If you like me, have a lot of health problems you want to cure, and therefore switch to eat a paleolithic diet as I describe, it might happen that you start to crave sweets heavily. I usually never have sugar cravings, but when I switched diet to the paleolithic diet, I started to eat lot of chocolate. It took a while to figure out how to stop sweet cravings. In this text, I will tell you how, so you can learn from my mistakes.
You see, when you eat in a sitting, 200 gram of refined carbohydrates such as potatoes, bread or pasta, your body will break it down, and the end result will basically be sugar. If you eat 200 gram of sugar, or refined carbs, the end result will be the same. Your body can not tell if you ate 200 gram of sugar or refined carbs – it is the same end result.
This means, for breakfast you might eat 100 gram of sugar (sandwich). For lunch you eat another 200 gram (potatoes, fries, pasta) and for dinner another 200 gram of sugar. In one day you eat 500 gram of refined carbohydrates, which is the same as sugar. Have you heard about diabetes?
Cancer
Coincidentally, in areas where people eat lot of grains and cereals, the incidence of cancer is greater. When you eat 500 grams of sugar per day, your blood sugar spikes. To combat all blood sugar, your body produces lot of insulin. Therefore, your blood stream contain a lot of insulin. Insulin is a growth hormone. As Westerners eat lot of grains and cereals, children will be taller. And, cancer thrives in insulin environments.
There is evidence suggesting you can starve cancer, by abstaining from eating sugar, see this Ted Talk video [1]. Basically, we always have lot of cancer cells in our bodies. For instance, 40% of all American women age 40-50 years have microscopic cancers in their breasts. About 50% of all Americans aged 50-60 years have microscopic cancers in their prostate. Most of the time, the cancers can not grow into a full tumor as the cancer don’t get fed properly. But cancer cells loves sugar and cannot stop eating sugar, so sugar give them plenty of energy to grow new blood vessels to form a full cancer tumor. It might be possible to starve cancer cells by not eating sugar and decrease the growth hormone insulin. The video is definitely worth a watch. If I ever got cancer, I would be very strict with my diet, and cut out all refined carbohydrates such as pasta, rice, etc, and instead eat lot of fruit and vegetables. It is better to be proactive and never develop cancer or diabetes, than not.
But if you eat 500 gram of fruits, or 500 gram of refined carbs – is there any difference as both give you lot of sugar? Yes, the difference is that fruit sugar is not the same thing as refined carb sugar. Your body is designed since the dawn of time, to use fruit sugar as fuel, but not the new refined carb sugar – which is therefore harmful. So avoid refined carbs, and eat fruit and vegetables instead.
Now, what happens when you stop eating refined carbs, and you don’t get this 0.5 kg of refined sugar each day? Your body starts to crave sweets. Even if you never eat sweets, you still eat refined carbs – which is the same thing as sugar.
BTW, paleolithic diet is more akin to a High Carb, Low Fat diet – as fruits and vegetables contain lot of carbohydrates. But the carbs are not of the harmful refined type.
So how do we stop the sweet cravings? If you stop eating sugar, you must compensate with another energy source. Fat. So start eating lot of fat instead of refined carbs. I normally ate one chicken leg + vegetables+ 1 dl of mayo in one sitting. And still I rapidly lost weight. Fat does not make you fat, just as greens does not make you green, as I explain here. So in each sitting, compensate the carbs with 100 gram of fat or more if you need. If you suddenly get sweet cravings, eat egg + lot of mayo. Or cheese with lot of butter. Eat fat until your sudden sweet cravings have stopped. You will still rapidly loose weight. After a couple of months, your body have adapted to the switch from refined sugar and your sweet cravings will slowly decline. When that happens, you can decrease your fat intake. Today I don’t eat much fat at all. When I first started with paleolithic diet, I had to eat at least 200-300g fat each day. So in the long run, you should strive to eat a paleolithic diet that does not contain much fat. However, in the beginning eating fat makes the transition easier, so eat fat.
Why are diets like LCHF, Atkins, Carnivore, etc popular?
High fat diets like LCHF, Atkins, Carnivore, etc are really easy to follow, because fats eliminates all cravings, so you never feel like you are starving. It is very easy eating, and no ordeal. However, the reason these meat heavy diets make you loose weight, is because of a common misconception: “you loose weight by only eating meat and fats, and nothing else”. This is false.
The correct conception is: “you loose weight by not eating cereals such as pasta, french fries, rice, etc”. Instead of cereals, you could only eat meat, or only peaches, or whatever you fancy. The only thing a meat diet gives you – is less cravings. Peach diet would give you a quick weight loss as well, but also lot of cravings, because peaches don’t contain fat. So in the beginning when adapting a new diet: eat a high fat diet. The most healthy fats would be plant based, such as lot of avocados, olive oil, nuts, etc. In due time, you can decrease your fat intake as your cravings slowly subside.
In fact, humans are not designed as carnivores. Therefore, meat damages your health, and that is why we should limit our meat intake. I will explain the perils of eating meat, in a later blog post.
Diabetes
Lot of people report that their diabetes type 2 disappear when they stop eating refined carbohydrates (i.e. sugar) and switch to the paleolithic diet. Several of the above arguments why switching diet is beneficial against cancer, also applies to Diabetes type 2. Instead of me rehashing the same arguments, here is some research that supports that the paleolithic diet is also beneficial to mitigate diabetes [2].
REFERENCES
[1] Li, William, Can we eat to starve cancer?, https://www.ted.com/talks/william_li_can_we_eat_to_starve_cancer
[2] Clonoff, David, The Beneficial Effects of a Paleolithic Diet on Type 2 Diabetes and Other Risk Factors for Cardiovascular Disease, J Diabetes Sci Technol. 2009 Nov; 3(6): 1229–1232.
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