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What happens when you cut out dessert?

Posted by Pascal Landshoeft

Aug 14, 2017 3:00:00 PM

What happens when you cut out dessert

Losing weight is hard. I personally did my biggest job at it by running a marathon and losing 15kg in half a year without changing my diet. Now I am at a stage in my life in which I want to become ripped. I have not achieved my goal yet and found got tips on the way there to break bad habits around eating which kept me from this goal. Here is what worked for me for you. Read on and comment.

Calorie Tracker

Sugar and Fat

Sugar and fat can be bad for you and we have all heard about it in some way. But is sugar really that bad? Well here is some food for thought for you:

If it is hard for you to completely cut out sugar a good start is to switch from processed food and the sugar in there to natural foods. Bananas and apples are a great example. Still full of carbohydrates in form of fructose, but at least they are natural (let’s not go into the details on how they are grown, pesticides and growth enhancing plant drugs and genetic manipulation of trees…).

Cutting out sugar can be done. Ryan Andrews wrote an entire blog post about his time from 2010 to 2011 when he went without sugar. It all started with a 30-Day challenge based on him reading up about addiction and attachment in his research for Buddhism. He took some lessons for life from it and in his experience, he is better off with having a lot less sugar in his diet.

From his experience, he observed that sugar changed him and made him act in a different way. He did not like how it changed him losing energy, feeling bloated and tanked every time he consumed sugar.

You always have the choice whether you go for that dessert, chocolate bar or piece of toast with jam or Nutella. Compared to making a marriage work, paying for your mortgage, getting over your parents dying and being a aren’t these are easy things. If you could do that and compare it to cutting back or even entirely cutting it out it becomes easy. In the context of my website one snickers more actually mean a hell lot of more exercise you should do.

At the core of changing and cutting out dessert is to realise that having something every day, once a week or three times a week is a habit. On top of that, you can read as many articles as you possibly can find on the internet and realise the fact that most of the processed desserts you can get at the supermarket like chocolate, ice cream, cupcakes, cinnamon buns and jelly are mostly highly processed and high in sugar.

As these are omnipresent at checkouts, advertisement, airports and wherever you find advertisement a superficial motivation for cutting them out will lead to superficial results. If you cut out sugar just to look good it is very unlikely you will succeed long term. Find a deeper meaning to why you are cutting or reducing sugar.

Ryan’s results are very interesting. He managed to recalibrate his taste buds to be more sensitive to sugar (which I personally find very exciting), lose weight and reduced his inner conflicts significantly. All points which result in a happier, more healthy and stressful live. The starting point for him was to not think about sugar reduction as denial but to achieve his goal of being more spiritual.

Another positive resume of quitting Alcohol and sweets comes from Rozalyn S. Driver who went cold turkey for 40 days. For you to note is that she also outlines that it is way easier for her to give up anything when religious factors are involved during lent, same as with Ryan. Try to work on a spiritual connection to your diet goals to make you more likely to succeed. In addition, she also expresses that the all or nothing approach seems to work better than allowing you some sweets.

She digs more into the social aspect of quitting and how this creates friction with your friends when you are saying no to alcohol and sweets. For her, it seems to be more socially acceptable to say no to cupcakes than to drink. I have observed the same. I fake drink in your hand which just pretends to have alcohol in it goes a long way to make your friends easier. It also relieves you from having to defend yourself why you are not drinking. In the age of social media, people are probably afraid that there is a sober person around when they are loosening up. From my own experience, I can only second these two points.

When I was a young adult and had my car I often went on my own to the Netherlands as I lived close to the German/Dutch border. I went by myself because most of my friends did not speak Dutch and I also preferred the Dutch attitude towards having a good time (and I am not talking drugs here…). Being by myself and not drinking because I was not drinking usually brought me into a position where I felt like I had to defend myself and being perceived as a creep. The fact that my Dutch was good and I was no stranger to making a fool of myself on the dancefloor helped here.

On a trip to Rio, I also felt what peer pressure means by my fiancée. I wanted to stick to my intermittent fasting regime and only have a bulletproof coffee for breakfast but she urged me to join in as it was delicious. I said no. She asked three more times and even our kids told her to back off and leave me alone. In the end, I caved in because I did not want to have a fight and talk about respecting a no from your future husband from time to time. In her defence, we had been through some rough times with my stepfather changing the locks to my house without telling me, work challenges and bureaucracy around our wedding and she just wanted me to enjoy my time in Rio. I did in the end and it was a great trip. But that day showed me that peer pressure is real and you should be prepared for it when you want to cut out desserts and alcohol.

How to consume less of it

Skipping meals and food groups is a very effective way of cutting unwanted calories out of your diet. Some of the most impactful candidates to avoid are:

  • Desserts
  • Sugary Drinks
  • Ketchup

Desserts are highly satisfying because they tend to have a lot of sugar in them. This is either achieved by adding processed sugar or fruit. The banana split is basically a combination of all kinds of natural and unnatural sugars which you could possibly get in one dish. Therefore, it is so great. You get a dopamine kick which your brain craves. The bad news is that the nutritional worth of this and other dessert dishes is not very high. So high pleasure but the low impact to fuel your engine overall.

