Sugar and artificial sweeteners make you fat, ugly and depressed

I was recently chatting with a good friend of mine who asked me "So what's the big deal about sugar, why do you not want to eat it?"

I was kind of caught off guard. Truly. I wanted to provide an intelligent answer on the evil effects of sugar, but the only fact which sprang to mind, was that the cane or beet sugar that runs rampant throughout processed food (particularly ones marketed TO CHILDREN) brings absolutely nothing with it. It is empty of minerals, vitamins or other nutrients, so to process it, you actually have to dip into your body's nutrient stores just to metabolize it. So eating sugar leaves you DEFICIENT. Who wants to eat and end up worse off than they were before they ate???

But you know, there is SO much more than that. The proliferation of sugar, wheat, corn and soy in all our packaged foods (go ahead- find one packaged food in your cupboard that has none of these- I dare you!) has correlated very nicely with an increase in our waist sizes, a decrease in our abilities to metabolize sugar (hello type 2 diabetes, nice to meet you!!), an increase in ADD/ADHD, a rash of food allergies/intolerances, widespread pain and depression, and more.

I've mentioned before that my sister Shan Larter is an eating disorder freedom coach. In this video, she talks about the use of sugar and artificial sweeteners to her community of women with eating disorders such as anorexia and bulimia. But the audience is much broader than that; don't let the "eating disorder" term fool you. Many of us use sugar and artificial sweeteners to pump us up, keep us "high", fill us up, etc. Don't forget that there is an even LARGER community out there that you can call "those with disordered eating". Watch it...put the gummy worms down, and ditch the diet coke.

Sugar and artificial sweeteners make you fat, ugly and depressed