We all know the feeling: that strong desire of something sweet hitting you mid-afternoon after a stressing day at work or at home or, that make you wake up at night and run to the refrigerator looking for a cookie, ice-cream or even a glass of milk... You didn't invent it. It is real in your mind and in your physical body... it is called an addiction...
The sugar addiction begins at birth. Human breast milk is very sweet, so even infants begin to recognize the pleasurable feeling they get from sweet foods. But once the body has experienced sugar's sweet rewards, it does not take much time for it to be officially addicted. Now what is the cause of it? After eating something sugary, the brain releases natural chemicals called opioids (doesn't ring any bell?), which give the body a feeling of pleasure. The brain then recognizes this feeling and begins to crave more of it. Researchers have identified that there are certain areas in the brain (specifically, the hippocampus, the insula and the caudate) that are activated when one craves sugar. There is also scientific evidence that shows that these same areas of the brain are activated when drug addicts crave drugs; which proves how "real" a sugar addiction can be. But what actually happens in your body when you consume sugar?
After sugar enters the bloodstream, blood sugar levels rise, causing the pancreas to release insulin that is needed to convert sugar into energy... The insulin converts the sugar into an instant energy source , which explains the jolt you get from a donut or a chocolate bar. After high levels of insulin are released, blood sugar levels begin to decrease rapidly, resulting in the "crash" you feel shortly after eating food containing high level of sugar,Insulin also stimulate the storage of fat when not too much energy is going to be used immediately afterward. Therefore if you eat a lot of sugar and you don't exercise immediately after... you are on the right path to gain weight... and will be fat and not the valuable muscle!,Sugar has also been linked to several "diseases, including increased mood swings, depressed immune system and diabetes.
Recent studies show that the opioids stimulated in your brain by sugar are similar to the chemicals stimulated by the use of heroin and morphine... scary enough? The same studies show that sugar also activates areas in the brain that reinforce behaviors. This means that, like heroin addiction, your body very soon learns to want more of the substance that makes it feel good and make you feel a real "need" of it. To prove this... , is it enough to say that brain scans performed on human subjects showed that the sight of ice cream in normal patients generated the same feelings of pleasure in the brain as images of crack pipes did for crack addicts? Again... very scary.
Now consider that the average American consumes around 160 pounds of sugar each year. This is no surprise when you consider that sugar is in everything from ketchup to salad dressing and canned soup to deli meat Sugar can be incorporated into many products under many aliases. Common names for sugar can include sucrose, fructose, dextrose, and high-fructose corn syrup, none of which actually sound like the word "sugar," but essentially mean the same thing.Nowadays there is an ongoing campaign against high fructose corn syrup, but if you substitute it with fructose of dextrose, you will have the same result... Better to read the whole label before trusting the words"No high-fructose corn syrup"put in evidence in a lot of products. Even if you have only one can of regular (non-diet) soda(not the King size), you are consuming nearly 10 teaspoons of sugar, which is, about, the maximum recommended daily allowance.Sugar does not give your body anything but a quick boost of energy and a lot of consequences.
Finally a good news: your body needs only 72 hours to get read of the addiction (as most of drugs)... So, when you start dieting seriously, you can expect the first 3 days to be really though, because your body will fight to maintain its sense of pleasure but after that... is mostly mental!
Chiara Vagnone Meretta has been a professional rider and horse riding instructor for more than twenty years in Italy. For her profession she has researched lot ofl "alternative ways" to maintain an athlete's body in the best condition to keep on performing using natural methods and avoiding drugs.
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