Does sugar put on weight?

[PheonixJo]

I put a pound on this week and can't think why because I've been careful but since I've found out a breakfast bar I have has 17g of sugar in it.....

[Hidden]

I would say so. I bought meringues thinking they have no fat in them and I put on weight. I have also thought these breakfast bars are ' healthy' but as you say they contain a lot of sugar. Good Luck with the coming week. ☺

[timetoact]

That is high for sugar content..............I'm avoiding refined sugars found in biscuits, cakes etc as I have a sweet tooth -banana and other fruits can give you a sweet taste instead. I read all the food labels to check for sugar content and eat no sugar muesli and stay away from all the sugary cereals. Keep going- I find there are healthy sweet alternatives in fruit.

[Hidden in reply to timetoact]

Hi timetoacat

Please be careful of the amount of fruit you do eat as some fruits have high sugar content. When you are trying to shift a few lbs, and I've lost 145 of them...... then you need to avoid too much fruit. Just one banana a day max and one orange plus one other fruit is enough and stay away from fruit smoothies..........They are just bad for you....

[timetoact in reply to Hidden]

The fruit idea is a stepping stone for me not to fall for refined sugars. I am aware of hidden sugars in fruit and I'm aiming to increase my veg intake to readjust my 5-7 a day so I don't end up with only 1 veg but 2 or more. So I'm working on stepping stone adjustments. Finding the 12 week plan a good one.

[Osiris275]

It shouldn't make any difference 8n my experience. I eat a lot of sugar, I know its far more than is recommended. But I still lose weight.

Do you think you could have over estimated your calories? Do you weigh your food? Its maybe some water weight or even muscle .

[Hidden in reply to Osiris275]

Water weight is sorted very quickly by the body and you have to be doing serious exercise to put muscle weight on. To put muscle weight on you have to be doing weights and it can take 6 weeks before any effects show. It will all be due to eating and nothing else. This sounds awful but if you cut the calories, you will lose weight. Not one person ever came out of a concentration camp looking like I used to (I was over 25 stone) because of muscle weight or excess water. If you cut food and do easy exercise such as walking to the point where you can hear your breath, then you will lose the pounds.

[Molly666]

That's probably the reason! When I cut out sugar and made sure everything I ate had less than 10% sugar content, I lost weight. Good luck

[Radleychick]

Yes, it can do, especially if you are having them regularly, you have to be so careful when buying products that claim to be low-fat and diet, a lot of them have high contents of sugar, and often salt.

Try avoiding processed and pre-packaged foods, the only way to be sure of the sugar content is to make your own foods, there are some healthy recipes out there for breakfast bars with less sugar if that is your preference, but to be honest my 2 weetabix loaded with fresh fruit is more filling and tasty and takes me through to lunch time, don't be disheartened just keep going, and good luck. 😀

[ScarletMissCharlotte]

That will not be the sole reason for putting 1lb on, it could be water weight, weight of food, hormonal happenings. You have fluctuations all the time. Don't let this put you off!

Sugar is the worst for putting weight on as its quick release energy and thr body will use this first to give you energy thus not burning the reserves you have. It also makes you more hungry as you have a peak and then a trough. Try having protein for breakfast as this will even out blood sugar and keeps you fuller for longer.

[Penel]

17 grams of sugar is about 4 teaspoons and it is likely to affect your weight. In the long term it can also affect your health, so it's a good idea to look for low -sugar or no sugar options.

[Hidden]

Right then Phoenixjo and others.... Here's the thing.....

I did a talk about calories this week at my weigh in class. The good and the bad. What's the difference I hear you say....go on.....say it........

Well, none. A calorie is just a calorie. A word for enegry but, and if you're not careful, a big butt, it's how that calorie is consumed that is the problem. To put on 1lb ladies, you have to eat 1 and a half days of food a week extra. In other words, to put on the 1lb, you have to eat 8.5 days worth of food in 7 days. That is because 1lb of fat is 3500 calories and ladies need around 1800 calories A DAY or 12,600 calories A WEEK.

Right, back to calories. Well, if the calorie you eat has nothing with it then it won't do you any good. This means that, take sugar for instance, it contains nothing but carbohydrate. Nothing wrong with carbs but thats all it is. There is no protein, fats, fibre, vitamins, minerals, nothing so what happens is, once eaten, your body has a quick sugar spike which makes you feel good, you then have a sugar low, which makes you feel bad and hungry again so you then eat before you actually need to. If you make simple food swaps then you can avoid the sugar spike. Swap white foods such as white bread for whole grain breads, pasta for whole wheat pasta, change your cereal for something like porridge and use almond milk instead of semi skimmed milk, this alone saves 50 calories a day and ditch the sugar especially in drinks. Sugar has many many names so check your food lables carefully. Sucrose, dextrose, corn syrup, meltodextrin, lactose are all names for sugar.

