I kicked the sugar dragon.

Seriously.

Whether the sugar came in the form of grains, alcohol, or soft drinks, I quit them. Using that one crazy trick, I’ve been able to live a much healthier, fuller life.

Want to lose weight?

Let’s start with drinks. Stop drinking sodas. Stop drinking fruit juice. Stop drinking energy drinks or vitamin water. All of these things have sugar in them. If you saw just how much sugar was contained in some of these drinks, you’d be shocked. In some cases, the sugar content is so high, it’s almost to the point of saturation.

Next, let’s move to savory foods. Things like bread, pasta, pizza, chips, crackers, and just about anything in the center aisles of the supermarket have lots of sugar in them. Take a look at the nutritional information sometime. Why some foods have sugar in them (and as a second, third, or fourth ingredient) is because when fat is removed from foods, it tastes bland, so they have to replace it with something to make people think it tastes good. Enter our enemy: sugar.

Finally, there’s the easy to identify sweets: desserts, candies, donuts, and treats. The vast majority of these are full of sugar. What’s interesting to me is that American desserts are so over-sweetened as compared to the desserts of other cultures. I remember, at the height of my sugar consumption, my mother made some traditional Hungarian pastries for me, and I commented to her that I thought she didn’t add enough sugar to it because it wasn’t sweet. She replied to me that it was sweetened as she always had made it, and suggested that I ate too much sugar and was desensitized to sweetness. I scoffed at the time, but I think she was completely right. When eating the very same pastry this past Christmas, I found it to be plenty sweet; almost too sweet for me, now.

My crazy trick to losing weight: cut the sugar as much as you can. Some doctors go so far as to say that sugar is a toxin to humans. While I won’t go that far, I do believe that it is the root of our obesity epidemic. Coupled with the horrible advice recommending low-fat and grain-based diets, it’s a perfect storm for poor health.

Kick the sugar dragon. Life is amazing when you don’t have it on your back!