SUGAR QUESTION!!

I am always over on sugar, mainly from dairy products. I don't track my sugar at all.

It's best to try to stay away from added sugars, but I really don't worry much about naturally occurring sugars. Naturally ocurring sugars are also coming with lots of macro and micronutrients, whereas added sugars are coming with very little nutrition.

It won't affect your weight loss if you stay within your calorie goal.

I set my sugar to 1000 grams...that way I'm never over:devil:

Good for you on giving up candy. I'm a huge candy lover myself so I know how hard it is!

Never feel bad for going over on sugar because of fruit. Fruits are full of nutrition! Not a single empty calorie there.

I started trying to watch my sodium & sugar intake ontop of calories, fat, and fiber, and am a little frustrated. I do fine with everything except sugar!! Today for example I am already over my sugar allowance and still have 700 calories left. I thought fruit is supposed to be healthy, but it is actually very high in sugar :-( I had 2 peaches today (my current fruit obsession :-) and found out after that they are 15g of sugar each!! I am a big candy-lover, but am not eating it anymore because it's bad for me... so instead I eat quite a bit of fruit to help with my cravings.

I guess what I am wondering is... how important is it to stay within your sugar limit? and how does it affect weight loss??

Sugar is not unhealthy. There is no reason to track your sugar, unless you're eating twinkies and muffins all day.

I'm glad this was posted. I was confused a bit, too-- I LOVE apples and grapes.

I actually had watched a show that expressed the more sugar you eat, the worse/more you crave. I had a HUGE sweets problem. Chocolate, cake, candy, you name it I could eat 6 servings worth for breakfast! What did I do? I went cold turkey except sugar in my coffee n natural sugar. I had a headache first 3 days, but feel great now, and agree I think of it n crave it much less. True test:TOM! It's coming up. Hope this helps.

There is a big difference in candy sugar and fruit sugar. Sugar in fruit is natural (fructose) and sugar in candy is processed (sucrose). Your body will break down fructose much easier than sucrose.

Here is a good article for you. Hope this helps.
http://www.livestrong.com/article/540374-refined-sugar-vs-fructose/

That's actually not true. Most fruit has large amounts of sucrose in it. Also, sucrose is made up of glucose and fructose. The human body has a specific enzyme (called sucrase) that's entire job in your digestive system is to break sucrose into its separate glucose and fructose molecules. The human body is actually incredibly inefficient at digesting fructose alone, but is incredibly efficient at digesting free glucose, and can also very efficiently process fructose when it is paired with glucose (which it almost always is.)

As for the original question, if you are honest with your overall calorie consumption, and getting enough protein and fat, sugar does not matter at all, unless you are diabetic, or have another metabolic dysfunction that affects sugar digestion.

Our bodies are genetically programmed to love sugar, not because carbs are good for us but because fruit has vitamins in it!

Skip the fruit & take a multivitamin supplement and watch the pounds melt off, then please watch the movie "Fat-Head" on Hulu or Netflix, it does a much better job explaining than I ever could. I'm down a very healthy 25 lbs in 23 weeks after watching "Fat-Head".

I wanted to exercise but haven't really gotten around to it, the only changes I have made are to reduce my food-carb intake to 1/4th of what it used to be and I switched from beer to vodka for my alcohol intake (less carbs).

I do still eat bread (such a good delivery vehicle for meat) and I haven't ever paid attention to fat or calories, but with these relatively minor lifestyle changes I'm loosing right around 1lb/week. Asking "can I substitute broccoli in place of the fries" takes way less effort than 3-5 hours a week at the gym and 20 minutes of daily calorie tracking.

@Tigerword that is incorrect. If you had bothered to read the article it would tell you that the information in this article is referring to the study which was done in the European Journal of Clinical Nutrition.
Glucose is the sugar that is turned into glycogen and stored in the cells for energy or it there is too much it is turned into fat.
Your information is outdated.

The human body stores roughly 2-3 pounds of glycogen when completely full. That's about 900-1350 grams of glycogen. Unless you are in a coma and not moving, you are constantly burning glycogen, stores are almost never full. Even when burning fat, the body has to burn glycogen to facilitate fat burning.

Also, I was unaware that the European Journal of Clinical Nutrition has only published ONE study in its entire existence. Throwing out a name of a journal, is not citing a study. Citing a study is giving the title, source, and date of publication of the study, in addition to the authors, in order to allow the reader to look up said study, rather than having to blindly guess as to which study, in the decades of studies from a publication to look in. Modern articles, particularly Internet articles, should provide links to actual studies, as a good amount of them are published online nowadays. Go ahead and read an article by Alan Aragon or Lyle McDonald if you want to see what I mean by, "citing a study."

Our bodies are genetically programmed to love sugar, not because carbs are good for us but because fruit has vitamins in it!

Skip the fruit & take a multivitamin supplement and watch the pounds melt off, then please watch the movie "Fat-Head" on Hulu or Netflix, it does a much better job explaining than I ever could. I'm down a very healthy 25 lbs in 23 weeks after watching "Fat-Head".

I wanted to exercise but haven't really gotten around to it, the only changes I have made are to reduce my food-carb intake to 1/4th of what it used to be and I switched from beer to vodka for my alcohol intake (less carbs).

I do still eat bread (such a good delivery vehicle for meat) and I haven't ever paid attention to fat or calories, but with these relatively minor lifestyle changes I'm loosing right around 1lb/week. Asking "can I substitute broccoli in place of the fries" takes way less effort than 3-5 hours a week at the gym and 20 minutes of daily calorie tracking.

You do realize you are losing weight solely because you've cut calories, right? If you've gone from (for example) 200 grams of carbs a day to 50 grams a day, that's cutting 600 calories a day. If you had cut 75% of your protein or fat consumption, you would've had the same results.

Haven't watched Fat-Head, but any documentary that recommends taking supplements instead of eating actual food is 100% wrong. Calories make people gain and lose weight, not sugar or fruit.

^ More people need to listen to this guy.