The world is LOADED with sugar. If you think you do not eat TONS of sugar, then you are probably living in denial because most people who don’t eat “additional sugar” still eat a ton of sugar. By additional sugar, I mean adding it to your coffee or tea or cereal or anywhere that you are spooning it on or eating a lot of candy or baked goods.
Here in the South a lot of people drink sweet tea. Tons of sugar so if that is a habit for you, then you are taking in a lot of additional calories and a lot of carbs and spiking your blood sugar and causing your poor pancreas to work overtime to pump out insulin to help cope with it. I understand you grew up drinking it, but it is a bad habit and most people are not having it as a rare treat like an ice cream cone on the 4th of July — they are drinking it regularly and really sweet tea should be consider a rare treat that you have a couple of times a year.
While I am on tea, I always think of a client who was such a helicopter Mom and she was extremely controlling over her daughter so she had a lot to say when her daughter and her were training with me but they were both having trouble with their weight. Why aren’t these workouts helping? Well, trust me, it isn’t the workouts. It is most likely your diet. When I asked her to show me her food diary — they of course were too busy for that — but she did mention Starbucks. Oh do tell me more about what you have at Starbucks. Well, it seems they were stopping for a banana bread or a cookie and a nice HUGE sweet tea (it’s ok though Dave cause it is herbal iced tea). Once I explained to her that every pump that Starbucks put into that tea is pure liquid syrup loaded with sugar, she still looked at me like I was crazy.
There seems to be people who don’t believe drinks count but they count for calories and they count for sugar so if you are enjoying super sweet sugary drinks, you might want to check the nutrition label or look it up online (the 800 calories that her “its ok herbal tea” had was a big source of their diet problem)