid it totally but I feel a lot better. I find that the more sugar I eat, the more I sneeze and have allergies. In my former work place, every person in our small office would sneeze every day except for one person. Looking back at it, she was the only of of us who avoided sugar like the plague.
I have been listening to my body more over the past several years. And it has been telling me over and over that it does not want to eat sugar but me, having a sweet tooth, could not bring myself to quit it. I have cut down on sugar significantly but never completely avoided it. Slowly my taste buds have adjusted to feeling repulsed by foods that are too sweet.
Now I have quit having desserts, sweet espresso drinks, ice cream, chocolate, cookies, etc. I only let myself have those things during the holidays. And I don’t really crave them like I used to. Honestly, I have been feeling sooooo much better. My body feels really good for the first time in a very long time.
Sugar Substitute. If you miss sugar, try stevia, which is a calorie free herb and natural sweetener. Try liquid stevia instead of the powder form because it dissolves better. A little goes a long way with stevia so you only need a few drops to sweeten your foods.
I have also discovered that avoiding items with added sugar has made a difference in how my body feels. I have been suffering from bursitis in my hip for the past year. I’ve taken several medications including muscle relaxers, NSaids and arthritis medication. It wasn’t until a friend told me that sugar is an inflammotory agent and encouraged me to go 2 weeks without eating sugar (like desserts, sugar cereals, etc.) I agreed hoping that I could prove her wrong (who really wants to start a sugar free diet?) However, after 2 weeks my hip felt better than it had in the past year. I’ve now gone almost 4 weeks and my hip is almost completely healed (it’s about 95% better.) I’m going to keep going at this point since I’m feeling so much better. It was only hard for about the first week and then my body adjusted and it wasn’t so difficult to turn down those desserts.
I hope this info. helps someone else. It’s worth a try. What do you have to lose?