5 EZ Ways to Instantly Reduce Your Sugar Intake
It's no secret that folks with Type II Diabetes need to control their blood glucose levels. One way to do that is to reduce your sugar intake. Here are some easy ways to immediately do so (I thank my health care providers with pointing out some of these sugary items to me):
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Switch from regular soda to diet soda. There are about 50 grams of sugar in a 12-ounce can of regular soda, but usually less than 1 gram of sugar in a diet soda. So switching from regular to diet soda will immediately greatly reduce your sugar intake. You may need to try several diet sodas to find one you like. My favorite is Minute Maid Light Lemonade, containing 5 calories and 0 grams of sugar per can. Follow this link for an explanation of "how much is a gram?".
Reduce your fruit juice intake. Similar to soda, many fruit juices contain 50 grams of sugar or more per serving. And that's a huge amount of sugar over the course of a month (see this link for a fruit juice example of "how much is a gram?"). My current juice drink of choice is the 10-oz. bottle of Tropicana Orange Juice, and I drink about a third of a bottle per day.
- Buy single servings. If you're like me, the first items that get eaten at home after grocery shopping are every sugary food snack I've bought. If I bought a bag of cookies and a box of snack cakes, those two items would be gone within about an hour of arriving back home.
Here's a brief story about cookies: one of my favorite kind of cookie is Lofthouse Frosted Sugar Cookies. They are delicious and they come in packages of 10. I could easily go through an entire package in about 15 or 20 minutes. One day after I started to become more aware of my caloric intake and calorie burning through exercise, I was wondering about the number of calories per cookie I was eating. I thought to myself: "Wow; these are so good; I'll bet each cookie has as much as 50 calories!". So I took a look at the nutritional information. I was wrong. Each cookie was not 50 calories. Each cookie contained a whopping 180 calories! That means eating a package of 10 cookies in 20 minutes added up to 1800 calories, almost the daily recommended quota of calories. And, since I knew I was burning about 400 calories per hour of exerbent exercising, therefore 20 minutes of enjoying a package of these cookies added up to 4-5 hours of exercising. Yikes again. Now I don't buy these and other sugary treats by the package any more.
When you feel you must have a sugary snack, limit yourself to buying just a single serving (and just buy one!). I've found that any sugary treats are in the house, they'll get eaten quickly, but if there aren't any around I don't really miss them and it's too much of a hassle to go out and buy something again.
Lofthouse and other brands of sugary treats would do well to think about offering their product in smaller single-serving sizes.
Eat snacks that require some preparation time. It's just way too easy to buy a snack that only requires opening the package to eat it. But if you can find a snack idea that requires you to put some effort into making it, you'll benefit because you'll eat them less often. A great example of this is the offering of sugar-free, fat-free instant pudding from Jello. These are delicious, low on calories, and sugar free. What I like about these is that you need to prepare them, then put them in the fridge and wait at least about 15 minutes to eat them--nice anticipation of deliciousness to come. And occasionally I forget that I even made a bowl and I get a nice surprise next time I open the fridge! I'll leave it as an exercise for the reader to decide how many servings each package actually makes. Just remember that "sugar-free, fat-free" does not also mean "calorie-free".
- Look for sugar-free products in your grocery store. Food manufacturers are now more frequently putting out healthier products and they often sit side-by-side with their other products on the shelves. I love having french toast made with whole wheat bread and topped with sugar-free Log Cabin or Mrs. Butterworth syrup. Yum.