Do Artificial Sweeteners Inhibit Fat Loss?
Do artificial sweeteners help, inhibit, or have no effect on weight loss and fat loss? Aren't they a better alternative to sugar?
Artificial Sweeteners Raise Stress, Cortisol and Fat Around the Belly
If you are under stress, you are making cortisol; it is basically a weak form of adrenalin. Cortisol helps your body to mobilize itself when you are under attack.
The human body is very good at mobilizing for stress – its how we kept from getting eaten by larger, faster, stronger animals (that, and good dose of smarts) in the old days. Today, it is how we pull all-nighters for tests, catch buses, and deal with bad drivers.
One small problem with all of this, though, is that your body does not differentiate between a saber tooth tiger, road rage, or endocrine disruption – it is all stress. Therefore, it all makes cortisol, and too much cortisol leads to too much fat around the waist.
Artificial Sweeteners and Fat Legs
Legs get fat for two main reasons – poor estrogen metabolism and poor growth hormone production. In the case of my female client, her body was too busy detoxifying and storing the artificial sweeteners to do things correctly, i.e., tying up her healthy estrogen production pathways so that she could do the work of detoxification, and making more storage bins – fat – for the toxins that she couldn’t handle.
Once she got the artificial sweeteners out of her diet, the nutritional protocol that I prescribed for her was able to do the work it needed to do because the overall toxicity burden was reduced.
Hidden Artificial Sweeteners
Just because you are not using Splenda, Equal, or Sweet & Low, does not mean that you do not have artificial sweeteners in your diet. Diet soda, no- low-sugar foods, and even some low-fat foods add artificial sweeteners to their recipes to make them more palatable. I always dissuade my clients from eating any processed foods of any kind, but everybody likes their candy now and then, so when you do cheat, cheat with the real thing, not some halfway kind of garbage food.
