But sugar. Fuuuck I cannot walk past sweets. Sugar has claws in me I cannot shake. I hope we someday understand that mechanism better, maybe enough to give me a little help.
If you have never given up sugar before, it will take at least 6-8 weeks of non-use before the cravings go away. These will be some of the hardest weeks too.
1) everything has sugar in it, and you have to absolutely avoid it, not just sweets, fruits, juices, I'd even tell you diet drinks and artificial sweeteners too. That means no ketchup, sauces, breads, and most processed and store bought foods.
2) your body will do everything to remind you about those easy access sugars. During your detox, you will have cravings, dreams about sweets, even the overwhelming urge to eat stuff you might not even thing about "oh god, i could really go for some prunes right now" sort of thing.
After your body gets it figured out that your no longer getting access to easy glucose it calms the hell down. You'll notice one day that sweets just don't seem that appealing. You'll get better at detecting sweetness in things you would have never considered sweet, like lettuce.
I warn you sugar is insidious and everywhere. One day, you will sit down to some mundane meal, nothing special about it. After a few bites, you will say, wow this is wonderful, its the best thing I have ever tasted, I absolutely must have more of this very mundane thing, I'll need seconds, thirds, more if available. That meal you were eating was loaded down with sugar, it probably didn't taste sweet but it will taste like the best thing ever. That's how sugar gets you.
As an example, cutting out candy and donuts for apples and pears isn't keto, but is objectively a step in the right direction. If you want to give it a try, just go for it and see what happens!
To get the benefits of keto, you have to get the body adapted to burning fat. Depending on the body, this can take a week or so. All those cravings are the body crying out for a fix of easy sugar, because it really doesn't want to have to switch over and burn fat for fuel as its harder for it to do.
If you just had sugar every 3rd day, you're body would never adjust.
Lost 10kg.
But it was hard.
My "trick" was buying a Pepsi Max Cherry and a >80% chocolate, when I got cravings.
After ingesting nothing but water, coffee and electrolytes for 3-5 days your eating compulsions will be immediately reset. It's incredible how quick the effect is when you go extreme. It's not magic but it is pretty close.
On top of that, I find it easier to go into water fasting if I've been in ketosis for a bit, which is difficult in itself.
But for that, I've found it helpful to remove other dietary restrictions; I don't typically eat dairy, and the stuff I do like to eat in keto is often much more expensive than the beans and rice / peanuts/ fruit that are the staples of my diet when I'm not trying to force ketosis or fast. Eating nicer food (usually meats, lots of eggs, dairy) makes being that process easier.
It came back a few weeks later, but over a few years I tried fasting again and it would go away every single time. Now I try to avoid sweets as much as I can but when old habits creep back in I just have a fast and it goes away.
I don't really fast for any reason other than knowing it will take the sweet tooth away—and generally make me want to eat healthier.
The first ~12 days were hell, as if the devil possesed me, that is how strong sugar addiction is.
But then all of the sudden it was as if cravings reduced by 95% in just 24 hours around day ~12.
Realistically how do you avoid sugar like this? Soft drinks, candy, and other artificial stuff are easy enough to avoid, but most bread? Fruits? What are you supposed to eat and how are you supposed to obtain it without involving sugar? Are you suggesting people eat pure meat and lettuce and eggs for 6-8 weeks? It would be so much more helpful to give some examples of sample diets people could actually follow.
(What specifically are you saying needs to be avoided btw? Sucrose and fructose and artificial sweeteners I assume, but not glucose?)
- Minimal to no fruit (that includes tomato).
- Don't eat anything that comes in a package or that has an ingredients list more than 1 item long (so, frozen broccoli is fine, as long as there's no extra stuff in the bag).
- Don't eat anything that your great grandparents wouldn't have had access to.
Some things, like bell peppers, will start tasting like candy after a few weeks of this.
Absolute zero is not really necessary for anything...
Carbs, all of them, as much as you can.
Gotta think on the lines of what did human bodies evolve to process and use. Since sugar sources weren't always available, our bodies make all the glucose we need to live. We don't need sugar or carbs at all. Sure our body's do like them because it's easier for our bodies to process carbs to glucose than to make it from fats and other amino acids. This means our brain signals to eat more of the sugary stuff because its "free" energy.
> Are you suggesting people eat pure meat and lettuce and eggs for 6-8 weeks?
Kinda. It's scary yes, but as your body switches over to eating less carbs, it has to work harder to convert non carbs into things it can use. This levels out your blood sugar levels which in turn makes you less hungry.
> It would be so much more helpful to give some examples of sample diets people could actually follow.
My diet when I'm in the zone so to speak (Keto + intermittent fasting), looks like the following.
First meal around 1pm. Salad - a store bought green mix, might have a little carrot with it, various lettuce (not iceberg or just romaine), I might throw in an egg, a serving of a protein (anything from steak, lunch meat, tuna or salmon), some cheese, maybe something salty (olives or peppers) and some kind of non-sugary dressing (ranch, blue cheese, oil and vinegar), water or unsweet tea.
