SANE Food Swaps that Defeat Diabesity
Most diets feature some form of deprivation. For instance, you can’t enjoy that piece of chocolate cake or other favorite food while on this or that diet. How long can you really go without enjoying your favorite foods? Fortunately, you won’t find such nonsense on the SANE setpoint diet. That’s because there are SANE food swaps for every inSANE food (except for those highly processed “food-like” products.) These foods help lower your setpoint and defeat Diabesity.
Learning about these food swaps frees you from the tediousness and deprivation of dieting. You actually won’t be dieting at all. You’ll simply be eating SANEly, using food swaps to help make your meals more enjoyable and to help you defeat Diabesity. This approach puts you on the right track — and keeps you there. No longer will you feel hungry or deprived or feel like you’re missing out on something.
Why SANE food swaps are necessary to defeat diabesity
The truth is that food swaps are not necessary. Not everyone needs food swaps. However, most people miss their former way of eating at some point, miss those certain inSANE comfort foods. If they don’t have access to those foods, they will likely indulge their desires, perhaps even permanently turning inSANE.
Our goal is to help you eat SANEly as much as possible. Perfection is not always possible, and, at times, you will eat an inSANE food. That’s fine. But we want to make it as easy as possible for you to stay SANE by ensuring your satisfaction with these foods.
Why is staying SANE so important? The health threat of Diabesity makes it essential you have tools that help you eat SANEly to lose weight long term and that you enjoy it. According to a 2017 report published in Clinical Diabetes and Endocrinology, Diabetes is the largest health epidemic in human history. More than 1 billion people worldwide suffer from Diabesity, including 50% of Americans over the age of 65.
The link between type 2 diabetes and obesity
Diabesity is a condition where you suffer from both type 2 diabetes and obesity simultaneously. The term “Diabesity” was coined to describe the interrelationship between these two diseases. The heartbreaking truth is obesity leads to type 2 diabetes and vice versa. In fact, if someone has obesity, there is a 90 percent chance they will develop type 2 diabetes.
This is because both obesity and type 2 diabetes involve a dysfunction of the hormone insulin. If you are diagnosed with type 2 diabetes, insulin is building up in your bloodstream. The continual presence of insulin makes it impossible for you to burn fat; consequently, weight gain and obesity are almost inevitable. If you’re obese, your body is not doing its job of regulating your weight. This leads to insulin building up in your bloodstream, leading to type 2 diabetes.
Poor-quality diet is the main contributor to the development of diabesity.
Poor-quality diet and diabesity
Eating a diet of refined foods, starchy carbs, sugar, and highly processed foods breaks your metabolic system. Because these foods contain no fiber, they are quickly digested and absorbed into your bloodstream. As your blood glucose levels rise, it triggers the pancreas to release the hormone insulin.
Insulin travels through your bloodstream to your cells, “telling” them to open up and let the glucose in. Your cells need glucose for energy, and they cannot absorb glucose without insulin. To avoid a toxic buildup of glucose in your bloodstream, insulin must quickly clear it from your bloodstream.
Because poor-quality foods rapidly raise blood glucose levels, insulin doesn’t have time to take all of the glucose to your cells. So, it shuttles most of those calories to your fat cells. You can easily see how eating a poor-quality diet leads to obesity. But how does it lead to type 2 diabetes? If you continually eat starchy carbs and sugar, the pancreas continually pumps out insulin, meaning insulin is always present in your bloodstream. When insulin is always present, cells become numb to it and will not open up for the glucose, a condition called “insulin resistance.” This leads to type 2 diabetes.
If a poor-quality diet leads to diabesity, it makes sense a high-quality diet does the opposite – defeats diabesity. Indeed, research shows it does exactly that. We will show you how to do that, too, with the help of SANE food swaps.
SANE food swaps: A focus on quality, not quantity
The science is clear. If you want to reverse or avoid Diabesity, focus on the quality of the calories you consume, not the quantity! Why? Because if you get WHAT to eat right, HOW MUCH you eat will take care of itself.
This is why you will never meet someone who became diabetic by eating too many non-starchy vegetables, nutrient-dense protein, whole-food fats, and low-fructose fruits. This is because not all calories are created equal: They work differently in the body depending on which food they come from.
Those who say, “A calorie is a calorie,” are simply misinformed. Consider two water glasses. On one level, they are the exact same. They are the same color, same size, and hold the same amount of clear liquid. However, this cup contains 8 ounces of water while this cup contains 8 ounces of gasoline. In this case, is “a cup a cup?” On one level yes. On a more relevant level – especially if you are considering putting either of these into your body – they are totally different! One can help heal you, while the other can kill you. The same thing applies to calories. Some types can heal you, and other types will kill you.
Factors that determine the quality of calories
The quality of calories varies wildly and is determined by four factors: Satiety, Aggression, Nutrition, and Efficiency (SANE).
- Satiety is how quickly calories fill you up.
- Aggression is how likely calories are to be stored as body fat.
- Nutrition is how many vitamins, minerals, essential amino acids, essential fatty acids, and so forth, that calories provide.
- Efficiency is how easily calories are converted to body fat.
SANE foods fill you up quickly and keep you satisfied for a long time while they help to balance your hormones, reduce neurological inflammation, and heal your gut thanks to the therapeutic levels of essential nutrients they provide. Be sure to catch the Diabesity Docu-Series for an awesome explanation of this process.
The more high-quality SANE foods you eat, the lower your setpoint and the stronger your defenses against diabesity… and the best part is that you will absolutely love SANE foods. You will never feel deprived, especially with all the SANE food swaps available to you. All your favorite tastes, flavors, and textures are available in abundance!
