Sugar Season has Arrived… Here’s How to Survive!

Hey everyone. Dr Angela here.

Today I want to talk to you about sugar season!

Sugar season has started. It starts with Halloween and goes all the way through Easter. Let’s talk about what you can do to protect yourself from the sugar binges that are so common this time of year.

*Full Video Transcription Below*

If you don’t already know me, I’m a board certified obesity medicine specialist and I’m also the founder and creator of Journey Beyond Weight Loss, an online program designed to help people lose weight and keep it off. If you have children or grandchildren, I want you to make sure you watch this video and share it. And if you don’t have children or grandchildren, I still want you to watch this video and share it because I want you to understand this is not your fault.

In the food industry, marketing is bold and obvious and it starts again with Halloween and they start Halloween in August, right? Maybe even after 4th of July, they’re starting with Halloween. And think about just Oreo cookies for an example. So the they will have orange food coloring in the filing of Oreo cookies this time of year. And then once Halloween is done, they move on to Christmas. So then it’s red and green filling and then it’s Valentine’s day and maybe some pink and then it’s Easter colors after that. And so that’s just one example.

Each season seems to have its own flavor. Right now it’s pumpkin spice. So the food marketers are just deliberately working very hard to do what my colleague David Kessler calls ‘hijacking the brain’. They are working on trying to hijack your brain to cause cravings that are going to cause you to BUY more and of course – EAT more! And of course, that’s what results in wight gain! So I want you to be part of the solution!

So let’s think about what you can do for Halloween. Now I don’t know if you know it, but sugar is eight times more addictive than cocaine. And so when it comes to handing out Halloween treats, you wouldn’t be handing out little bags of cocaine powder to children, right?

So let’s not hand out a drug that’s eight times more addictive. Okay. And I know this sounds kind of crazy and this sounds kind of harsh, but I always joke around and say, you know, “I used to be a drug Lord.” I have two young, I have two daughters – and when they were young I was the girl scout cookie mom. Now think about what drug Lords – do they have other people sell drugs for them, right? And so here I am – and we’re having little kids sell ‘drugs’.

Like there’s a reason why I couldn’t eat two thin mints! I ate the whole sleeve. So this stuff is powerful guys. And so the girl Scouts are selling ‘drugs’! So just keep that in mind when girl scout cookie season comes along.

But let’s talk about Halloween. What can you do now so that you’re not passing out this drug to children? So I went to the dollar store and I found some fun little treats that you can hand out to kids for Halloween. I mean, this is a beautiful bowl. We’ve got little silly straws. We’ve got necklaces for kids. Imagine this. So fun little necklaces and we’ve got little googly eye rings. Okay. I put some Play-Doh in here. It’s Play-Doh. All of these things come in packages that are a multiple pack, multiple things in a package, so you’re not breaking the bank and each one is a dollar. So packages of this for a dollar, these little kaleidoscope things. I’ve got some Halloween pencils with some fun little erasers on top.

If you don’t want to go the Halloween route there, you can just get stickers like this and cut them up and give them out. Here’s another idea. I went to at the dollar store and I found this box of puzzles for a dollar and I took the individual puzzles and I packaged them up individually. What little girl wouldn’t love that, right? I’ve got a glow in the dark little car toys. I’ve got stickers, Halloween stickers. You can get all kinds of stickers or temporary tattoos for kids. They love this kind of stuff. So think about what other kinds of things that you can put in your trick or treat a bowl for the kids so that you don’t want to get egged, right!!?

So I want you to feel good about this. I want you to realize that if you start with Halloween, you can feel good about this. I’m starting with Halloween. You’re not gonna let yourself fall prey to the food marketers, right? You’re not gonna let yourself fall prey during this season.

Second thing that you can feel good about is that you get to be on the leading edge of preventing diabetes, right? I don’t know if you realize it, but diabetes is becoming more and more common. I’m diagnosing it in younger and younger people all the time. And one in three will be diabetic by 2050. One in four high school students already has prediabetes or diabetes! That’s what’s going on in this country. 13% of children have nonalcoholic fatty liver disease. So this is the liver disease that happens for alcoholics after decades of alcohol abuse.

Our children are getting it from fructose. So fructose and alcohol are metabolized exactly the same way in the body, in the liver. And so you don’t want to be handing out a Halloween candy is fructose, guys. That’s what it is! So you don’t want to be handing that stuff out. You want to prevent liver disease and diabetes among our children.

Third reason is I can’t tell you how many of my patients have come in after Halloween and said, well, I binged on the leftover Halloween candy. Well, if it’s not there, it’s not there to binge on. That will get you started in the right way too.

So let’s go out and have fun on Halloween. And if you want some more information about the food industry and their marketing tactics, I’ve got a handy guide for you. It’s called Five Dirty Little secrets of the food industry. And I put the link in the description (below). Click on that, and you can get your free guide.

In the meantime, I want you to have fun getting healthy.

I’ll talk to you next time. Bye bye.

Dr. Angela.

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