One other thing, do some exercise and I don't mean hit the gym and start doing press ups. Go for a nice walk every day for at least 45 minutes and I don't care if its raining........ You can burn up to 100 calories doing this and that all adds up.

Good luck and STOP EATING THOSE AWFUL CEREAL BARS........

[IndigoBlue61 in reply to Hidden]

Love this reply!! Perfect explanation! 😊😊😊

[Penel in reply to Hidden]

Have a read of Dr Robert Lustig " Not all calories are the same". Different foods/calories have different effects on our bodies. Changing what you eat can be as important as how much you eat.

huffingtonpost.com/robert-l...

[Hidden]

One other thing Pheonixjo

DO NOT LISTEN TO THE, IT COULD BE HORMONES, IT COULD BE WATER, IT COULD BE BLAH BLAH BLAH.

If you are taking serious medication which makes you heavy then stop dieting and get healthy first. Hormones, low metabalism ect will not make you fat. Not one person came out of a concentration camp weighing 25 stone because they had a low metabalism or their hormones were making them fat. Only one thing shifts the fat and it is move more eat less. It really is the only thing that works.....

[Hidden in reply to Hidden]

I do so agree with this! Searching for other reasons just distracts people. It's a hard truth to accept, but no less true for that!

[ceejayblue]

Yes sugar can put on weight when its combined with overeating loads of other stuff too! When you look at the labels and see the sugar content, ignore it! The total carb content is what actually counts, sugar (in all its forms!) is a carbohydrate and is counted within the totals. Diabetics are advised to ignore the "of which sugars" numbers and concentrate on the total carbs. You could be eating "low sugar" but eating high carbs.

Anything can make you put on weight if you eat too much of it! As Dadtoad says - move more, eat less simples!

[PheonixJo]

Thanks lots of great advice there, I have looked at total carbs on the things I eat and they seem quite high like 26g for 30g cheerios for instance......

[IndigoBlue61 in reply to PheonixJo]

For me it's about getting maximum "fill-me-up-ness" for the calories. Weigh out 200 calories of Cheerios and then another low sugar high fibre cereal, and think which will keep hunger at bay the longest 😊

[PheonixJo]

Which would fill me up longer for less calories?

[Hidden in reply to PheonixJo]

Brown rice instead of white. Porridge in the morning with a milk alternative. Whole wheat pasta instead of white pasta. Use tomato based sauce in pasta instead of a cream base. Have nuts in the morning. Great fats for the body but only enough to fit in the palm of your hand....NO MORE or its too many calories.

Above all, eat slightly less, avoid alcohol, move a lot more and ditch sugar in drinks. If you want to do sport then do something that doesn't feel like sport. Badmington, tennis, ping pong etc. They are fun and you hardly know you're doing sport at all.

[Matilda_1922]

I'm afraid it does

They have found sugar is worse than animal fat like butter

[greanise]

Interesting article for those who would like further reading. authoritynutrition.com/10-d...

[Gottodothis]

Hi, yes especially when you add it to the rest of the sugar eaten during the day. Shocking hiw much sugar is in things. Look for anything which ends in 'ose' sucrose, fructose, lactose means sugar.

[Hidden]

The truth about this is that it is calories that put on weight - wherever they come from, if you consume more than you burn up, you will put on weight.

The current publicity/controversey about sugar, low carb high fat etc. etc. slightly obscures this important principle. You have put 1lb on this week because somewhere over the past 7 days you consumed approx 3500 calories more than you burnt off. Some of it will have come from sugary foods, but the chances are that some came from fatty and protein foods as well. You just ate too much.

Sugary/starchy foods are difficult, not because they are uniquely fattening (they aren't), but because they are the foods it is most easy to overeat. Think about how easy is it to eat a bit more cereal or an extra biscuit, and how difficult it is to overdo the meat by cooking a second steak, for example......

For this reason it is best to cut back a lot on sugary and starchy foods, but not ban them altogether. Breakfast bars are best not eaten while you are losing weight in my opinion, but a bowl of porridge, 2 weetabix or shredded wheat etc, for breakfast should be fine.

Hope that helps!

