As an Integrative Doctor, IQS graduate and mum of seven, I’m convinced the 8-Week Program is one of the BEST things you can do for your health!
From a personal perspective, when I ditched the sweet stuff one of the main improvements I noticed was in my mood. It’s amazing how much sugar can turn me (and many of my patients) into Jeckyll and Hyde thanks to swinging moods and rollercoaster blood sugar levels.
These swinging moods are partly because sugar activates the reward centres in your brain, giving you the warm fuzzies whenever you eat something sweet. Interestingly, this same feeling is also activated by drugs, social connection and sex – and leads to a lack of self-control and cravings. Essentially, we need more and more sugar to get the same “high”.
Knowing this, it’s no wonder sugar is so addictive – a fact food manufacturers take advantage of! They know that evolutionarily, us humans have been dealt a blow by having a strong urge to forage for anything sweet (which previously helped us stay alive). However, as we wise-up to the dangers of sugar, the food manufacturers have started to get sneaky too using more than 70 different names for sugar! Thankfully, organisations such as IQS have educated us about these dirty tactics.
What’s important for us all to understand is that sugar (namely fructose) doesn’t satisfy us, nor does it lower our hunger hormones as much as glucose does. It also reduces our brain’s ability to tell us to stop eating, leading us to gorge on the stuff and subsequently suffer from food guilt. In turn, this makes us even more likely to reach for the sweet stuff to make ourselves feel better, so it’s not your fault if you feel like wolfing down a whole pack of biscuits in one go!
Aside from turning you into an addict, there’s also evidence to show that eating sugar impairs your memory and puts you at risk of depression, strokes and dementia. And worse still, there are a bunch of scientific studies linking sugar to other diseases too including obesity, heart disease, liver diseases, type 2 diabetes and cancer.
While many of my patients feel that it’s inevitable they’ll get these diseases because it “runs in the family” – the truth is, only a small percentage of diseases are inherited. We have a lot more control over our health than we are led to believe by conventional medicine and in a sugar-free nutshell – the less sugar you eat the less your chance of disease. Yes, it’s really that simple!
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