How to Cut All Sugars Out of Your Diet to Lose Weight

People struggling with weight loss may feel that moderate changes are not giving them the positive results they are seeking. If cutting back on calories and exercising a few times a week is not helping you lose weight quickly enough, you may want to consider reducing the amount of sugar in your diet.

Things You'll Need

• Food journal

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Instructions

Evaluate Your Diet and Determine Where You Can Reduce Sugars

• 1

  Evaluate your current eating habits. Many people underestimate the amount of sugar they eat on a regular basis. One good way to get an honest view of your sugar intake is to keep a food journal for about a week. Write down everything you eat, and you will realize that the sugar you eat is much more than the sugar you add to foods, such as your morning coffee. There is sugar in many foods you may not suspect, such as ketchup. Read labels and include it in your food journal to give you a better idea of the amount of sugars you are eating every day.

• 2

  Cut back on refined or "simple" carbohydrates. Now that you know how much sugar you are eating, cut back on the simple sugars. This means no candy, white bread or pasta, cookies, cake, or ice cream. Many of these foods have absolutely no nutritional value and will only set you up for a sugar crash later. If you eliminate these from your diet, your body will regulate, and you will eventually stop craving them altogether.

• 3

  Reduce your intake of complex sugars. Now here is the hard part: There are sugars in some foods, such as fruit, that are better for you than those in a candy bar, but they are still sugars. And some fruits have more sugar than others. For example, watermelon has a lot of sugar in it, but apples have less. Bananas also have a lot of sugar in them compared with other fruits. Get familiar with the sugar level of fruits and vegetables, and cut back on those with a high level of sugar. This will also help reduce sugar cravings.

• 4

  Create a new eating plan based on removing all of these sugars from your diet. Now that you are familiar with a no-sugar way of eating, you should make sure your foods do not include any unexpected sugars. This new plan will help you lose weight because most sugary foods provide little to no nutritional value at a high calorie cost. When you make room in your diet for other foods, you will find that you will be full with fewer calories.