Podcast
She runs, he runs
A life without sugar: I tried it
Sugar is addictive and thick. Above all, our brain makes us reach for the sweet stuff again and again.
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For some time lives star– Editor Alexandra Kraft almost without sugar. How she is doing and what has changed for her as a runner – an experience report.
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My record was just lousy. I realized this when I ate a Bircher muesli with cherries in the morning. After that, I had an unpleasant sensation in the stomach. Heavy, full and grumpy. And the sweet taste in the mouth did not want to disappear even after brushing your teeth. Pretty soon after, I was hungry again. I was craving something to eat. Funny, I thought. Shouldn’t muesli fill up at least for a few hours? Irritated, I rummaged the packaging from the trash can. The 100 gram portion in the organic shop had cost almost four euros. “Tastes great, the best we have,” the cashier had given me on the way.
When I looked at the bottom, where hidden and small printed the ingredients were, then the shock. Of the 100 grams, 45 grams were sugar. The World Health Organization WHO recommends a maximum of 25 grams per day for adults. Everything about it is harmful to health. With the two spoons of sugar, which I had stirred into my tea as always, I had already before I left the house in the morning, the double portion of the sweet crystal intus. A real shock that made me think. Today, the excessive consumption of sugar is considered the main driver of the development of particularly unhealthy belly fat.
Even without excess weight, you can live unhealthy
I do not have excess weight, run two, sometimes three times a week and ride a bike to work. I had the feeling that this was the best way to protect me from cardiovascular disease or diabetes. But that was a misconception. In my head I calculated. A can of coke every few days. In between a few toffifee, the sugar in the tea, at lunch a small chocolate pudding for dessert, gummy bears and so on. It added up a lot. I honestly completely lost the feeling of how much sugar I was eating per day. Open or hidden, every now and then. After my little extrapolation, however, I quickly realized: clearly too much. Many people in Germany feel the same way as I do. On average, a person in this country eats 35 kilos of sugar per year.
Because it affects so many, we looked at the new episode of our running podcast “She Runs. He’s running.”concerned with the issue of how the regular and excessive consumption of the sweet substance makes us sick. My co-host Mike Kleiß was also addicted to sugar. “I even got up at night to get sweets from the fridge,” he reports. It also unites us that at some point we decided to dramatically reduce our sugar consumption. Mike tries to avoid it whenever possible. For almost three years now, I have mostly avoided sugar completely. How a life without sugar works and how the renunciation of mileage can affect-this and much more you will learn in the new episode of the podcast. Listen in.
