Why Diets Fail (Because You're Addicted to Sugar) (31 page)

If you consume low-sugar-equivalency foods like meats, vegetables, poultry, and seafood, you’ll lessen your dependence on sugars. As a result, you’ll stop eating because you crave sugars and instead begin to eat based on true hunger, rational decision making, and occasionally pleasure. Your food choices will no longer be driven by the “need” or compulsion to consume certain foods, which may stem from an addiction. You’ll also find that you can consume as much sugar- or carb-free food as you like because you will only
want
to eat as much as you need to satisfy your hunger, not your addiction. The beauty of this approach is that it reduces complex nutritional information about individual foods down to one simple number. It’s not an exact science, but for people who are trying to monitor their sugar intake and lose weight, it can be extremely helpful. Can you imagine picking up each food item in a grocery store, looking at its nutrition label, and trying to do this calculation in order to arrive at an estimate of how much sugar and nonfibrous, nonsugar carbohydrates are contained in the food as a percentage of total weight? No way. It would be next to impossible. You shouldn’t need a calculator to go to the grocery store. So instead, all you need to do is refer to a table that summarizes all of that information into one number.

As this table demonstrates, you don’t need to memorize the sugar equivalency of every single food item in the world to be successful on this diet as long as you primarily consume food items that belong to groups of foods that have low sugar equivalencies and stay away from those that have high sugar equivalencies. There are some food groups, like fruits and vegetables, that are in the mid-range of sugar equivalency, but some may need to be examined more closely using the Sugar Equivalency Table.

Until you feel comfortable that you have a good idea of the relative sugar equivalency levels associated with these different food groups, you might want to copy down some of the items on this list and stick it in your wallet or purse. It can serve as a helpful reminder when you’re in the grocery store or out to eat at a restaurant.

SUGAR EQUIVALENCY TABLE

The following table provides a single number, or “sugar equivalence,” for common food and drink items. Sugar equivalency values do
not
take into account other factors that are also important when making food choices, such as the number of vitamins a food or drink offers. This table is meant as a guide to help you assess the relative sugar content in many popular foods, which may be useful when thinking about which foods to avoid.