No Flour, No Sugar Diet, Worthed It?

Eliminating flour and sugar effectively reduces the amount of "empty" calories from your diet. Many of these foods (based on refined carbohydrates) are also high in fat (pizza, donuts, etc).

The premise is a good one. Despite all the contrary dietary advice of recent years - there does seem to be a growing consensus about refined carbohydrates: We eat too much of them and they provide us with little nutritive value - not to mention the issue of glycemic response.

The No Flour, No Sugar Diet suggests you can lose weight without a dedicated exercise plan. However, it does make some recommendations to increase those results. Exercise shouldn't be a punishment, so find something that you'll look forward to doing and give that 30-60 minutes each day.

It seems that the No Flour, No Sugar Diet would be most ideal for individuals with food allergies who are looking for support to eat healthy. However, if you're looking for a low-carb plan, this one definitely takes it to the extreme. Some testimonials say it's hard to stick to because you're refusing yourself some of the foods you really enjoy, like sandwiches, pizza or pastries. The diet requires a lot of effort on the user's part, as there is daily journaling, measuring portions, detailed reading of food labels (searching for those hidden sugars) and a daily commitment to exercise.

Sample Meal Plans

* Breakfast: Omelet muffin, sliced fresh strawberries
* Morning Snack: Diced cantaloupe
* Lunch: Greek salad
* Afternoon: No-sugar-added yogurt
* Dinner: Chicken breasts in Rosemary-Dijon sauce, spinach salad with tomato vinaigrette, steamed brown rice

* Breakfast: Whole-grain cereal (with no flour or added sugar), nonfat milk, fresh peach
* Morning Snack: Diced pineapple
* Lunch: Green salad with water-packed tuna, sliced tomato, shredded carrot, and no-sugar-added vinaigrette
* Afternoon: Spiced Edamame (Soy beans in the pod)
* Dinner: Meatballs in tomoto sauce and baked polenta with fresh corn

* Breakfast: Basic Crepe filled with sliced lean ham and reduced-fat cheese; sliced apple
* Morning Snack: 1 stalk celery fille with reduced-fat, no-sugar-added peanut butter
* Lunch: Taco salad with spiced prawns
* Afternoon: Spiced Edamame
* Dinner: Curry yogurt chicken, steamed or sauteed zucchini, steamed brown rice

The Secret to Burning Fat up to 300% Faster

When is the best time of day to do your aerobic exercise? The answer is any time! The most important thing is that you just do it. Continuous cardiovascular exercise, such as walking, jogging, stair climbing, or cycling, sustained for at least 30 minutes, will burn body fat no matter when you do it. However, if you want to get the maximum benefits possible from every minute you invest in your workouts, then you should consider getting up early and doing cardio before you eat your first meal – even if you’re not a “morning person.” Early morning aerobic exercise on an empty stomach has three major advantages over exercising later in the day.

First of all, morning cardio burns more fat! Early in the morning before you eat, your levels of muscle and liver glycogen (stored carbohydrate) are low. If you eat dinner at 7 p.m and you eat breakfast at 7 a.m., that's 12 hours without food. During this 12-hour overnight fast, your levels of glycogen slowly decline to provide glucose for various bodily functions that go on even while you sleep. As a result, you wake up in the morning with depleted glycogen and lower blood sugar - the optimum environment for burning fat instead of carbohydrate. How much more fat you'll burn is uncertain, but some studies have suggested that up to 300% more fat is burned when cardio is done in a fasted, glycogen-depleted state.

EXERCISE IN THE EVENING - Do the other half of your workout in the evening. For example, lift weights in the morning and then take a long walk after dinner. Exercising in the evening will keep your body burning fat all night long. You can burn fat faster with plenty of exercise.

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Sleep Disturbance and Your Health

The sleep disorders are organized into four major sections according to presumed etiology. Primary Sleep Disorders are those in which none of the etiologies listed below (i.e., another mental disorder, a general medical condition, or a substance) is responsible. Primary Sleep Disorders are presumed to arise from endogenous abnormalities in sleep-wake generating or timing mechanisms, often complicated by conditioning factors. Primary Sleep Disorders in turn are subdivided into Dyssomnias (characterized by abnormalities in the amount, quality, or timing of sleep) and Parasomnias (characterized by abnormal behavioral or physiological events occurring in association with sleep, specific sleep stages, or sleep-wake transitions).

In the short term the effect to your health are:

* Decreased Performance and Alertness: Sleep deprivation induces significant reductions in performance and alertness. Reducing your nighttime sleep by as little as one and a half hours for just one night could result in a reduction of daytime alertness by as much as 32%.

* Memory and Cognitive Impairment: Decreased alertness and excessive daytime sleepiness impair your memory and your cognitive ability -- your ability to think and process information.

* Stress Relationships: Disruption of a bed partner's sleep due to a sleep disorder may cause significant problems for the relationship (for example, separate bedrooms, conflicts, moodiness, etc.).

* Poor Quality of Life: You might, for example, be unable to participate in certain activities that require sustained attention, like going to the movies, seeing your child in a school play, or watching a favorite TV show.

* Occupational Injury: Excessive sleepiness also contributes to a greater than twofold higher risk of sustaining an occupational injury.

* Automobile Injury: The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) estimates conservatively that each year drowsy driving is responsible for at least 100,000 automobile crashes, 71,000 injuries, and 1,550 fatalities.


The body senses sleep loss as a “stress-inducing” state, which raises levels of stress hormones such as adrenaline and other similar body transmitters. These hormones are what regulate the body’s blood pressure and when these levels are chronically high that may cause blood pressure to be harder to control. Of course, high blood pressure is a risk factor for heart disease. In addition, the ability to control sugar levels, which give our body its necessary fuel to function, seems impaired in people who are have chronic sleep loss. This can lead to diabetes, which also increases the risk of heart disease. We also recognize that a protein in the body called high-sensitivity C-reactive protein, which has been linked to increased risk of heart attack is elevated in patients who are not getting enough sleep. Collectively, it seems that chronic sleep deprivation will probably raise one’s risk of heart disease over the course of a lifetime.