How Can I Lose Weight? Sugar Substitutes and Weight Gain

Do you constantly find yourself wondering, how can I lose weight? Have you tried eating low-fat foods, no-sugar snacks, and diet sodas, and you are not losing weight but actually find that you are gaining weight?

Sounds crazy, doesn't it? I thought so too until I started researching the subject a little bit. My friends and I used to drink tons of diet soda, use the little blue, yellow, or pink artificial-sugar sweeteners in our coffee and tea, and buy only the low-fat snacks. But we still did not lose weight and in fact often gained weight.

What I've learned is the body is programmed to anticipate that any food which tastes sweet is going to be calorie-ridden. Artificial sweeteners disrupt the body's innate ability to regulate the calories you are consuming. Typically, when you consume a sweet-tasting beverage or food, your taste buds sense the sweetness and signal to the brain to get ready for a big pile of calories. But when that fails to happen, this gets the body out of sync and it has trouble getting back on track to regulate the appetite.

As a result of this, you tend to actually eat more and thereby gain more weight. So instead of getting slimmer you end up finding yourself a size larger, and all the while you think you're doing yourself a favor by consuming these fake-sugar foods and drinks.

So after reading all this I decided the best thing to do was to simply either drink water or else drink regular soda and eat regular snacks in moderation. That's the key right there.

So if you are consuming a regular diet of low-fat sodas and snacks, and continue to ask yourself the question, how can I lose weight, maybe the answer is not to deprive yourself of sugar but rather just limit your intake of natural sweeteners and drink a little more water. You should see the number on the scale start to get lower instead of higher.