Anonymous wrote:

Hi everyone my name is Victoria and I’m a U.K. based Yoga teacher. I quit alcohol 3 years ago and although I’m a healthy cook I feel it’s time to properly go sugar free so I joined this forum for inspiration. I absolutely love the Sweet Poison books and have read them. My start dates 1st of April for a detox month so am planning lots of greens and no sugar or bad carbs at all. Tips appreciated. For example is black coffee a good distraction? I’m actually not the sugarholic I used to be but bread and sweet potatoes are a thing. Also rice noodles. And sweets made from cacao and dried fruit are a weakness of mine then I crave more. Any tips for sugar pangs appreciated too. And home made pizza ideas?! Lots of love xxx

Hello "anonymous" Victoria :-) By the sound of things - your current healthy lifestyle and your obvious intelligence, including emotional intelligence - I don't think you're going to have much rouble eliminating fructose from your diet. You don't mention your current weight or BMI  so assuming you are not now overweight or obese, I guess you want to do so is for other health reasons. In any case, there are a few suggestions I can offer you in reply to your questions.

(1)  Most of your concerns about individual foods can be answered by looking at their fructose content  in "Sweet Poison Quit Plan". The aim is to restrict your daily intake of fructose to 10 grams. Creating a fructose intake diary for a week is a good way to discover where you are at and where to modify your diet to achieve this goal. You also find a lot of information in the Australian Government's food composition NUTTAB tables:   http://www.foodstandards.gov.au/science/monitoringnutrients/afcd/Pages/foodsearch.aspx

(2) Your sugar cravings should diminish over a fairly short time period - at most a few weeks. You can overcome many of them with artificial  sweeteners (but research their effects), &/or using double the amount of glucose to replace sucrose, e.g.in cooking. Stevia based sweeteners seem to be the least harmful.

(3) Try avoid processed foods as much as you can. And ensure that those you do eat contain no more than 2% of "sugars", which is roughly 1% of fructose. Yoghurt is an exception of which the safe limit is 7% since the first 4.7% are lactose based an metabolised as glucose.

(4) The two criteria which matter are (a) whether or not you feel full at the end of each meal - "couldn't eat another mouthful" and (b) Your weight is steady within a range of plus-or-minus a kilogram.

(5) Two other criteria which are useful are the waist-to-hip ratio which should be less than 1.0 and the actual waist measurement which should be less than 94 cm for men and 80 cm for women.

Let us know if this information is useful and what you progress is. And DON'T GIVE UP!