Zero sugar will change your body and life

Going to zero sugar is hard but if you do it, it will change your body and life. Sugar is an “obesogen” that leads people towards poor health, and “we’re eating 25x more refined sugar than we were 100 years ago.” Why you should get to zero is also covered in the essential Gary Taubes book The Case Against Sugar, and I recommend you read it. Knowing that you should get to zero is easy but implementing changes to get to zero is very hard, because society is against you and sugar is all around you.

To make the changes necessary to get to zero you have to swim upstream against the society you live in. Most people will hold you back. Your diet should focus on nuts, vegetables, and some natural oils, especially olive oil. Roasting vegetables is especially important and if you don’t know how to do it Google that shit right now. Breakfast should usually be eggs with some vegetables or some complex carbs like quinoa.

I first made these changes more than ten years ago and they were very hard at the time. With discipline and time they have become normal in my life and I have systems in place to make them easier. They are still hard, however, because donuts, cookies, cakes, and pop are always showing up in the office, at birthday parties, and at basically every event.

Saying no is hard. Being fit is still better.

Humans have not evolved to ingest the large amount of sugar that most modern humans do. Most people are too lazy and undisciplined to make these changes and it shows in every facet of their life.

I am not the Buddha and I will sometimes have a small ice cream on hot summer days or a good pastry, but those exceptions are rare. I’m also not paranoid enough to hunt down every gram of sugar that may hide in salad dressing. Sometimes I will also make social exceptions because sometimes the right thing to do is to take the beer. Under most alcohol-based circumstances, prefer something like vodka and soda or whiskey and soda or red wine. Not every circumstance will be amenable to this strategy but many are.

I’ve seen posts with titles like “The never ending shit tests I have experienced while losing weight,” and those posts inspire this one. So do the conversations I’ve had with younger guys and gals at work. I’ve never been a fattie but I have gotten lots of curious looks, questions, and sometimes outright shit for declining the never-ending donuts, bagels, and other food that most people relentlessly shovel into their gaping maws. I’ve also gotten a lot of shit for my love of biking, mostly again from car-based fatties.

All around me I hear people complain about their weight and health. The foundation of both starts with the hand and mouth. Neglect the foundation and nothing else matters. Struggling with dating? Struggling with injuries? Food is part of what you likely need to change.

There is so much around you you cannot control. You can control what you stick in your face. This post is not very long because it doesn’t need to be. You will achieve what you achieve or you won’t. You will reap the pleasures or sorrows of the way you lead your life.

It looks like the weight story is a little more complicated than being a pure sugar one, because a number of hormones regulate weight and it appears that the body wants to gain weight in a high-calorie environment much more than it wants to lose weight. This is not an excuse for eating sugar but it does mean that I might have been a little too harsh originally.

Some of Magnum on nutrition.