[Hidden]

Depends what you mean by careful. In general, eating sugar is not a good idea, but the effect can be far worse for some people than others. I would never eat breakfast bars, or any manufactured product. There are plenty of healthy real food alternatives. If I do have breakfast, I prefer something nourishing, like eggs and bacon which satisfy and stave off hunger longer. I usually don't bother with breakfast anyway, since I find that 16:8 intermittent fasting works well for me, with the occasional 24 hour fast whenever I put on weight after temporary indulgences. I eat whatever I like in between fasts, as I have developed a liking for real foods. I don't have to count calories or read food labels. I reversed my type two diabetes three years ago and have maintained my weight loss ever since. The Low Carb Program from diabetes.co.uk is an excellent introduction to sensible eating habits.

To get back to your original question - if something isn't doing you any good, then why not stop doing it and see what happens? Sugar isn't the only villain so note what works for you and concentrate on that. Good luck!

[freyja12]

Hi my name Freyja and i would like to let you know that sugar is fattening and can cause tooth decay but you say you have a breafast bar with 17g of sugar that is a lot of sugar in a breakfast bar let me find out for you how much sugar y ou can have per day and i will get back to you.

[freyja12 in reply to freyja12]

Hi freyja i'm back i found out that you are allowed 30g of sugar per day, i can try give at you a recipe for a breakkfast bar that is fll of antioxcidents and full of energy it is about 300 cal but it is good thing have in the morning if you are in a hurry so contact me if you want to try the recipe i can write out for let me know

[PheonixJo]

Thank you Freya

[Venusflytrap]

Hi PheonixJo ,

I am so sorry you gained a lb instead of losing. I know you will be feeling gutted as you are so committed and enthusiastic. Don't panic. It has given you a push to look at the sugar (or empty carbs) in your breakfasts. So there is a plus side.

You sure know how to push our buttons! Look at all those fantastically helpful comments. I agree with 99% of what everyone has said. The only bit I don't agree with is the "you must have over-eaten in the last week" to put on weight.

We are dealing with bodies which are incredibly adaptable but we are not robots. New dieters tend to assume that if they have been "good" the scales will reward them. It ain't necessarily so. It often is for men, because their kcal needs are so much higher than ours that many can afford to make mistakes and get away with it. If they put on weight, there usually will be a reason they can point to. Women are not always so lucky.

We have a monthly cycle which can give us a monthly cycle of weight gains and losses. This won't affect all of us, but it will some. Bathroom talk: how recently you have emptied your bowels, had a wee etc will make a difference. So will the type of things you ate/drank the day of weighing and a couple of days before as they are still in your system.

For this reason, I switched from a Monday evening weigh in to an early Thursday morning weigh in. I knew that, at the new time, I was just weighing me and some light clothes as I had been to the bathroom but not had a drink or anything to eat. On the Monday I was weighing me, the clothes, the residues of the weekend's extra consumption plus the nervous eating and drinking during the day while I waited for those all important numbers.

Some of us are a week behind at the scales. For months I got weighed and lost when I hadn't expected to. Buoyed up by my success, I had a "good" or even "perfect" week but then put on at the scales. Shock! Horror! And then repeated this cycle for months. One day the mist fell from my eyes and I realised the pattern. And that is the crux.

Do you have tools to recognise patterns? You are changing your behaviour in order to get a certain result. How are you monitoring it? You need to keep a record of what you are consuming. And it needs to be as accurate as it can be. It could be scraps of paper that you write on, it could be a journal that you fill in, it could be an on-line app on your phone, it could be photos of every plate, nibble, glass and cup. But one of these processes or something similar will allow you to record what you actually had rather than what you hoped/thought/planned to have. Don't forget drinks have kcals too. Some will be better choices than others.

There can be a lot of wishful thinking in those food logs! Some of us used to celebrate a good loss with an off the log takeaway! Totally off the leash overeating. And it went into neither week's food diaries. Yes, we put on the following week and "couldn't understand it". But one day when we saw each other in the queue, reality dawned.

It also helps to record your weekly weigh-ins and put them on a graph. The graph gives you a visual picture of your overall success and helps you to see if there are patterns.

If I am really puzzled by how my body is reacting, I make sure I weigh and measure everything so that I can check the kcal. If this means persuading the guy in Caffe Nero to rubbish dive for my sandwich wrapper which I forgot to ask for, then I do that. (I did offer to dive myself but that would have taken me behind the sacred counter!)

I also check my weighing and any estimating that has slipped in. Finally I check that I am using the right kcals as those food processors have a nasty habit of "improving" old favourites' recipes or changing the sizes of the portions. I have noticed that the cheese slices, that manage my urge to inhale half a lb while slicing for my sandwich, have mostly gone up in size from 20g to 25/30g - a 25% or 50% increase in weight AND kcal.

