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Sugar –- The Hidden Enemy!

By John Kent

Limiting your sugar consumption is not only important for diabetics and for your teeth, it’s also important for individuals who are trying to lose weight.

Refined sugar contains no fiber, no minerals, no protein, no fats, no enzymes. Just empty calories.

Eating sugar causes a sudden rush of insulin into the bloodstream which in turn inhibits the body’s ability to release fat and be burned for fuel and may even lead to fat storage. Obviously, this effect will put a serious halt to your weight loss (read "fat" loss) goals. Even individuals who are not concerned with weight loss should seriously consider some of the other ill effects that sugar causes.

Because it is nutritionally incomplete, your body has to use other vital nutrients from healthy cells just to metabolize it. If left unchecked, this can cause your body to become highly or over-acidic. To compensate for this over-acidic state, our bodies try to use other nutrients from the body to balance itself out causing a host of diseases and problems.

If that’s not enough to halt your sweet-tooth, wait, there’s more. Many times, the body also uses calcium to neutralize the sugar and has to use so much of it that it leads to osteoporosis or even gallstones.

The average person can digest 2-4 teaspoons of sugar daily. How many teaspoons of sugar are you ingesting each day in your fruit juice, fat-free cookies, yogurt, sauces or marinades, fat-free ice cream, etc?

The news is not all bad though. If you can resist sugar for 72 hours, this will give your blood sugar level time to stabilize and those strong sugar cravings will go away with supportive meals.

You might be surprised at some of the ways sugar is hiding in the foods you eat. Sugar comes in many forms and in an ingredients list, it can be listed as a number of things. Obviously, if the ingredient has the word sugar in it, it’s a sugar, but you should also watch out for ingredients that end in the letters “ose”. These are all sugars: Sucrose, dextrose, fructose, galactose, glucose, lactose, levulose, maltose — the list goes on, but I think you get the idea.

Also watch out for the following ingredients: Carob power, corn syrup, dextrin, honey, maple syrup, milk chocolate, molasses, sweetened condensed milk, turbinado.

This is not even a complete listing, but I believe it does a good job of illustrating how easily sugar can be hidden in our diet.

Also one last point, if a product says “no sugar added”, it does not mean it is sugar-free. It just means that no “additional” sugar was added beyond that which was naturally occurring.

Curbing your sugar intake will massively affect your ability to lose weight and with just a little time, your cravings will go away too!

About the Author:

John Kent is a writer, speaker and owner of John Kent Fitness, Inc. located in Clearwater, FL. With his fitness expertise, as well as warm, friendly, and approachable character, John has become a captivating and much sought after speaker on the topics of nutrition and health.

He has contributed articles to various publications and has been featured on Bay News 9, Channel 10’s Life Around the Bay and in Tampa Bay’s Best Magazine where they named him “Tampa Bay’s Body Transformer”. He can be reached at or on the web at www.JohnKentFitness.com