Sugar Baby – Part 3

It’s just cool to think that we got beamed down from “somewhere” to experience such earthly abundance. An abundance of experiences, loves, hates, playthings and … sweets. If you have been reading the other “Sugar Baby” blogs you’ve probably made some decisions about those sugars and sweeteners brought to you through the marvels of modern chemistry. Unlike the sweeteners in Sugar Baby –Part 2, these sweeteners weren’t created by chemistry geeks wearing lab coats… we’ve left the Frankensugars behind. So this blog takes a look at natural sweeteners.

Will Work for Sugar

As a kid, my sweet tooth was so strong that I’d ride across town to my grandparent’s house to score some cookies (I was a dental mess). Along with her "All American" chocolate chip cookies, there were always her Armenian specialties of Paklava (or Baklava as the Greeks say) and butter cookies, both sweet and without sugar (she served the latter with spoonfuls of honey over it). Most of the time there was a half eaten apple or berry pie around too.

Before she would let me indulge, I’d have to work in the garden, filling the apple basket and collecting eggs from her chickens or berries and vegetables from her garden. She had plenty of honeybees as well, but they terrified me. She was my first teacher about the abundance and generosity of natural foods and also the memorable, addictive sugar spikes of refined sugars. Sugar is irresistible to 4 ft. tall humans, and just as juicy to 6 ft. ones.

Stealth Naturals 

With the exception of stevia, (stevia doesn’t elevate blood glucose levels) all of these natural sweeteners can lift you up, send you flying and then crash you down just like the old Paramount Park Stealth Rollercoaster. These sweeteners have calories… you know what that means. If you don’t burn them off, you'll add them as fat and end up looking like a stand-in extra for "Big Momma". One more thing, even though the “crash and fat” warnings should be enough – Sugars can weaken your adrenals, which compromises your ability to deal with stress. Stress leads to illness.

Dehydrated cane-juice crystals

These are the easiest substitute for replacing white sugar, and you know, if it looks like a dog and barks like a dog… Anyway, the crystals are made by evaporating water from sugarcane juice. This is sold under the name sucanat. Sucanat is not processed like white sugar so it still contains nutrients found in the sugarcane. Don’t be mislead, sucanat is not commercial “brown sugar”.

Sugarcane is a crop that isn’t sweet on the environment; it’s hard on ecosystems and biodiversity. Buy organic or Fair Trade certified sucanat.

Blackstrap Molasses

This sweetener is what is left after crystals of sugar are removed from sugarcane or beet juice, and it’s about 65% sucrose. Blackstrap molasses contains calcium and iron and other minerals, providing nutritional value. Sorghum molasses and Barbados molasses are less nutritious than Blackstrap.

Barley Malt, Rice Amasake, Rice Syrup and Sorghum Syrup

These sweeteners are made by fermenting grains. They contain both simple and complex sugars as well as some complex carbohydrates so they are absorbed slowly into your bloodstream. They also contain nutrients (approximately half) from the original grains.

Date Sugar

Like the previous sweeteners, you can figure out the source from the name. This sugar is made from pulverized dried dates. One tablespoon of date sugar is counted as one fruit exchange in the diabetic exchange system. It contains fiber and minerals from the original fruit.

Maple Syrup

This great tasting stuff is simply tree sap. There are lots of minerals in this one including potassium and calcium. It takes 10 gallons of maple sap to make 1 gallon of maple syrup. Make sure you are choosing REAL maple syrup. Under the ingredients it should say 100% pure maple syrup, not corn syrup or anything else. Making sure it is organic is important because some companies use formaldehyde to prolong sap flow. Vermont has stringent quality control for the production of maple syrup. Always check the label.

Honey

Honey is just as sweet as refined sugar and gets absorbed into the bloodstream quickly. If you want nutritional value from this sweetener, choose raw honey. Raw honey contains the vitamins, minerals, enzymes and pollen that are destroyed when honey is processed. Raw honey, particularly from local sources, may help with hay fever and allergies by building your natural immunity. My suggestion: don’t eat processed honey.

Agave

Agave Nectar is a liquid sweetener that comes from the sap of the agave plant. It’s the maple syrup of the south. Agave is heated and processed to create the light or amber liquids. I’ve read that the amount of iron, calcium, potassium and magnesium create the color tone. Agave is sweeter than refined sugar, but doesn’t spike your insulin levels as refined sugar does, but it has just about the same calories as sugar.