Food quality explained
Before revealing some great SANE food swaps, let’s discuss the 4 factors that determine the quality of calories above.
Satiety
This one-word satiety can change your life. It’s how scientists measure how “satisfying” various foods are. For example, a food with high Satiety satisfies you quickly and keeps you satisfied for a long time. On the other hand, you must eat a lot of low-satiety foods to feel satisfied, and before long, you’re hungry again.
Aggression
Calories also vary in how likely they are to be stored as body fat and how they impact your blood sugar and hormones. The more Aggressive calories are, the more your body will store them as fat due to their impact on blood sugar and hormones. So it’s not about eating less food, it’s about eating foods that less aggressively dump glucose into your bloodstream.
Nutrition
Unfortunately, what you’ve learned about nutrition is incomplete. Rather than looking at total nutrition, you need to examine “nutrients per calorie” to see how nutritious a specific food really is.
When you look at the nutritional breakdown on food labels, you may look at the calorie count and then all the details below it. All good. You are halfway there. The only thing left to unlock a whole new world of setpoint-lowering nutrition is to divide those details by the number of calories.
When you do this, you’ll see that a cup of spinach is way more nutritious than a cup of enriched wheat flour. Knowing how nutritious a specific food really is will help you defeat Diabesity.
Efficiency
The fourth and final part of the SANE acronym might be the most revolutionary and is definitely the least well-known in the mainstream. The E in SANE stands for “Efficiency.” Your body varies wildly in its ability to store things you consume as body fat. Some things you consume can’t be stored as fat, while others are very Efficiently stored as body fat. If your goal is to have less fat on your body, it’s helpful to eat foods that your body is inEfficient at storing as body fat.
There seems like a lot to remember here, but if you keep three words and four food groups in mind you will be good to go. Those three words are Water, Fiber, and Protein. The more water, fiber, and protein there is in a specific food, the SANEr it is, the higher its quality, and the more it will lower your setpoint and protect you against diabesity. In contrast, the less fiber, water, and protein in it — think processed fats starches and sweets — the less SANE it is, the lower its quality, and the more it raises your setpoint and risk of Diabesity.
4 SANE food groups
To make it even simpler, all you need to do is remember to choose foods from these 4 food groups: non-starchy vegetables, nutrient-dense protein, whole-food fats, and low-fructose fruit.
Non-starchy vegetables
Your number one nutritional goal is that every time you eat, half your plate or half of what you eat is a non-starchy veggie… these types of veggies are easy to identify because generally they grow above ground, can be eaten raw, and need to be stored in the refrigerator or freezer.
Nutrient-dense protein
Next to the non-starchy veggies filling half your plate, you want to have about a third of your plate containing plenty of satisfying nutrient-dense protein.
Whole-food fats
Next, you want to enjoy whole food fats. These are things like nuts, seeds, avocados, cocoa, and whole eggs. The key is to eat the whole food… aka whole nuts and seeds vs. processed oils so that you enjoy the most setpoint-lowering and diabetes-defeating benefits.
Low-fructose fruits
Last but not least, if you’d really like to eat a serving or two of low-fructose fruits daily, feel free to, but you don’t need to. Everything that fruits do, non-starchy vegetables do but with about 10 times less sugar.
Easy food swaps
Food swaps are a great way to lower your setpoint and still enjoy your favorite meals. There is one caution, however: don’t expect all food swaps to taste exactly like their replacements. Most of them won’t. But the amazing thing is that eventually, you’ll get used to the new taste and even grow to like or even love it!
Pasta and rice
There are many food swaps for pasta and rice. Try spaghetti squash (squoodles) or zucchini noodles (zoodles) covered with low-sugar or no-sugar-added marinara sauce. To make it even better, cook some grass-fed ground beef and add it to the sauce. Yum yum!
Shredded cabbage, shaved Brussels sprouts, and bean sprouts are all great food swaps for pasta and rice. And let’s not forget cauliflower rice. Even regular grocery stores are selling it now!
Potatoes
You have many choices of food swaps for potatoes. Turnips or radishes, eggplant, squash, and zucchini are all excellent replacements. They can take the place of potatoes in many dishes. Mashed cauliflower is also a popular replacement for mashed potatoes.
Bread and tortillas
You can make SANE bread and tortillas by simply replacing white flour with flax, coconut flour, almond flour, and psyllium. You can also replace bread and tortillas with lettuce leaves, collard leaves, kale leaves, etc. They will have a different flavor, but they are SO SANEly good for you!
Cookies/cakes/pies
You can make SANE cookies, cakes, and pies by replacing white flour with the following: golden flaxseed meal, coconut flour, almond meal, and other nut flours. You can also replace the sugar with natural sugars such as Stevia or Erythritol.
Sugar/honey/syrups/jams
This is one of the easiest food swaps. Simply replace the sugar with Erythritol, Xylitol, Monk Fruit, or low-fructose fruits.
Hot and cold cereals
You can simply make your own SANE cereals using cooked pumpkin, coconut, ground flax, nuts, and/or chia.
Next step: choose healthy diabesity food swaps with SANE
Ready to finally break free from the yo-yo dieting rollercoaster by balancing your hormones and lowering your body’s setpoint weight?
Want to know the exact foods and serving sizes that are scientifically proven by over 1,300 peer-reviewed research studies to boost metabolism, burn fat and enjoy virtually effortless weight loss like a naturally thin person?
Download the free SANE metabolism boosting food list, cheat sheet, and “Eat More, Burn More” weight loss program by .
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