Will Giving up Salt and Sugar Help You Lose Weight?

Last Updated on April 23, 2023 by admin

It’s summertime, which means everyone’s focused on doing what they can to lose weight so they can look good in a swimsuit. You may have decided to do the same, but most diets haven’t produced great results for you. Now, you’re thinking of curtailing your salt and sugar intake. Will it help you lose weight?

Yes, giving up salt and sugar can help you achieve your weight loss goals. This, combined with cutting out oils, are the benchmarks of the salt, oil, and sugar or SOS-free diet. It’s important to eliminate not only salt and sugar from your diet but processed foods with sodium and sugar in them as well. 

In this article, we’ll expand more on why excess salts and sugars may impede your progress as you try to lose weight. We’ll also delve into some tips for staying away from the salty and sweet stuff. Whether you want to lose weight for the summertime or anytime, this is the article for you.

What’s in Salt That Makes It Unhealthy?

Salt, on its own, isn’t inherently unhealthy. It’s all about the quantity. Harvard Health says that consuming excess salt may increase our chances of having a stroke, heart disease, and high blood pressure. In our introductory blog post, we mentioned that you may also develop kidney failure and lead a shorter life by overdoing it on the salt.

The biggest salt culprits appear in processed foods. These are often laden with sodium (and sugar, too). Not only can salt boost the flavor profile of packaged and canned items, but it allows these foods to have a longer shelf life. This makes the food manufacturer happy, but it does nothing for our long-term health.

What’s in Sugar That Makes It Unhealthy?

While salt isn’t all bad, that’s not the case with sugar at all. Not only is it predominant (it’s in more than 50 percent of the foods we contain, as we’ve said on this blog), but there’s nothing healthy about sugar. It has calories, calories, and more calories and does not benefit our health.

Sugar also has about a million nicknames, some of them dextrose, fruit juice concentrate, grape sugar, maltose, rice syrup, saccharose, and yellow sugar. The word “sugar” doesn’t even appear in most of those names, yet that’s what it is.

Whether you make sugary sweets yourself or you buy them at the store, you can suffer what are called sugar crashes. This is where you have a lot of energy for a short period but then need more sugar to function. Sugary foods also don’t leave you feeling very full for long, so you reach for more and more. Before you know it, your weight has spiraled out of control. You also increase your chances of having chronic heart disease and other chronic conditions.

Besides obesity and heart disease, the added sugars in most sweet foods can also cause diabetes. This can occur because your blood glucose levels spike from enough high-fructose corn syrup.

How to Give up Sugar and Salt

Okay, so you know you probably shouldn’t eat sugar and salt, but how do you even go about quitting them? After all, they’re in just about every food you can buy on shelves, even the ones that seem exclusively savory. How do you avoid salt and sugar then?

It’s not easy, but it’s possible. You will have to go raid your fridge, freezer, and cabinets and toss (or set aside for someone else) most foods and ingredients you own. Then, go to a specialty food store or shop online for SOS-free vegan counterparts. We also have tons of recipes on our blog to get you started, including in the article we linked you to before.

The best way to go about starting this new diet is to progress slowly. Don’t try to remove all sugar and salt from your life on the very first day. Instead, you might start with salt or sugar, cutting out one at a time. Gradually reduce intake, lessening what you eat more week after week until you’re sugar-free. Then do the same with salt.

What Kinds of Results Can You Expect?

By quitting salt and sugar, you should have less of a difficult time meeting your weight loss goals. For instance, if you’re starting with salt, then that means you’ve stopped eating calorie-heavy processed meals. It’s not necessarily the calories in salt itself, after all, but more the calories of the food it’s added to that you have to worry about.

Not only that, but you’ll finally drop that stubborn water weight by lessening or eliminating salt from your diet. That’s easy weight loss that will make you look better, too.

With each gram of sugar you eat, you ingest four calories. That makes it a nutritional nightmare. You’re also not staying full or maintaining even energy levels across any given day by subsisting mostly on sugar, as mentioned. By giving it up, you’ll benefit your heart health and your waistline as well.

You can still have sweet things in your life, but look for sugar-free versions (and make sure they’re really sugar-free). Sugar substitutes and natural sugars like those found in fruit can also keep your sweet tooth happy while allowing you to maintain your goals of weight loss.

Conclusion

If you’ve tried diet after diet with no success and you have just a few stubborn pounds to lose, you might want to look into how much salt and sugar you’re eating. Indeed, these two common ingredients are in almost everything edible. They add flavor to processed foods and give them a longer shelf life. Sugar even sneaks its way into savory food items.

For a better weight, lower blood pressure, less risk of diabetes and stroke, and a healthier heart, we implore you to consider SOS-free veganism. Although you shouldn’t rush into giving up salt and sugar completely right off the bat, making a gradual move into reducing and then stopping your intake will do your health wonders.