Hi. My husband, children and I have been sugar free for about 2.5 months now. Everyone else seems to have lost weight. I however have put weight on, on the scales. My husband and children have lost weight on the scales and noticeable in clothing. I do not cheat. Why am I not loosing weigh? I am feeling quite down about it. Help.

 

[1] Have you followed David's advice on going Cold Turkey? For example have you removed everything tempting from the house?

[2] You will know that your appetite-control system is working when before you have finished your meal you have that feeling of satiety "just can't eat another mouthful".

[3] Try making a one or two week inventory of ALL your fructose intake. If necessary weigh you portions and calculate the amount of fructose. Keep it to under 1 gram per day. Especially look for sugar hidden in processed foods. As a rough guide half of the percentage of "sugars" may be regarded as fructose. Avoid anything with more than 2% "sugars" [5% for yoghurt].

[4] When you crave something sweet [whatever euphemism you use for that] try distracting yourself by moving away, checking your email, walking around the block - anything to change your focus for a few minutes. If it's anything like quitting smoking, and I suspect it's a lot like it, the craving only lasts less than 5 minutes.

[5] When you are experiencing craving try to identify the feeling, emotion, pictures, sounds etc associated with the desire to eat something sweet. Bringing these into awareness and just deciding to let go of them is often enough to dissolve the urge.

[6] Don't expect anyone else to have any magic solutions. YOU have to do it FOR yourself.

[7] If you are answering all these questions "correctly" it is possible that you have a genetic disposition to obesity [ see Fat Chance by Robert Lustig, or your gut flora may be out of kilter [ see The Diet Myth  by Tim proctor.

 

[8] Above all, DON'T give up . . the effort is VERY worthwhile :-) It's working for your family so it must work for you!

JohnN

Tracie Oliveri wrote:

OMG.. No wonder I'm not losing weight either. 1g per day! 

I've been at this for only 5 weeks.. I've been eating food that is less than 2g per 100g on the labels but probably more than 100g of it. So does that mean I can only have 100g of one thing for the whole day as it would equate to 1g of sugar? 

I'm thinking of quitting :-( I used to eat 4 bars of chocolate and a packet of lollies a day and I weighed less than what I do now!  I am so disheartened. 

My apologies . . . ten(10) grams per day. You can get that from 2 small pieces of fruit, totaling 200g in weight. When reading labels "sugars" generally means cane-sugar (sucrose) which is 50% fructose & 50% glucose. So 4% sugars means about 2% fructose.

David suggests that if you are following all the advice and still not losing [ or worse, gaining] weight, try going low-carb for a few weeks. There are lots of books and web-based advice on how to do that.

While 2% "sugars" is recommended as a good limit, yoghurt is OK ti 5% because 4.7% is milk-sugar which metabolises as glucose, not fructose. Just watch out for the "low-fat" yoghurts because when they remove the fat the flavour goes with it and they replace that with sugar and salt.

Even if you have some sort of genetic predisposition to obesity, cutting fructose from your diet will still help you to. avoid many nasty medical conditions.

JohnN

What's your BMI? maybe you are worrying needlessly.

BMI = weight (kg) divided by height (m) squared. e.g. I'm 74kg & 1.82m tall. So  my BMI is 22.3. Below 25 is OK 25-30 is overweight and over 30 is obese. If you already know all this, my apologies :-)

JohnN