We are in our summer holiday week, this year we’ve spent a lot of time swimming in Lake Biwa.
We’ve watched a lot of movies on amazon prime, too. One film I saw the other day was That Sugar Film, an Australian documentary film about sugar.
It is about a man going through an experiment on himself, changing from his normal diet containing no refined sugar to a high in sugar diet, equivalent to 160 grams (40 tsp) of sugar per day. As a result, he gained weight, grew lethargic, and developed fatty liver disease.
It was good timing to watch it because, in the new paperback version of the Ikigai Diet, I added a chapter on Seven Worst Foods You Want to Avoid If You Don’t Want to Age Quickly, and the first one on the list is sugar.
Well, we all know that sugar is bad for us, but what many of us don’t know is that a lot of so-called “healthy products” contain sugar and we absorb a great amount of sugar without realizing it.
In the film, many people in Australia and more in the United States consume tons of sugar each day, and I felt a lot was to do with the dietary culture; breakfast cereal, bread, muffins, orange juice, yogurt, coffee, and dessert. When you think of healthy alternatives, you are still thinking in the same diet, just replacing white sugar with something else, or decreasing the amount of sugar.
When you have yogurt, you want to make it sweet, when you have bread you want to put jam on it. A lot of dishes are designed to have with sugar.
One thing the Japanese diet is different from the Western diet is that we hardly consume sugar.
We don’t have anything sweet for breakfast, such as cereal with sugar, orange juice, muffins, or pancakes. We don’t have the custom of having dessert after dinner. Even for our tea breaks, we have green tea with pickles, not with cakes or donuts. We have been living like this for centuries.
Not only a few health-conscious people, but the majority of the population has lead a sugar-free diet. I am talking about average people who don’t care about what they eat. Well, at least till a few decades ago. It is a matter of custom and habit. If a population of 100 million could do it, so can anyone else.
If you change the dietary culture entirely, you won’t have to replace sugar with anything else, the dishes we have for breakfast don’t even need sweeteners.
The Ikigai Diet offers a new kind of social conditioning. It will change the dietary culture of the entire planet. Not only what we eat, but how we eat, how we think, how we breathe, how we walk, how we interact with one another, and they all help us condition ourselves not needing things like sugar in our life. There is a way to enjoy your life without sugar. Yes, a way to have fun. I am not talking about a strict diet where you have to give up this and this. With the Ikigai Diet, you can have plenty of delicious foods and you won’t desire sweets anymore.
The Ikigai Diet: The Secret Japanese Diet to Health and Longevity
POD Paperback
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/4991064864
Kindle