Most people learned about pH in school. The difference between acids and bases can be shown on Ph Test Strips (affiliate link). It was fun to discover where certain liquids would fall on the scale. What most people don’t learn is how important pH is to your health. Did you know your pH could be making if more difficult to lose weight?
The optimal pH level is between 7.2-7.4. “pH (potential of hydrogen) is a measure of the acidity or alkalinity of a solution. It is measured on a scale of 0 to 14—the lower the pH the more acidic the solution, the higher the pH the more alkaline (or base) the solution. When a solution is neither acid nor alkaline it has a pH of 7 which is neutral.” (Natural Health School)read more
This is not a new idea. Lots of popular diets have come to the conclusion that our sugar is out of balance in our Modern diet and this is the cause of our expanding waistbands.
Management of your Sugar and Carbohydrates is crucial for weight loss and your general health.
We know sugar is so important to get under control.
A low glycemic diet in general is healthier than a diet focused on lots of carbs. When our system gets overloaded with too many sugar and carbs, our cells start storing extra carbs as fat in our cells.
Our cells love to store carbs, so they are very eager and ready when we over eat our carbs. If we eat a moderate or low carb diet, then we can burn those carbs before they get the chance to be stored as extra fat.read more
Sugar is everywhere. We know we get too much of it. Can we break the sugar habit?
We as Americans have a sugar tooth. It seems like we can’t enjoy anything unless it is covered in sugar or artificially sweetened. It would probably the best for us if we can completely eliminate the desire for something sweet except from fruit sources. However, all of us enjoy a sweet treat every now and then.
We were told to kick the sugar habit by switching to artificial sugars. No calories = no weight gain…. It seemed like the perfect solution to us since processed white sugar was so terrible. We all switched, but we were still gaining weight. What in the world?
Aspartame only makes sugar craving worse and causes you to overeat… causing even more weight gain.
Here is a little about artificial sweeteners and how they can be much worse than sugar itself:
Aspartame is very unhealthy for us. It is documented that it can cause memory loss as well as brain damage: here here and here.
When you eat aspartame, it causes a rapid fire of neurons, naming it an excitotoxin. This over time causes brain cells to be damaged and die off.
From Mercola.com
The excess glutamate and aspartame slowly begin to destroy neurons. The large majority (75 percent or more) of neural cells in a particular area of the brain are killed before any clinical symptoms of a chronic illness are noticed. A few of the many chronic illnesses that have been shown to be contributed to by long-term exposure to excitatory amino acid damage include:
If we are supposed to be eating all natural, what are our best choices for sweetener?
Jordan Rubin, author of the Maker’s diet, recommends unheated raw honey (no more than a tablespoon per day), Stevia, and maple syrup in the last phase (phase 3). Ideally, you could satisfy a sweet craving with some fruit – like a smoothie maybe.
We primarily use Stevia. If I’m baking, I have a few recipes that use honey or maple syrup. I normally sweeten naturally with fruit sources like applesauce when making thing for Aidalyn. We find Stevia at our local grocery store and buy it on Amazon. It is much sweeter than sugar in the packet form, so you would only add a little bit for sweetness. Here are some cookies that are low in sugar: Apple Oatmeal Cookies.
Stevia is a naturally sweet plant, but is concentrated in a powdered form. I do have some raw stevia that I bought online, but I don’t use it too often.
Trim Healthy Mama (a great book I’ve previously reviewed) recommends using stevia for a sugar substitute. They also recommend using xylitol and erythritol (non-GMO sources) for natural sugar substitute options.
