Story time!

I used to drink my coffee with sugar. Next to the coffee machine at my office there was this big box of sugar sticks, I took one with every cup.

One day, we ran out of sugar sticks, the box was empty. I asked around in the office if anyone knew where we keep the boxes of sugar, everybody answered that they didn't know, because they didn't take sugar in their coffee. If found I was the only one in the entire office drinking coffee with sugar.

That box was 3kg... 3000 grams of sugar, that I consumed in my own in just a matter of a few months...

Kind of shocked by this, I told a colleague about this, and he replied with something that stuck with my till this day: "It's all between your ears, stop taking sugar in your coffee, and after just a week, you won't know better. In fact: you'll come to detest it".

So I did, stopped taking sugar in my coffee cold turkey. And, my colleague was right, after a couple of days, I didn't miss the sugar in my coffee. In fact: I came to appreciate the taste of pure coffee.

A couple weeks later my mother accidentally put sugar in my coffee, as a force of habit, and I actually spat it out. It tasted horrible.

So, If you drink coffee with sugar: just stop doing it and you'll get to enjoy the real taste of coffee, and safe yourself a lot of sugar intake.

Similar story, but with tea. I used to dump sugar into it but eventually I just stopped. Now I have plain black tea every morning. I really can’t stand drinking it with sugar now.

I also ditched soda (except for an occasional mixed drink) and when I want something cold and fizzy I pour a can of seltzer water with lime, orange, cherry, etc. It’s a game changer if you can kick the sugar habits.

Aren't you having violent blood sugar swings with that amount? God it sounds like hell for your body and mind.

You, this.

I can second this fully. Figured out the same thing when I spent a solid week nazi tracking my eating.

The thing that blew my mind. I always used heavy cream in my coffee. 150cal per 2 tablespoons. I would use like a quarter cup. I switch to milk, just 150cal per cup.

The little things really damn matter.

That's why I always drink my coffee black. The amount of calories in sugar and especially "Coffee Mate" is amazing (in a bad way). A serving size of Coffee Mate is actually 1/5 of what I see most people actually put in their coffee. It only looks "low-ish" calories because the serving size is so small.

For folks who don't want to drink their coffee black, erythritol and monkfruit powder make fine zero calorie substitutes. For a lot of things, actually.

Modern zero calorie sweeteners are really impressive. We've come a long way from the days of saccharine.

Black, one sucralose packet per 10 to 20 oz and that's fine for me.

I know that's a wide range, but you can't really do "half-packets" easily and the cup sizes I use vary.

My favorite sweetener is a sucralose/stevia mix in highly concentrated liquid form. You can’t find it in the US, I get it from an importer:

https://chinchileproducts.com/products/iansa-cero-k?_pos=2&_...

About 6 drops is a teaspoon, so 125ml lasts forever. It is much more concentrated than other versions in the US.

The pure stevia versions and pure sucralose versions are okay, but for whatever reason the mix is really just perfect.

Thanks! I'll try this when I run out of my current bottle of sucralose (from Capella, which also makes interesting flavor additives). Shortages have made it occasionally hard to restock and I've yet to really try stevia as a sweetener that I personally add (as opposed to something already added) so I'm gonna enjoy trying something new.

Sucralose is such a godsend. Cheap, meters extremely easily with a liquid dropper, mixes incredibly well into most things, has no bad taste (at least to me).

I love cafe latte made with a high quality bean in a portafilter. I use special higher fat oat milk for it, which gives it a nice nutty flavor and still puts a cup at just about 150kcal. I'm fine with that.

The oat milk actually tastes disgusting to me from the fridge, but is super tasty once steamed. The higher fat version (Oatly calls it Barista Edition) is necessary to steam it. Regular oatmilk stays mostly liquid.

FYI milk undergoes a chemical reaction when steamed in which it is broken down into simpler sugars, hence the increased sweetness.

If anyone remembers the internet personality Ulillillia, he claimed he lost weight by removing the grease from pizza he ate.

Not exactly the diet plan anyone should really choose, but it shows that even changes that feel like they shouldn't matter actually do, even when eating what most would describe as an unhealthy diet. There are a lot of calories in fats and oils, and apparently removing some of them can have significant effects on weight gain or loss.

Also, check out erythritol as a sugar substitute. I use it for everything and actually prefer it to sugar. It has a nice cooling effect in liquids it's dissolved in that you don't get with sugar.

I love pizza and never get to eat it because of the caloric load, and I really doubt that.

Fats are 9 calories a gram. If you remove the available grease you're getting, what, two grams off per slice, maybe? Doesn't seem like that's really moving the needle.

Though now I want to rigorously test this, so the next time I have pizza I'll weigh the napkin before and after soaking up available grease.

There's a lot more than 2 grams of fat in a slice of pizza. I've tried it before because Ulillillia's pizza degreasing meme has lived rent free in my head for like a decade, and I could easily soak a couple of paper towels in pizza grease from just a slice of pizza.

Apparently, all he ate were pizzas, so it wasn't just one slice he was degreasing, but whole pizzas.

A tablespoon of grease (or fat in general) is about 120 calories. A slice of pizza has anywhere from 1 teaspoon to 1 tablespoon of excess grease per slice (especially pepperoni pizzas).

Yeah, he said all he ate were pizzas, so he was doing this for a lot more than just one slice everyday, as well.

Two tablespoons stingy? Holy shit. Even two teaspoons is a lot…

Until you get used to it. When you couple it with other sweet (sugar fortified) items in your diet it just becomes normal.

I highly recommend weighing ingredients when cooking. It's so much easier to be consistent when cooking recipes this way, cup and tablespoon measiremts be damned.

Yes, over one tablespoon is more sugar than an adult should have per day. (Not to mention all the added sugar these days.) Maybe an ice cream on the weekend.

