There are a lot of statistics in dietary behavioral studies and dietary reinforcement that are mostly uninteresting because, frankly, people omit details.
You can lose considerable weight at speeds that are actually not recommended simply by dropping added sugar from American diets. So much so that you would need to taper off this removal to stay around 2 pounds of weight loss a week instead of dropping this consumption pattern cold turkey.
The biggest difficulty in sourcing food materials or eating out is that we have sugar in everything. We have added sugar in things that in other countries you would have never added sugar into to begin with.
The reinforcement habit is directly tied to food reward, sugar consumption, and ghrelin production. Anyone who tells you otherwise is lying and is simply refuting what we have come to understand about food science over the years.
And frankly, we as a people have not yet completely matured out of the phase of producing or accepting low-fat foods being replaced with high sugar content. Plenty of other nations never had this problem at all, never inherited it, and as a result, don't have to grow out of it.
It is staggering how much of our food is incompatible with healthy weight homeostasis, and all of our common supermarkets absolutely work against you unless you are otherwise taught differently.
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Edit:
If you're baking bread for your family every day, even without added sugar, and you don't see the problem here, I don't know how anyone can help you.
I'm not calling you a liar. I said you were omitting details. You didn't mention that you're frequently eating carbs. Now you mention that you're baking, and presumably eating, bread every day.
I bake bread for my family every day because I can't get bread in Canada that has no sugar. I'm aware of how insidious sugar is.
You obviously deal with a lot of obesity that is caused by excessive sugar consumption. Your conclusion - and smuggled assumption - is that all obesity is caused by sugar. This is trivially refuted by finding obese people in non-high-sugar societies, or from a time period before sugar became ubiquitous.
Calling me a liar does not make your position stronger.
Response edit: I have four school aged children who get a sandwich for lunch every day. It takes no time at all for a family of six to go through a 650g loaf of bread, and it doesn't require overeating - I'm the only one in my family with a weight problem, and I bake the bread I don't eat it. Your assumption that everyone in the world is exactly like you is truly breathtaking.
> This is trivially refuted by finding obese people in non-high-sugar societies, or from a time period before sugar became ubiquitous.
Those people definitely existed, but were pretty rare. Maybe you are one of them. Statistically, probably not.
> I bake bread for my family every day because I can't get bread in Canada that has no sugar. I'm aware of how insidious sugar is.
That is definitely way, way better than anything store bought, so it's great that you are doing that. However, even without added sugar, bread will start converting to sugar immediately after being in contact with saliva(and will continue once the pancreas enters the picture). So you are eating sugar every day still, possibly quite a lot of it.
I had to severely decrease bread consumption, as well as anything containing simple carbs, to decrease my insulin resistance.
>Those people definitely existed, but were pretty rare. Maybe you are one of them. Statistically, probably not.
Mexico has approximately the same per-capita sugar consumption as Italy, Spain and France, yet the obesity rate exceeds that of the U.S. Norway has 50% more per-capita sugar consumption than the US and very little obesity. I don't think eating little sugar or refined food, yet being overweight makes me a statistical anomaly at all.
I'm not claiming some kind of magic variation in base metabolic rates. I'm only saying that it is too simplistic to point at refined sugar and say that a complex problem has that one simple cause. (And that to solve it one need only learn to be an adult).
I don't eat bread by the way, I bake it for my family. I do revert to eating potatoes and pasta though, which is no doubt to blame for my weight fluctuations. My irritation in this discussion comes only from the ridiculous claim that if I were only to eat like a grown-up for two weeks, food cravings would disappear and my problems would be solved.
Mexican cuisine employs large amounts of fat, directly, or in the form of cheese. Take a trip to Italy, Spain, or France. It's a very different eating atmosphere. The portions and ingredients aren't comparable, and in Europe, there are greater food protections that straight up don't exist in North America.
Carrefour et Monoprix ne ressemblent pas du tout à ceux de WalMart, etc. You can't compare them. Their food selection makes ours in the states look embarrassing, and I wouldn't be surprised if it were the same for Canada. It's superior on all fronts.
It isn't too simplistic to look at sugar or general carbohydrates and say, this ingredient has the highest reconstitution of habit developing behaviors compared to that of any other macronutrient. Your body's ability to reinforce food habituation compared to any other macronutrient on a graphed scale makes every other macro look like peanuts. It's sugar. It's carbs. It's a fact. It's scientifically proven. I implore you to do the reading yourself. Fat also has a high recidivation rate, but it pales in comparison to carbohydrates.
For your own health and the risk that you'll tell others otherwise as well, just dismiss me and read these studies yourself.
It's that easy, and the reality is that no one adjusts for it. Your supermarkets don't care and all of the people around you probably don't realize it either. It's cultural. It's in your beer. It's in your coffee creamer. It's everywhere.
It is the dietary equivalent of global warming denial. Seriously. I have watched people with class 3 obesity drop 40 pounds in one month, which is terribly hard on your body and not recommended, by immediately switching off high carb, high fat diets.
Yes, your food cravings do truly, really, disappear within a span of 2-4 weeks. Within 30 to 60 days, people can and do form rejection habits with little documented "willpower" in the same way these individuals using GLP-1 hormones do.
Because it's the same activation vector. You increase incretins production through rich protein consumption. People suffer from the effects that you describe because of leptin resistance. For people in extreme weight class categories, you don't get off after a few months, fat cells stay in your body for years in dormant, reduced volume form.
Of course I eat carbs when I shouldn't. Not the bread, but I eat potatoes sometimes, and too much fruit. I'm not denying that I eat too much.
The point is you claim that if we gluttons would just cut out sugar for 2 weeks and learn to be an adult, our appetites and cravings would disappear. That's nonsense, and your dismissal of data that doesn't fit your narrative makes your accusations towards others of being anti-science both hollow and ironic.
You can lose considerable weight at speeds that are actually not recommended simply by dropping added sugar from American diets. So much so that you would need to taper off this removal to stay around 2 pounds of weight loss a week instead of dropping this consumption pattern cold turkey.
The biggest difficulty in sourcing food materials or eating out is that we have sugar in everything. We have added sugar in things that in other countries you would have never added sugar into to begin with.
The reinforcement habit is directly tied to food reward, sugar consumption, and ghrelin production. Anyone who tells you otherwise is lying and is simply refuting what we have come to understand about food science over the years.
And frankly, we as a people have not yet completely matured out of the phase of producing or accepting low-fat foods being replaced with high sugar content. Plenty of other nations never had this problem at all, never inherited it, and as a result, don't have to grow out of it.
It is staggering how much of our food is incompatible with healthy weight homeostasis, and all of our common supermarkets absolutely work against you unless you are otherwise taught differently.
* * *
Edit:
If you're baking bread for your family every day, even without added sugar, and you don't see the problem here, I don't know how anyone can help you.
I'm not calling you a liar. I said you were omitting details. You didn't mention that you're frequently eating carbs. Now you mention that you're baking, and presumably eating, bread every day.
This is a big eating habit detail.