The reasons for switching to a sugar free diet for most people are related to weight loss or diabetes. People who are aiming to lose weight or gain control of their blood sugar often assume that all they need to do is cut down on sweet foods, and all will be well. However, very few of these people are really aware of the quantity of sugars our normal everyday food consumption actually contains.

Cut out the sweets

Because most of us totally underestimate the amount of sugars we consume, changing to a sugar free diet is a lot less simple than we might suppose. In the first place, it is not only candy, cookies and ice cream that contain sugars, but soft drinks, bread, ketchup, even savory snacks and chips. This means that, in order to cut out sugar, we actually have to make a complete change to the way we approach food.

In the first place, in order to follow a sugar free diet plan, we need to stop focussing on sugars, and focus instead on:

Carbohydrates

• Energy-producing elements of the food we eat. The fact is that all carbohydrates when they enter our bloodstream break down into sugars, although complex carbohydrates break down more slowly than simple ones. When you look at the label on a food product, it might say that it contains a certain percentage of carbohydrates, of which a smaller percentage is sugar. This only means that the smaller percentage is simple sugar, and the rest is sugar in a more complex form.
• Following a sugar free diet involves a lot more than just cutting out cookies and candy. It means cutting out any food that contains a high proportion of carbohydrates, and this includes white flour and semolina, which are contained in the vast majority of pizza bases.
• Look at the ingredients of products you buy, you will find that sugar is not always referred to as sugar. If you see sucrose, fructose, beet, maple, or cane juice, you will know that sugars are involved. One suggestion if you are uncertain is to increase the overall proportion of vegetables in your diet, and this way you can be sure you are eating sugar free diet foods.

Fun with Jello

One popular way of losing weight is to pursue a sugar free Jello diet. Jello is a gelatin product used in many desserts and especially loved by children. Most varieties contain 80 calories per serving, but the majority of sugar free servings contain only 10 calories. There are actually some diets that claim to enable you to lose 20 pounds in only 20 days by eating nothing but Jello. Even if this worked, it would be very bad for you because it would be nutritionally unbalanced. A safer method is to substitute Jello for desserts and chips, and all of your daily snacks, but make sure you get good nutrition in the rest of what you eat, including plenty of fruit and vegetables.

Even without Jello, it is not too difficult to incorporate a sugar free diet menu into your daily eating plan. For instance one day you could have an omelet muffin for breakfast, a Greek salad for lunch, with a no-sugar yogurt for an afternoon snack. Dinner could be chicken breast in a sauce of mustard and rosemary, accompanied by steamed brown rice and spinach salad in a vinaigrette dressing. There are plenty of other menus that are equally delicious and could help you vary your food every day, while still keeping to a sugar free diet.

Create an eating plan and stick to it!

If you want to keep your family on a healthy eating plan, you will want to look for sugar free diet recipes that everyone including the children will eat. This means not only recipes for desserts, but for savory meals as well, to eliminate all the hidden sugars that usually lurk in normal meals. For instance, you can try a great recipe for restaurant style buffalo chicken wings, which is prepared in 15 minutes. The children will love it, and they will not even realize it is part of a sugar free diet.

It is well known that the USA is facing an obesity time bomb. There is no escaping the fact that the main contributor to the escalating health problems resulting from excess weight is the sugar in the foods we eat. Switching to a sugar free diet is not easy, but it will not only help towards weight loss, but bring about a more healthy and active lifestyle and much greater enjoyment of life.