Stevia

This is probably the least known sweetener around. You won’t find it on many labels. Stevia is a native of Paraguay and is now grown in many countries. It has been used for many centuries and by many cultures. Extensive scientific research has been done to prove its safety, but until recently, it had only been approved as a dietary supplement. Stevia packs a sweet wallop. It’s 150 to 400 times sweeter than sugar and has no calories. It has been proven to help regulate blood sugar levels. A little goes a long ways. You can find stevia as a liquid or in powdered form.

Staying Alkaline

We already know that processed sugar and chemical replacements for sugar are acid forming and that cancer and viruses love an acidic body. Ratings for the following natural sweeteners come from a book I highly recommend called Alkalize or Die by Dr. Theodore A. Baroody:

Alkaline Forming Sweeteners

Honey – Raw 

(from alfalfa, clover and eucalyptus, sourwood & tupelo varieties)

Sucanat

Dr. Bronners Barley malt sweetener

Brown rice sweetener

.............................................

Acid Forming Sweeteners

Barley malt syrup

Fructose

Honey – Processed and pasteurized

Maple syrup

Molasses

Turbinado sugar

Eat till you Pop

Culturally, we’re programmed to eat until we explode, just like the fat guy in Monty Python and the Meaning of Life. What you want to do is moderate your intake. 


Maybe because the Blue Agave plant also gives us tequila with memories of crazy dancing, I’m partial to it as a sweetener. Maple syrup reminds me of double stacks of pancakes and Sunday mornings, so I have trouble controlling my use... raw honey reminds me of stress free days at my grandmothers. 

Over time I’ve “Trained my Tongue” to be happy with less. If you ever had to stay off sugars for a long period of time –which is something one would do on a Candida elimination diet– when you finally get to eat an apple or grape, your taste buds just explode from the sweetness. 

Find a natural sweetener that works for you, it might not be the one that someone else likes. As you use less, you’ll want less. Or better yet, eat an apple. Having a dessert or an occasional indulgence can be part of diet planning. It’s actually better if it is planned. It keeps us from going on a total binge. Take the time to read labels, and stay conscious when you eat. The less processed your food is, the healthier you will be. Your body will love you for it, so will your abs... 

We don’t have to be saints to be healthy, just committed.

Supplements

To assist with sugar metabolism

Chromium picolinate, B-complex vitamins, calcium/magnesium

To help with sugar cravings

L-glutamine, royal jelly, bee pollen, gymnema sylvestra

To assist with fat burning

L-carnitine

To balance adrenal stress caused by sugar

Licorice root, Siberian Ginseng, Vitamin C and Bioflavanoids

Train your Body, Train your Mind, Tame your Tongue.

Information on this site is not a substitute for consulting a licensed medical professional.  You should never begin an exercise routine without consulting your physician. 

Comfort Food

Familiar and dependable foods that pretend to make life ok

Food.
My family was all about food. Shopping for it, cooking it, eating it and before any meal was finished, talking about what we’d have for the next meal. Whew.

“Gher” was my father’s favorite word at dinner… it means EAT in Armenian, and yes, I mean that with capital letters. It was usually uttered near the end of a meal when everyone was already full. My ears received “Gher” somewhere between a request and a demand. I was a fat kid.  (Photo:  Me in the 8th grade)

None of us had any idea what the food did to our bodies. Meat, bread, butter, vegetables, cookies… for all the understanding we had they could have all been put into a blender together. Except for the cookies. I always had some hidden in my t-shirt drawer, no blender for them.

Numb and Dumber

Somehow in this mix of “blenderized” foods I picked out the ones that gave me the most comfort and made them my favorites. In case you wanted a description of comfort foods, they’re the ones that numb you to the world and do it by-passing your brain’s satisfaction center finally landing in some dumb spot in your body. You know the place – it doesn’t have an “off” switch. Sometimes comfort foods put you to sleep too, just like potatoes and gravy at Thanksgiving, another numb-you-dumb.