About 3pm - 5pm is a mixed bag and might be a snack or meal, and depends on hunger levels. This can be some nuts (almonds typically), cheese, lunch meat, protein shake, or just left overs.
7-8pm I'll have dinner. Bunless burgers are common, or just some source of protein and a veggie side. I like chicken, beef, pork, fish. You can make all kinds of stuff with them. Bake it, grill it, fry it (without breading). Meatloaf is good. Lots of good recipe sites, maybe you like tacos, so you can have them with low carb tortillas. Asian dishes work out too, as long as you modify them. Cauliflower can be subbed for rice.
8-9pm I'm likely to have another snack.
9pm-1pm - Water. I'll eat if my blood sugar levels demand it. But on a typical day, I avoid anything that needs to be digested.
To my surprise, my weight hasn't skyrocketed, I feel full way faster without having to exert loads of willpower to stop eating and my sugar cravings have reduced by a lot. Only from time to time I want to taste something sweet and even then I'm happy with just a green apple.
Sugar is a drug and it messes with our satety hormones. No matter how much you eat, you end up always wanting more
It is essential for strong stomach acid (a whole system benefit), your body always ensures the salt level in the blood (and will even extract it from bones). Ask yourself - 'what is the most common medical intervention' and you will see it is a saline drip. And farmers ensure that salt is available to the their cattle for their health. And Japanese have a highly salty diet and live long, with fewer bone breaks. And, and....
Salt is essential, and a low salt diet is terrible.
Then ask, why is a low salt diet recommended to people, if it is so good? The answer, sadly, is that the 'health' industry actually requires ill people - they make money treating disease, not from keeping people healthy. It is in the big pharma's interests to encourage poor behaviour, and, yes, they will even lobby governments to mandate behaviour that creates disease.
For all the similar reasons you gave, except - no sugar, no energy. You may wonder why a skinny af cyclist will happily consume 6k+ calories a day, as well as shovelling glucose gels down. Endurance athletes get it best: long distance cycling is just an all-day eating competition.
Sugar is not an essential nutrient. You can eat absolutely no sugar without any ill effect. If you eat some starchy vegetables, that provides all the carbohydrates you need.
Even if you want to eat 6000 kcal as carbohydrates, you can eat that easily from rice/maize/bread/potatoes etc., with no sugar. In fact it is much easier to eat a huge amount of food when it does not contain sugar, because even if sugar is addictive and makes you crave for it, when you eat too much sugar during a short time, it becomes disgusting when you try to eat more.
On the other hand, if you stop eating salt, or even if you just eat too little salt, you will die soon, and not in a pleasant way (e.g. one of the symptoms of hyponatremia caused by eating too little salt is severe constipation, because various muscles, including the muscles that are used for the peristalsis of the intestines, lose their strength).
Like for any essential nutrient, both eating too little salt and eating to much salt is bad. The recommended daily intake of salt is between 4 and 5 grams of salt.
In order to be able to control precisely the daily intake of salt, I prefer to not add any salt to food during cooking (and I do not buy industrially made food). Instead of that, I add the salt only immediately prior to eating, so I can know exactly the amount added during a day.
One benefit of this, like you say, is you develop a general disgust for sweets and have no interest in them outside of training.
As you say, in order to achieve the maximum power output that can be sustained for a long time, i.e. in aerobic effort, you also need fructose, i.e. sugar, besides glucose, to reach the maximum rate of carbohydrate absorption in the intestine.
However the vast majority of the humans may never encounter during their entire lives a circumstance when they need to produce a sustained power output so high that it is limited by the intestinal absorption (and without an appropriate training their muscles would not be able to sustain so much power anyway), so they never need to eat sugar. They eat it only because it tastes good.
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/how-do-you-know/2020...
Whatever you think of willpower, I think controlling the food environment (don't bring it home from the store, don't eat at restaurants with mainly junk food, etc) is the most effective intervention. After that, things like substitution, delay, smallest possible portion, and putting the tempting food in an inconvenient location may help.
But if you have junk food in your home some people (like myself) will eat it compulsively at some point.
If one can make it through the sugar detox phase then it's pretty easy because the cravings do go away.
The other part is stress management; when something bad happens it's so tempting to say "fuck it, I deserve this <insert bad thing>". That's the harder part.
Do you know how many calories you're getting from the healthy food? It's actually tough to maintain 2k calories while eating very healthy so your body will get cravings for candy which it knows is calorie dense.
But when I'm not totally focused on eating clean, I will eat as much sugar as I can reach.
Keto helps, but it's anything but automatic. (Especially around the holidays.)
You are doing this completely in reverse. You need to drop sugar & carbs. And eat fatty-meat/low-carb.
Dairy is sugar... I'll have some cottage cheese or other cheeses. And salty junk food (chips, cheese crackers, etc) is almost always high carb.
See keto diet. (I do it and carnivore).
I used to consume about 1.5 litres of ice cream every day. I still get the cravings but less and less. Good thing my wife is making fruit salads for me.