Now, you may not know this about me, but I also work as a ghostwriter, primarily of health and personal development books. It’s a really cool intersection of my major loves–writing, coaching, and sharing information. I had the privilege of working with today’s guest on his book, and not only does he know his stuff, but he’s so passionate about helping folks get healthy and such a good guy in general that I wanted a chance to get to spend some more time with him! And of course get him to share his insights about breaking one of the toughest habits to break–and that is getting off sugar.
Listen to the Podcast Here
Dr. Daryl Gioffre is author of the new book Get Off Your Sugar, which outlines a three-step plan to help you burn the fat, crush your cravings, and go from stress eating to strength eating.
Daryl, It is so great to have you here.
Hey Kate, It’s so great to be here with you and just appreciate you for having me on.
I love that our worlds get to collide and yet another way
Super exciting. Always every time we get together, it’s always something fun and passionate. I love that word, passion, you use. I got to throw that right back at you because everything you do is with that same exact vigor and vitality and passion. So I appreciate you just as much for that as well.
Love fest! All right. So I want to dive into getting off sugar. And I want to look at it today through the lens of breaking an old habit so that we can establish a better one in its place. Now I know you and I went through this for so long before we even started writing anything. You put a ton of thought into how to help people successfully wean themselves off the sweet stuff.
And one of the first things you talk about in the book is that especially when it comes to sugar, but not only when it comes to sugar, willpower doesn’t work. So why is that?
Yeah, it’s such an important topic to talk about because that’s the way most of us go about making changes in our lives. And listen, willpower is okay to get you started, but it’s not enough to keep you going. And I’ll give you a perfect example of that. You know, here we are in February. Look back in January. January 1st, everybody sets their new year’s goals and resolutions. And then fast forward, just 15 days later, what do we find? The research shows that 92% of people who set those New Year’s goals fail at accomplishing that.
So why is that? Because so many people associated making that change or a specific health transformation with willpower. Now, listen, willpower is very noble. But the problem with that is you’re not really addressing the true underlying reasons why you’re craving sugar in the first place. You see, that’s what most people do. They remove the poison from their diet, but they don’t give the body the antidote. Which is why we’re really craving this poison, this drug in the first place.
So we have to really flip the strategy and start to create what we call a map, a Massive Action Plan. So we can start with that excitement, that willpower. But we have to have that strategy, the purpose in place so that we can keep on going, getting the results that we want.
Awesome. Now you have an amazing story about a true sugar addiction that you struggled with for most of your young life. Can you tell us about what your relationship to sugar was when you were younger?
Yeah. I mean, it was pure sugar addiction. Obviously something that I’m not proud of. But, I I mean, going back to ever since I remember like when I was five years old, I ate so much sugar. It was crazy to even think about what I did as a kid. And it wasn’t my parents’ fault. You know, they did what every other parent did. What the doctors were telling them to do. And that’s just what we did as kids.
You know, I remember a specific story we talked about in the book when I was eating Cheerios. And literally for every single spoonful of Cheerio’s I would eat, I would eat a spoonful of white sugar in one-to-one ratio. And that was just one little example. Even as I was getting into my twenties and it was just something that I always battled. But to the point of willpower, that’s how I always try to make the change in my life was removing the sugar, removing the sugar. Sometimes it got me two weeks. Sometimes it got me two months, but again, it always came back with a vicious vengeance.
And why is that? Because sugar is the most addictive substance. Not a food, substance we can put into our body. In fact, the research shows it’s eight times more addictive than cocaine to your body. How crazy is that to even think about that? So we have to really start to approach this topic with a completely different mindset, a different approach. And that’s exactly what I did. Finally. I ditched that deprivation mindset. I said, I’m not going to remove the sugar from my diet. I’m going to keep on going as I have been.
