Sugar Addiction and Metabolic Health Problems with Lisa Lewtan

Lisa Lewtan published the award-winning and best-selling book  Busy, Stressed, and Food Obsessed! and went on to host a live radio show called Healthy View Radio (now a podcast called The Healthy View). Recently, she studied in one of the first classes to receive certification as a Designing Your Life coach, based on the NY Times bestselling book and class by Stanford University professors Bill Burnett and Dave Evans. Lisa also received a certification in teaching Mindfulness. Her work has been featured in numerous publications including The Boston Globe, The Huffington Post, MindbodyGreen, and Reader’s Digest, and has been a speaker at companies such as Kripalu, Canyon Ranch, Rancho la Puerta, WGBH, and Google.

In this episode, Lisa opens up about her sugar addiction. After cutting sugar, Lisa thought she would lose a ton of weight; however, that did not happen. Instead, Lisa found positive changes after cutting sugar - she finally felt calm and relaxed. So, Lisa ended up developing a program to help other people get off of sugar. There are loads of people out there who struggle with it! Lisa isn’t sure why sugar will profoundly impact one person and not the other.

Many people won’t know that they have a sugar problem. Lisa can look at what somebody eats throughout the day and immediately know if they have a sugar problem or not. When people start realizing the reason they crash is because of their diet, Lisa steps in. Lisa helps people tweak their eating habits, and she can assist with cutting out sugar completely. Sugar is often an emotional connection, that’s why it is so difficult for people to kick the habit.

RXBARs are popular in the paleo community because there are only a few ingredients. However, some of their bars have well over twenty grams of sugar in it. You need to be careful with anything that is going to keep the cravings going. Lisa ended up cutting bars out altogether from her diet – it’s just not worth the cravings she gets later on.

Then, Lisa speaks about how to break the emotional connection to sugar. We aren’t addressing the emotions that people have when they are addicted to sugar. Lisa says that when we stop tasting sugar, we can recalibrate our taste buds. Plus, Lisa wants to say that sugar addiction has nothing to do with will power. Once you take the break from sugar, you will realize that you don’t even need it anymore.

Lisa explains the strategies for cutting sugar. Instead of cutting all of the sugar, Lisa says to stay with the dark chocolate and cut everything else. It will be impossible to reduce the sugar if you don’t want to give it up. There has to be a reason why you want to cut the sugar. Usually, people will endure a health scare, or people realize that they just feel crappy. Then, they decide it is time to ditch the sugar train.

If you are going to have sugar, then sit there, love it, and enjoy it. We want to get to the point where we aren’t beating ourselves up about it. When we have a break from sugar, we choose what we are going to eat. When we feel good, we don’t need to beat ourselves up anymore. This is really hard to do when you’re still eating sugar. Stay tuned as Lisa reveals tips for giving up sugar quickly.