Cut out that fructose from your diet...

To Shed Pounds, You MUST Eliminate This From What You Eat

by Joseph Mercola

To Lose Weight You MUST Limit Fructose to Less than 15 Grams per Day

It is important to understand that the foods you eat are three times more important for controlling your weight than your exercise. It's very easy to sabotage yourself with sugary foods and beverages; especially beverages containing high fructose corn syrup, which many sports- and energy drinks are chock full of.

Consuming fructose and other sugars just before or during exercise will cause your blood sugar and insulin levels to spike and crash, most likely resulting not in increased hydration, but in reduced athletic performance. Not only that, but consuming fructose after your workout will completely shut down your body's production of HGH! This includes items that are typically viewed as healthy, such as fruit juice or even large amounts of high fructose fruits.

According to Dr. Robert Lustig, fructose is "isocaloric but not isometabolic." This means you can have the identical amount of calories from fructose or glucose, fructose and protein, or fructose and fat, but the metabolic effect will be entirely different. Different nutrients provoke different hormonal responses, and those hormonal responses play an important role in determining what happens to those calories, including how much ends up being stored as fat. This is why calorie-counting doesn't work for weight loss.

One of the most thorough scientific analyses published to date on the topic of fructose and weight gain found that fructose consumption leads to decreased signaling to the central nervous system from two hormones, leptin and insulin, both of which play key roles in hunger and satiety, as well as weight control.

Leptin is responsible for controlling your appetite and fat storage, as well as telling your liver what to do with its stored glucose. When your body can no longer "hear" leptin's signals, weight gain, diabetes and a host of related conditions may occur. Insulin is also a potent regulator of fat accumulation. The analysis concluded that:

"The long-term consumption of diets high in … fructose is likely to lead to increased energy intake, weight gain, and obesity."

So please understand that the number one step of any weight loss and weight maintenance plan is to severely restrict or eliminate fructose from your diet. My recommendation is to keep your total fructose intake below 25 grams of fructose per day, if you're in good health. Most people will also benefit from limiting your fructose from fruit to 15 grams a day, and, if you need to lose weight, you likely will need to limit your total fructose consumption to 15 grams a day total, including that from fruit...

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