Please explain no added sugar to me?

I am diabetic. My husband is diabetic.

We don’t worry about added sugar.
We count carbohydrates.

There is nothing inherently wrong with sugar
It is not a poison.
And if you have a functioning pancreas and are mostly eating a well balanced diet, you don’t need to worry about it at all.

As Lynn and Pav have mentioned, Calories In/Calories out is the math. The only math. Everything else is just preference.

If you find yourself eating too many sweets, it is wise to reduce the amount. Definitely. And there are lots of tips and tricks to achieve that. In that sense, yes. Avoid added sugars.
You will get to the point where you don’t miss it. Taste buds do evolve after time. I promise.
And yes. You can eat crisps. As long as you eat sensible portions and log it.

Here’s the big secret:
You can eat anything you want, as long as it’s under your calorie budget

Of course, some foods are more satiating than others….

ChristopherLimoges wrote: »

CICO is a myth. I.E. Water/Fiber. All those calories will still be delayed in your system if you're not drinking enough water, or even consuming enough fiber, etc.

CICO is the only proven science that directly impacts weight in humans every. single. time.

Sure, there are variables that impact rates of gain loss, including hydration and fiber intake. But there are loads of other variables as well. All of them have been proven minor as compared to energy balance. It's the primary driving force of all weight changes.

ChristopherLimoges wrote: »

CICO is a myth. I.E. Water/Fiber. All those calories will still be delayed in your system if you're not drinking enough water, or even consuming enough fiber, etc.

No.

Besides, why would a calorie "delay" matter? I know there are circumstances where food exits the digestive system without that food's calories being harvested for use by the body to generate energy. So what? Those calories either don't count as calories in, or they've become a different type of calories out (i.e., they exit as waste rather than being burned as energy). 😉 The amount of non-absorbed calories, in a normal healthy person, isn't enough overall to worry about.

If you're suggesting that it would be a good thing to eat enough fiber and drink enough fluids to have healthy digestive throughput, that would be true.

However, if you're thinking that healthy digestive throughput inherently implies absorbing fewer calories, then I think you're wrong. Think about it: Why would natural selection create humans who, when healthy, absorbed fewer calories? That makes no sense. Natural selection happened primarily during times of food scarcity, not during our current anomalous period of food surplus (in lucky parts of the world). Also, if calories were under-absorbed with healthy digestive throughput, wouldn't that suggest that nutrients would also be under-absorbed from that food? That would be bad, wouldn't it? Calorie absorption and nutrient absorption are are quite bound together, in practice, I believe.

Just because a food may sit longer in a sluggish digestive system, that's not a clear reason why more calories would be absorbed. Besides, there's no way for a body to absorb more calories than are actually ​in the food in the first place, by delaying digestive transit (or any other method). Slow digestive transit doesn't create energy (calories) from nothing.

CICO, which is the calorie counting equation, isn't "a myth", it's a restatement of a basic, inviolable principle of physics. Energy isn't created or destroyed, but only converted from one form to another. Calorie counting, the weight loss method that most directly exploits that equation, isn't a myth either. There's a good bit of estimation and approximation involved, more than I suspect some people realize, but it can still be a practical weight management method for a wide range of people. Me, for one.

OP, as others have said, if you eat a lot of added sugar now, and change things so you eat less or none, then don't replace those calories with other food intake (crisps or carrot sticks, doesn't matter), *and* doing that means you're eating fewer calories than you burn (by a combination of just being alive, daily life movement, exercise), then you'll lose weight. To lose weight, eat fewer calories than you burn.

To lose a meaningful total amount of weight, make that a sensibly moderate number of calories fewer than you burn, or you'll likely burn out or fail out before reaching goal weight. Losing any meaningful amount of weight is not a quick thing. It takes weeks, months, maybe even years. Best take the loss in a sustainable way, eh?

It's a good idea to get good, well-rounded overall nutrition on average, on a number of calories that lets you reach and stay at a healthy body weight.

If eating too much sugar is the thing that puts you over that calorie level while getting good nutrition, or causes you to get sub-par nutrition in order to stay at sensible calories, then you should eat less added sugar. In other scenarios, unless one is diabetic or something like that, sugar intake is an irrelevant consideration - a distraction from the main points of nutrition and weight management.