Just eliminating sources of corn syrup and added sugar is a great first step, IMO. We cut out soda, sweets, and other added-sugar crap (but kept bread, milk, pasta, fruit, honey, etc) and that alone was a big improvement.
Personally, just eliminating obviously-sweet things has been enough to make me not even want them in quantities I used to like. I still like things of course, but more than a little candy or soda is sorta sickening after you get away from it for a while. It becomes self-reinforcing.
Eliminating sweets is likely more important. Complex carbs in pasta / bread or even simple sugars in fruits are absorbed more slowly which supposedly is much better for you. I think the jury is still out on how good or bad carbs are for you. My instinct tells me they are probably completely fine if they don't make you feel bad personally.
I have been on a similar trend lately. Trying to first focus on low gluten/no gluten and nothing with processed sugar in it. Often hard to eliminate it all but even a dramatic cut back in processed foods has made a difference on my sleep.
Cutting out processed foods and making your own food everyday makes a huge difference!
body treats everything carbs (except for dietary fiber and sugar alcohols) as glucose eventually. getting under 50g net carbs a day is fairly easy. staying under 20g net is harder but not impossible these days.
Yeah... but that "eventually" is metabolically relevant. Anecdata, but 250g / day of complex carb felt very different to 125g simple carb + 125g complex carb / day. As an athlete, and at one point a keto based athlete, I'm confident that carbs per se were not the enemy.
We tried keto for a month or so but it was a pain to keep up with (and getting more expensive because of meat price inflation).