Sugary Drinks are another obvious choice to cut out which you probably heard of. To put some numbers on it. The average 12-oz. serving of soda or sugary juice beverage contains 10 to 12 tsp. of sugar, totalling about 150 calories. Multiply that by how many glasses a day you drink and it quickly adds up.

Ketchup is another processed hidden sugar bomb which you can cut out. If the food is not tasty enough by itself, why squirt ketchup on it to make it bearable? My teenage son is in that habit and he wants to get lean and muscly. I always look at it and think “Why????”. I bite my tongue though as it is not worth the argument.

Another strategy is to swap certain foods for alternatives which work well for me.

Pasta sauce is a processed food which is often consumed in many households as it is a fast food and come on, who does not like Spaghetti with meatballs and pasta sauce. You can make you own pasta sauce instead which is healthier than what you get from the shelves of most supermarkets.

Replace flavoured yoghurt with 0% non-flavoured alternatives. I used to love Muller corners with chocolate balls inside them because they were so tasty. Guess what, because they taste so good there is loads of sugar in them. I swapped them for 0% Fage yoghurt, a teaspoon of honey and a tablespoon of blueberries and strawberries.

Swap salad dressing with self-made oils.  This is easy and fun and healthy to do. Buy a bottle which you can close again. In addition, get some sundried tomatoes, rosemary and olive oil. Put everything into the bottle and let it sit for two days. Done, you have a nice salad dressing that goes nicely with any Mediterranean salad you will make instead of buying one with sugars in it off the shelf.

On top of that band the food from your life you crave the most.

For me, there were three culprits which undermined my efforts to get leaner and this is how I eliminated them.

Chocolate bars are for free at the place I work and situated upstairs next to where the food is given out. I had a bad habit of whenever I got an email which displeased me (and there were a lot of them as of late, but this a topic to be discussed another day) to go upstairs to decompress and have two Kinder Buenos and two Pick up bars. That is a whopping 400 calories of processed sugar each day. Maybe even more than once.

The first step was to realise that I had so many a day. That was easy as my fiancée usually found them in my pockets in the washing and gave out to me that I did not take them out. So, I had the knowledge that I ate many of them but did not action to cut down on them.

Once my desire to become financially independent in the fitness industry manifested I realised that having a six pack helps a lot towards that goal. You do not necessarily need it, but it makes achieving this goal so much easier as pictures work better than long blog posts like this one. So, I had what Ryan covered with his desire.

Next step was to analyse the trigger event for the consumption of the bars. Once I was a bit more conscious about how much I consumed, how it impacted me and kept me from reaching my goal I identified work as the main source of stress for these sugar cravings.

Now, instead of going to the sugar fountain, I get a cup of bulletproof tea or a new water bottle instead to calm myself down. Problem solved.

Nutella is my absolute favourite food besides bacon. There are even recipes for covering bacon in Nutella. This got so bad that I was eating entire jars of Nutella by myself in a day. 500g of Nutella are 2730 calories which are my entire day’s allowance. The problem was solved by just not buying it anymore. Fortunately, the cravings are not that bad that I got into my car just to get one jar of Nutella.

Jam toast with butter was the last enemy on the list which replaced the Nutella toasts. These are my current experiment with willpower and getting better at saying no. I started meditating in the mornings and the bread is directly beside the fridge. Whenever I want it I say “Cancel, cancel” to myself and leave it. I swapped the toast habit with yoghurt with berries and honey.

The last point is to keep track of your intake. MyFitnessPal is a great app which is for free that can do just that for you and is easy to use.

Have a reward system

Once you hit your goals it is good to reward yourself with something that is non-food related. Maybe an hour on the PlayStation. A new book that you always wanted. A cake for the kids to make them happy (although that would be a bit sinister wouldn’t it?)

Have a punishment system

Burpees are good. Remember that jar of Nutella I mentioned. This translates to doing three hours of burpees to get that out of your system. Yes, you are reading correctly. Half an hour of burpees burns about 240 to 355 calories.

30 Day tracker

At the end of this post, you will find a tracker to print out and put on your fridge to track whether you looked your food for the day into MyFitnessPal or not. Doing this will provide you with great insight into how you consume food and what it means for your body. With that data, you can consider what might keep you from reaching your goals.

Conclusion

Cutting out dessert and sugar will enhance your life as you will be less prone to obesity, cancer and get better at managing your impulses (which keeps people out of prison, drug-free and employed, all good things overall). For me, it was applying all the principles above to have a better life and lose three kilogrammes in a month without feeling famished and in denial. I still have desserts from time to time but now I am in much more control especially as I cut out the toast and chocolate bars and introduced intermittent fasting to my diet.

Further reading

 

Topics: Food & Diet