My first experience with changing eating habits was at 18, my freshman year in college. I wanted to row with my University crew team and had to drop 12 pounds. Intuitively I knew that the foods I loved the most I’d have to give up. But I wanted to crew more than eating those Oreos, so I left them along with my big bag of chips with other guys in the dorm.

Otis Redding had just released “Sitting on the dock of the Bay” and since we were rowing on the San Francisco Bay, I made it my theme song. I talked to the food service director who took a liking to me and she came up with some low calorie meals (Jello was the linch-pin to her planning – go figure, what did I know?). I got up and ran the foothills before class every morning, and after classes in the afternoon we sprinted laps up and down the stadium stairs. Plus, we rowed an hour every other day. I got into really good shape, I actually got abs, my self-confidence changed and I got to row. We won our first time out and I thought that I’d died and gone to heaven. But I still didn’t know much in the way of how food really works. I just knew that some foods were only supposed to be sidebars on my eating list. (Photo, Stanford University freshman crew 1968, that's me, fourth back on the right side)

Hot Stuff

Later on in my college career I got to study in Germany for six months. The first three of which I forgot everything about food and lived on what seemed like a Bavarian sugar and carb fest. My body was run down and I ended up with Scarlet Fever. I discovered what I had while in Rome, after trying to escape the fever by laying down on the Sistine Chapel floor to cool off. The guards weren’t happy about me doing that and kicked me out, but it had turned out to be a great place to look at the ceiling. My skin peeled off in big sheets from the heat of the fever, I lost half of my hair and my eyes couldn’t focus to read more than two lines of text at a time, my muscle tone was gone along with my abs. The doctor was concerned that I’d have heart and other organ problems… from all that internal cooking going on. It was a pretty low spot. On top of it all, I ended up quarantined with my two best friends and my German teacher. Now, they weren’t happy.

After recovering and returning to the states I worked myself back to health. My eyes were goofy for quite a while (I re-trained them using a prism) but the worst was my thin hair and now delicate skin. Everything made it break out in a rash, similar to psoriasis. I had a vanity attack. When an allergy test showed that I was allergic to almost all of my art supplies I knew that was not going to fly. I’d have to do a healing that my doctor couldn’t help me with. Getting back to exercising and returning (most of the time) to a healthier version of my freshman eating patterns helped me feel and look better. I moved off campus and got a place for free as a live-in pool boy. I swam every day and biked to school, my diet was pretty simple most of the time. Once again my body started to change and become more healthy. It took at least six years for the outward symptoms to disappear. I still didn’t know much more about how food really worked, I just knew that if I kept working at it, I’d learn. Meanwhile, whenever I felt sad, scared or rejected, I’d head right back to those comfort foods.

All these years later, I get to guide clients on food as part of their training program. I’m still learning. I don’t crave some foods at all any more, and some foods are still real challenges. It takes time to understand food and then to accept and live by really healthy eating habits. If you have someone to help coach you through a progressive diet change, you’re lucky. If you don't, the information and support available now is amazing. The key to modifying our relationship to comfort food is through our commitment to making a change. Sometimes it has to be motivated by an outside source or goal, like getting on the crew team or addressing a major health issue like it was for me.

Everything Changes

Changing any part of our life ­­– whether it is changing our body, changing a relationship, changing our understanding of something specific to our life (like food), or really committing to something you want – changes our relationship to every other part of our life. We just can’t be the same. Like wearing a new pair of glasses, our vision suddenly becomes crystal clear. That’s one reason we re-bound to comfort foods, they’re dependable. They're from the past and they're familiar and unchanging. Leaving comfort foods behind, especially sugary comfort foods, is as tough and emotional as the final scene in “Where the Wild Things Are” where Max leaves Carol on the shore and sails off alone.

So if you want to start planning for a change, train your mind. Learn everything you can about what you put in your mouth. Develop an exercise program and stick to it. Mind, mouth, body. Connect the dots and you win.

Be proactive. Make only one change in your food habits at a time. Be fearless with your changes. Take the time to enjoy life, laugh and be with your family and friends. I invite you to share your comfort food stories with me – not keeping them a secret is the first step to letting them go.

Train your Body. Train your Mind. Tame your Tongue.
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Information on this site is not a substitute for consulting a licensed medial professional. You should never begin an exercise or nutritional regime without consulting your physician.