Ask Marilyn: How to avoid sweets?
Q: How can I stay away from sweets when I have a really big sweet tooth? I’m finding it really hard.
A: The reason you have a sugar addiction in the first place is because you eat too much sugar. When you eat sugar your body tends to overproduce insulin. This excess insulin causes your blood sugar to drop. Your body then craves more sugar in order to raise your blood sugar level back to normal. You find yourself caught in a vicious circle.
The only way out of this never-ending sugar addiction roller coaster is to break the cycle – that means eliminating sugar from your diet, or at least cutting down on it dramatically. The less you eat, the less you will crave.
Now as you said, it’s not all that easy. The first steps are to eliminate foods containing sugar from your diet, anything with an –ose on the end of the word is a sugar e.g. sucrose, dextrose, maltose, so read the ingredient list carefully. There can be sugar in savoury foods such as tomato ketchup and baked beans.
At the same time, make sure that you eat little and often, not leaving more than three hours without eating as this will stop the roller coaster of blood sugar and reduce the cravings. In order to help your body while you get your blood sugar under control add in a chromium supplement as this mineral is needed for the metabolism of sugar. Avoid chromium in the form of picolinate as this is a synthetic form of chromium and has been linked to DNA damage, liver dysfunction, skin blisters and anaemia (see my book ‘Fat around the Middle’). Chromium polynicotinate is fine.