Why Fat Cells Become Addicted to Sugar: How We Turn It Around

“How is candy like cocaine?” This question and answer shock people from coast to coast, fighting food addiction and learning why foods are high in sugar and bad fats (as opposed to healthy fats). Recent food addiction research studies showed the impact of sugar and fatty foods on the brain. The brain activity looks like that associated with drug addicts and alcoholics. Read the National Geographic article:  Why We Crave Sweets and Fats.

Watch a documentary on your favorite streaming service and learn about the development of refined sugars in our nation and how the big food industries are involved in pumping as much sugar into us as possible. Our fat cells become addicted to sugar. Want to stay out of the hospital? Want to stay off medications for health problems? Want to maintain a healthy weight and not stress your organs? The answer is kicking the addiction to sugar. And your fat cells are the bad ones, addicted to sugars. Fat cells just love sugar because of the chemical makeup of sugar that makes it a cheap easy food source. In this article we show how to change the long-term makeup of your fat cells, shrinking them with healthy foods and reducing sugar and carbs in your diet.

Smaller U Weightloss works with people and helps them achieve permanent weight loss by retraining the brain, body, and fat cells, to get happy and full of healthy foods rich in proteins and nutrients; the good food sources that our bodies need to get our metabolisms back in check and get back to a healthy weight, for good.

Sugar, an Addictive Substance, is a Cheap Food Source that Tricks Your Brain and Body

Once people figure out how bad refined sugar is for health, they seemingly become warriors in the battle of the bulge, fighting bad sugars and processed foods. Dopamine is the key to understanding why we eat and consume things we think make us feel good. Feel-good comes from the release of the neurotransmitter, Dopamine, in our brains, the “feel-good chemical” naturally produced in our brains. All sorts of things can trigger dopamine and a satisfying feeling, things that are good for us and things that are not so good.

Sugar is not good for us, but it trips our dopamine triggers. Remember first that sugar is never the main food, rather it is an ingredient used to sweeten foods. Think of a chocolate chip cookie, there is a lot of sugar in that cookie as well as chocolate chips, nuts, or fruits like raisins. Imagine eating nuts, dried fruits, or chocolate without the refined sugar and flour in the cookie. It’s time to be smarter and learn how our brains work and what motivates our eating habits when fat cells become addicted to sugar.

Healthline: 14 “Healthy” Chocolate Snacks to Satisfy Your Sweet Tooth

Smart Article by Psychology Today: Sugar May Be Stealing Your Happiness

Sugar is a cheap food source, and our bodies love to burn sugar first because it’s easier for our bodies to burn sugar than fat. Once you remove the cheap energy sources, like hybrid engines, our bodies go to the next available energy sources and will burn the food we consume and then the energy in stored fat.

At Smaller U Weightloss We Help Get Program Participants Off Sugar Addiction

Conditioning our program participants to prefer and enjoy healthy foods is easier when learning how and why it is important to monitor sugar and carbohydrates. Not only do we frequently publish informative articles like this one, but we also work with our Smaller U Weightloss program participants to educate and remind us how and why we feel hungry or full, and how our bodies work efficiently and collapse fat when we use the right food sources and retrain our cells that may have become addicted to sugar.

Get Happy and Boost Your Mood and Motivation with Healthy Dopamine Trigger Foods

Dopamine kick-starters are foods that contain the amino acid l-tyrosine, commonly found in protein-rich foods. Animal products, almonds, apples, avocados, bananas, beets, chocolate, coffee, olive oil, peanuts, watermelon, and wheatgerm are all examples of foods that will naturally help release Dopamine and make us feel good.

At Smaller U Weightloss we teach our program participants to love healthy foods that are good to eat and make us feel good and satisfied. Nobody is going to maintain a diet of foods they don’t enjoy eating. So, the key to lasting weight loss requires a permanent change in how we eat and what we enjoy eating.

How Clean Eating Changes Taste Buds

Eating clean changes what we crave. Healthy food cravings are real and as we get back to training ourselves to want what is good for us. The tiny bumps on our tongue, taste buds, are called papillae and contain microscopic highly sensitive hairs that recognize taste.

Just like our ears prefer the sounds we are used to hearing, and foreign sounds resonate differently, our taste buds change when we eat clean foods, the ones that trigger Dopamine and make us happy. For example, if we like green apples and that is part of our breakfast menu, we look forward to the apple and when we eat it, the apple tastes great. This is because we conditioned our taste buds and our brain to associate the apple with positive feelings and dopamine, thus the apple tastes good to us.

And when people cheat, something we know happens, people are shocked to realize that once they stopped eating the foods to avoid, those avoided foods no longer taste as good, and that is because our taste buds are effectively retraining for good.

Is Sugar Tricking Your Brain, Do You Need Protein?

Thinking you’re hungry or craving sugar, you probably need protein. Protein is the key to eliminating sugar cravings. Commonly people who are not getting enough protein in their diets are going to crave carbs, typically sugars.

When we eat protein, our body increases the production of the gut hormone that makes us feel full. There are many studies and articles published that establish the science-based reasons that a high-protein diet helps weight loss and metabolic health. As we talk about in our article, Metabolic Age and Maintaining Weight, we showed everyone how the net benefits of eating the right foods and getting off sugar and processed foods will increase our metabolic rate and get us 10 to 15 years younger internally by dropping weight.  

Can I Eat That? Expectations for Maintaining Healthy Weight Loss

Once you start your lifestyle journey, eating better becomes natural. It becomes easier to get off the sugars as taste buds change and you no longer seek sugary foods. We remember what we like to eat and what gives us that good food feeling and Dopamine release. Once achieving a goal weight, there is a period of adjustment where we might eat more calories and adjust from weight loss to weight maintenance. Some people notice that even a seemingly innocent introduction of sugars and cheat foods too often may lead to regaining weight. Some people also justify eating things they should generally avoid because they know they can have it now and then and not regain the weight.

In any case, to maintain permanent weight loss we need to keep eating healthy foods because we enjoy the foods in addition to the positive effect of healthy eating. At Smaller U Weightloss, we remain available to our program participants to help them keep their new healthy bodies and metabolism. We make sure everyone is comfortable with their plan to maintain a healthy weight.