I usually combine with a Almond/Coconut milk and it is fine without sweetener. May take a bit to get used to if you have habits to break.

By whose measurement? AHA says two tablespoons for women, three for men, is a maximum.

You're probably getting that and more just from additives to food. I'm of the opinion that adding additional sugar to anything isn't exactly the healthiest unless you're cooking everything from scratch and can control the amount of added sugar in your diet.

It is 15 grams, too much at once if you want to maintain a level blood sugar. No, it won't kill you but it's a habit no one needs.

1 tablespoon of common granulated sugar is 12 grams.

Some sites say 15, some say 12.5. Tablespoon quantities are typically rounded up to "heaping" as well, so who cares? It is clear from the ancestor post adults are healthier without all this sugar.

The WHO recommends staying below 50g/day, or, for additional health benefits, below 25g/day, which is ca two tablespoons.

But this is another reason why people don't lose weight / get fit / make progress on so many things. 50g / day is fine according to WHO. If that is correct (for argument's sake), we can't then use their 'better' guideline to mean "no adult should".

The perfect is the enemy of the good. People stop trying when they set unrealistic goals for themselves. We don't all need to be hyperfit. Etc.

I have made a ton of personal progress over the last 1.5-2 years in health and several other areas, by being vigilant in refusing to try to change too fast, even for mundane goals. It is important to find the right pace.

I fully agree, there needs to be some room for error or things get expensive, complicated, or just depressing (no cake at birthday parties).

I recently returned home from a trip to the United States where I’d not been since the before times. They put so much sugar in everything and I just couldn’t understand it. I basically felt like I was eating pudding (that is, desert) for every meal. Breakfast was particularly bad (bread has sugar for some reason and I got a sausage that had apparently been soaked in maple syrup) and obviously less sugary things existed (eg sushi didn’t seem to have much). I think I have a sweet tooth but I still found it unpleasant there (and I avoided soda and mostly things that looked obviously sugary). Even if things didn’t have sugar in they would have sweeteners.

> "Wow, you're really stingy with the sugar in your coffee."

> Except I wasn't. I was actually indulging myself, like two tablespoons.

Is that correct? 2tbsp? 30ml? That's beyond indulgent. Sugar in hot drinks is typically measured in teaspoons, where two is a lot. And that's a third as much as yours; his I dread to think.

I don't say it to be condescending, but I am sceptical that sugared coffee drinkers have ever tried half-decent coffee (without instinctively adding/thinking they need to add sugar to it) anyway.

Yes. In my defence it is a large glass :) When I do that, I'm drinking it for the sugar + caffeine boost. Like I would a can of Coca Cola. It's about the same amount of sugar as a standard can. Absolutely not healthy, I know.

Being from the UK I tend to use milk rather than cream in coffee. One pack of raw sugar is 20 calories. One ounce full fat milk the same. Being I only drink a cup or two a day, 40 calories a cup is a reasonable price to pay to avoid artificial sweetener.

What blew my mind is how many calories are in a couple ounces of trail mix. I used to snack on that whenever I’d pass the cupboard. I can pay for a week of coffee by avoiding a few handfuls of trail mix!

> What blew my mind is how many calories are in a couple ounces of trail mix

As a bit of an aside: putting as many calories in as little weight as possible is kind of the point of trail mix, so you're not carrying kilos upon kilos of food when hiking.

I take lactose free milk with my coffee, same amount of sugar technically but apparent sweetness goes up because lactose has broken down and lactose isn’t so sweet on the tongue

In my family we don't drink calories. I do give my son some fortified almond milk and some juice if he squeezes it himself (the hard way, by grinding it against whatever they are called. By hand).

I realized when I was 20 that I could easily drink 15% of my energy needs. Mostly empty calories (soda and the like).

I stopped. Now I drink water 98% of the time.

Drinks other than water, tea (no milk), black coffee (if too strong, make it muricanize it) were a mistake, change my mind.

Nothing wrong with diet coke. (Well, I don't like the caffeine so I don't usually drink it, but still.) Gatorade zero after a workout can really hit the spot some days too.

Every time I've successfully lost significant weight, I was drinking mostly water and not diet sodas. I half-way wonder if our bodies release insulin into the bloodstream in part due to the presence of a sweet taste on the tongue -- even if noncaloric. Because anecdotally, I think I get hungrier faster after a Diet Coke.

I'd wager regularly consuming sweetened things also makes it a lot harder to quit sweetened things and get rid of the "sugar craving" reported by many.

Similarly, I've heard of people giving up sugary colas that they used to drink multiple times per day at work and losing scads of weight while making no other changes.

I lost several pounds by replacing high fructose based creamer with a little honey.

No you didn't, unless the quantities were very different. Honey is basically nature's high-fructose syrup.

Interesting. Well, more importantly to me the crash is almost nonexistant compared to the creamer. There might be a quantity difference, too.

That's almost certainly psychosomatic. The sugars in the two are basically identical, and the creamer presumably has some fat in it, which would actually make it have a lower glycemic index (meaning the crash would be slower with the creamer).

This is mostly what the article calls the "halo effect". People assume that "natural" things are lower calorie or healthier, which is sometimes the case, but fructose is fructose. It doesn't really matter if it's from corn or honey. Honey arguably has another couple marginal benefits, but it's absolutely not useful in losing weight. It's something like 90% sugar by weight.

What I'd actually suspect is something closer to: all diets work. Almost every fad diet works, even when they're completely counter to nutritional science because the simple act of paying attention to what you eat has positive effects.

Haha, no. It's not psychosomatic.

It's most likely portion difference plus all the other crap in the highly processed creamer.

stevia tho, zero calorie sweetener - why not use that instead of azucar