Sugar is the reason you can't lose weight
I was poisoning myself with sugar but didn't know it
I was skinny when I was young and had never been really fat, but my weight had slowly drifted up over the decades. It came to a head about a year ago when my doctor said that I should go on a statin to lower my cholesterol. Also, I found I couldn’t button some of my older pants. And I saw that after Thanksgiving and Christmas my weight was over 170 pounds. The combination was enough to make me realize that I needed to do something.
I did several somethings. I committed to getting back into running. I set up to track what I ate. And I eventually started to track my weight too. My goal was to get back down into the 150’s. It worked, but mostly by a series of lucky accidents. I had read that too much sugar is bad, and I had tried to cut out some of it where I could. But eliminating sugar was not the focus of the plan when I started.
Out with friends last year, one of them told me about a new diet she was on where she only allowed herself to eat for an eight hour time window each day. During that window however, she could eat anything she wanted. I tried that and it failed miserably. I ate ice cream, candy, and cookies (but only during an eight hour time window each day). For this year, I kept the eight hour diet in mind, but realized I need to eat healthier if I was going to lose weight.
I have been a runner for decades, and I knew running would be a part of getting back in shape. As soon as the worst of winter was over, I started on the running program. By April I was running a 5k route almost every day. I kept that up until late summer when a pulled hamstring caused me to pause the running for the rest of the year. Even though the running didn’t continue, I suspect it raised my metabolism, making it somewhat easier to burn off pounds.
According to the food journal, at the start of the year, I was having ice cream for desert almost every night. I was eating Oreos and chocolate fairly regularly, and snacking quite a bit throughout the day. Potato chips were as likely as fresh fruit to appear as snacks.
By the end of April I had dropped about 5 pounds. See the graph of my weight below. It was progress, but not as much as I had been hoping, considering that by this point I was running 20 miles a week. So I started looking at the food I was eating. I had already been trying to limit the amount of food, but that apparently wasn’t fixing the problem. The food journal says I was reducing the amount of food (for example, 3 raviolis at dinner instead of 10), but it also says I was still regularly having chocolate bars and bowls of Frosted Flakes.
Around this same time I saw a news article on how bad soda is for you. I stopped buying and drinking Coca-Cola and 7Up. I didn‘t realize it as an error at the time, but I made the mistake of replacing these with apple juice and pineapple juice because I thought these were healthier. In May, I saw another news article that said sugary drinks of every kind, including apple juice, orange juice, and other seemingly healthy juices are actually loaded with sugar. Natural or not, they are basically liquid sugar and are processed by your body immediately after you drink them. Since they quickly create a large excess of sugar in your system, your body converts a good part of that sugar to fat. I cut out all drinks and replaced them with tap water. This was one of the key things that helped me lose weight. Almost as soon as I replaced sugary drinks with water, I dropped another several pounds and got into the 150’s.
The combination of the running and the elimination of sugary drinks allowed my weight to drift down into the mid 150’s by August. This is when the pulled hamstring sidelined my running routine. But I was on a roll. I started looking to eliminate sugar from everything in my diet. The chocolate bars and candy had to go, replaced with fresh fruit. This was pretty easy since it was summer and good, cheap fruit was everywhere in the grocery stores. Yogurt, which I was eating because I thought it was healthy, is apparently loaded with sugar. You have to search carefully to find yogurt that has no sugar in it. Most white bread has a lot of sugar in it. I jettisoned that and replaced it with rye bread or sourdough, which have almost no sugar. And I was still sticking to the 8 hour per day time window for eating. In practical terms, this meant that I was skipping breakfast (and all the sugary cereal I had been eating).
Despite the fact that I had stopped running, my weight was continuing to drop like a rock. In October I was consistently in the low 150’s and at month end I hit 149 for the first time since college. I was down in the 140’s throughout November. I was never a big drinker of alcohol, but after reading that alcohol is largely processed into sugar in your body, I eliminated beer and wine and replaced them with non alcoholic beer.
So there it is. It’s been less than a year and I’ve lost 25 pounds. After a new physical exam, the doctor said I no longer need a statin, my old pants fit again, and my weight is in the mid 140’s. Pretty good considering I was making it up as I went along.
After thinking about it, I realize that I was addicted to sugar and didn’t know it. Even foods and drinks that I thought were healthy had loads of sugar in them. Somewhere during the past year I broke my sugar addiction. It may have been easier for me since I didn’t know what I was doing. Had I said to myself that I was going to eliminate sugar from my diet, I probably wouldn’t have been able to do it. But because I did it little by little, over a period of months, I think it make the process easier.