So you're trying to figure out what to do to lose weight and improve your health. Hopefully, you read my post "Diet as a Noun not a Verb" explaining the proper mindset of approaching your start to a diet that will continue to evolve as you improve your health, step by step.

For me, the first and most important part of my successful transition was to eliminate adding sugar to foods in my daily diet. I did not start my change in diet by eliminating everything I normally eat and changing to all healthy foods. By starting with baby steps, eliminating adding sugar, I effectively made a huge positive change to most of the foods I was consuming. In time, my palate changed and I no longer craved sugar. This was a big step because it helped in my start to gradually eliminate the unhealthy foods, one by one.

One night, a few years after my start, I was out to eat with my two young son's after a baseball game. I had ordered an unsweetened iced tea and the waitress brought me an iced tea loaded with sugar. A few years earlier, I would have drank it and loved every sip. Now, I took one sip and I was spitting it out, I couldn't stand it!

Just about every food out there that the majority of people eat has sugar in its ingredients already. Take a look at the chart below and you will get a pretty good idea of where you will want to go with the next step of your evolving daily permanent diet plan once you have eliminated adding sugar to your foods.

Rank Food group Proportion of average intake

1 Soda/energy/sports drinks 42.2%

2 Grain-based desserts 11.9%

3 Fruit drinks 8.5%

4 Dairy desserts 5.5%

5 Candy 5.0%

6 Ready-to-eat cereals 2.9%

7 Sugars/honey 4.1%

8 Tea 3.8%

9 Yeast breads 2.3%

10 Syrups/toppings 1.4%

Source: CDC, National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey

Some experts think that sugar might be as addictive as Cocaine. Eating sugar releases opioids and dopamine in our bodies. This is what makes added sugar lead to addictive behavior. Sugar releases Dopamine which makes you feel a pleasurable “high”. As you repeat sugar intake more and more, your brain adjusts to release less dopamine. The only way to feel the same “high” as before is to repeat the behavior in increasing amounts and frequency. This is known as substance misuse.

Eliminate sugar from your diet and you will improve the odds that health problems won't straddle you as you age. Large amounts of sugar intake increase the chances of volatile glucose levels, obesity, diabetes, heart disease, age acceleration, tooth decay, gum disease, and stress. With the exception of heart disease and gum disease, I have experienced all of the above. If I didn't start to take action when I did, there is no doubt, eventually, I would have experienced heart & gum problems.

The number one subtraction I made was sugar in my coffee. From the time I started drinking coffee, I am not quite sure when that was, but I would add two to three teaspoons of sugar to each cup. As an example of the information stated above points out, I started to drink a second and eventually a third cup of coffee with the same added sugar to satisfy my fix. My palate screamed for more and more sugar.

I began to drink my coffee black and gradually started to enjoy the real taste of the coffee. As the years have gone on, I have started to add raw honey to my morning coffee after reading about the benefits of raw honey, which I will cover in a future post on its own. It's important to note, my processed sugar intake has been drastically lowered and I chose to add only raw honey due to its many benefits to improved health. Most of my sugar intake is from the natural sugars in fruit & honey, not processed. Processed sugar is in most of the foods most people eat. I have gradually eliminated most of these foods over the years.

Eliminating the sugar bowl from the dining room table was the start of my transformation that started in my 40's. The difference in my health from then to now is truly amazing and proves that it's never too late to start your transition. Do it slowly, one step at a time, and you can achieve the same results!

In my future posts, I will continue to explain and show you what I have done to continue to improve my diet, fitness, and lifestyle that continues into my 7th decade.

I Feel Great and you should too!

Please comment below if this content helps you. I am very interested in your feedback.

I will add new content that I hope to post each Monday morning.

Thank you!