I am sure with these tools you will be a long way towards solving any repeating slip or finding out your pattern and working with it not against it.

Just to cheer you up, it could be worse, one of my local slimming club pals is a really careful planner and logs everything. After 2 months she learnt that her pattern over 4 weeks was: gain a half lb for each of 3 weeks and then lose 4lbs the 4th week. She had become philosophical and told me that she was disappointed at gaining at all and that her rate of long term loss was now 2.5lbs a month, but she found her eating plan could be lived with and the trend was downwards so she would take what she could get. But imagine how that feels when you are sitting next to a guy who has had 3 nights out, which he enjoyed, and he has lost 4lbs in a week. Another lost the whole of her weight in "happy halves" and learned to love that.

If I look at my graph for the last 5 years it is very wobbly with a lot of ups, downs and horizontal lines as I worked my way through learning what I needed to know. But the overall trend was always down and it became easier and easier as I learned routines. Plus, of course, all those compliments helped! I think my rate of loss is now shown as 0.3lbs per week on average. But the total is now 5st 6lbs.

Sometimes I spent about 6 months losing and regaining the same 3 or 5lbs. The month I spent at the gym training hard for a holiday, stopped my weight losses totally, but going down 2 dress sizes made up for that!

From past experience I knew that if I did it properly diets worked for me, so I was always motivated to keep going. The successful dieters may not lose fast or lose predictably, they may gain in a planned or unplanned way because of celebrations, holidays, tragedies or just Life, but they ALWAYS keep going.

Some of these ideas may help you solve your mystery gain, or they may not. But if you can keep going with some checks that you are keeping it real, you will lose that pesky lb and more soon!

Keep asking your great questions, you are really making us get our thoughts in line and review what we have learned through the process of moving from obesity to the fit, healthy eating miracles we are today or will be tomorrow. Have a great day and a good week. If you can manage not to let this throw you there could be a bigger loss waiting in your immediate future. The choice is yours.

Venus

[Hidden in reply to Venusflytrap]

Yes, I think it's a fair point that weight gain over a week can be fluid fluctuations - especially if you jump on the scales the morning after a "binge" (like I did today!) you'll be pounds heavier because of keeping more water on board, and this will work its way through the system during the day.

However, I do stick to my view that if you eat 3500 calories more than you burn off over the course of a week or a month or a year, you will put on a pound of fat.

It is fat rather than weight that should concern us, but unfortunately, most bathroom scales don't measure fat separately from the rest of the body.

[Venusflytrap]

Oh yes! You're right there about the weight/fat business. But all of this nutritional business is a bit vague unless we are in the lab, isn't it? I have always thought I could see if I was fat or not. Then I was introduced to the TOFI concept (Thin Outside: Fat Inside!). I would need some expensive imaging to find out the truth. And I have just been told that my cholesterol is up. How? I eat porridge every day, replace some meat with quorn and pulses, have small portions of proteins all of them lean, all my dairy is very low or zero fat, most of my oils are the right ones and by the teaspoon, and I eat about 10 servings of different veg a day. So unless it is a temporary blip, it wasn't my food. Does that mean it's hereditary? Some history of strokes etc on my Dad's side of the family but mostly the men and at older ages than I am. Really puzzled on this one. Not been exercising even the minimum amount lately, could that be it?

Chime in anyone or should I start a new thread?

[Penel in reply to Venusflytrap]

Hi Venus

There is a Cholesterol group on HU, if you need it. Cholesterol levels tends to up naturally at the menopause, perhaps that applies to you?

There's a very big debate around "healthy" levels and whether or not statins are a good idea. It's another area, like nutrition, that has some diametrically opposed views, I'm afraid. And most of the research has been done on men and not women.

Although fats may raise your cholesterol, it's the refined carbs/sugars that cause the real damage. But your levels could well be inherited.

[Venusflytrap]

Thank you Penel , I suppose I should have realised that, if I'd thought about it. Doh! Thanks for your comments. You're right I am post menopausal (whoopee!). My levels have always been low before (I think). I eat a lowish level of carbs and as few sugars as I can manage as I do not like sugar. Many sweet foods are just too sweet for my tastes (even some of the sweeter veg!) I have been following the blood sugar diet recently to support Mr Flytrap who is trying to control his diabetes. So I'm a bit mystified as to why it is high. Will start my research in the directions you suggested. Thanks for being on the ball and pointing me in the right direction.

Venus