But what I started to do was this add, not take away approach. And I started with a simple green juice, which right now I say is the core of a strength eating diet. I started drinking that every single morning. Then I added it to two green juices. Then I started bouncing on a rebounder and there’s a few other things that I did. But I started adding these strengthened includes into my body that alkalized my body. And what I found within a few weeks, literally the good started to outweigh the bad. And fast forward, 21 days later, my cravings were completely gone. Lifelong addiction to sugar, completely crushed. Blew my mind away.
So I kept going. I felt so good. I didn’t want to go back to the old self. And then within about, I would say just under four months or so, um, my body had dropped about 42 pounds. I was 42 pounds heavier than I am today. And that was a by-product of me just putting these rally healthy alkalizing, strengthened foods into my body. Which detoxified my body and helped my body remove the inflammation, the acids, and the fat that was being protected within.
You know, there’s something that really was eye-opening to me and interesting to me when we were working on the book. As you know, I love that it’s not about deprivation because I do think that’s how we tend to try and go about making change. Like, Oh, I’m just going to take this away.
But the sugar has been taking stuff away from us, right? It’s been depleting us of minerals, which is something that you go into in the book. And the green juice not only is alkalizing, which is so important and can also retrain your taste buds, which is something we talked about in the book. But it replenishes your minerals. And then that kind of also helps to offset the sugar cravings. Can you talk about that a little bit? I thought that was really cool.
Yeah. I mean the biggest deficiency we see in the standard American diet, which we call the SAD diet, is minerals. You know, there’s a lot of different minerals the body needs. I’ll tell you. The top of that list is magnesium. Magnesium is the fourth most abundant mineral in the body, but it’s number one on the list as far as what we are most deficient in.
Number one, it’s not in the soil anymore. You know, 200 years ago when our great, great ancestors were eating all the different foods that they ate, there were so many more minerals in those foods because the minerals came from the soil. But guess what? Now, our soils have become massively depleted. Add to that, a stress eating diet loaded with sugar, crappy carbs. When I say crappy carbs, I mean C.R.A.P, Completely Refined And Processed. Things like grains and dairy and too much protein. All those deplete your bodies of the minerals, because those products, those specific foods are loaded with acids.
And acids need to be neutralized once they’re ingested into the body. And the first place your body goes to do that is minerals. Then you add onto that stress and environmental toxins. I mean, we are more toxic than we’ve ever been in human history. So it’s one of those things we need to add more of, and it’s the first first step in our seven steps where we stack to get the 21 days. The first three days is all about remineralizing your diet. I talked about green juice before, again, it’s the core of a strength eating diet. So doing something like that, when you wake up in the morning, yaving a green smoothie, a green soup, having a salad, a rainbow salad, or what I call an acid-kicking salad.
So things like that, we want to start to add more because why are those greens so powerful? What makes kale such a powerful superfood? What makes spinach and Popeye’s so strong? It’s not that they’re green. It’s what makes it green, which is the chlorophyll molecule. And chlorophyll is loaded with minerals. When you put minerals into the body, it’s going to lower your affinity for the sugar. It decreases your cravings. And it strengthens your body, strengthens your digestive system. It strengthens your energy, it strengthens your hormones. So as you add those things, you’re going to get more energy and that’s going to make you want to go further. It’s going to motivate you to want to keep going to the next step and so on and so forth.
And it’s going to make you less reliant on willpower. You’re going to have the strength to just have it be something that you do, you know?
Yeah. Well, it’s interesting because one of the stats we talked about is that for every molecule of sugar that you take in, and think about how much sugar we’re literally eating. I mean the average Americans consuming 130 pounds of sugar every year. It’s just insane to even fathom that number. And trust me, I was there. I was doing more than that. But for every molecule sugar, you ingest, your body requires 54 molecules of magnesium to neutralize that one molecule. So that’s why we become so depleted.
So to your point, as you start to add the strengthening foods, loaded with minerals, it’s going to basically make it a lot easier for you. And that’s the goal. We don’t want to rely on willpower. We want you to get through this, but I want it to be enjoyable. Like this needs to be a lifestyle. This is not a diet. Right what’s the first few letters of diet, d-i-e. This is not about deprivation. This is about giving your body what your body is truly deficient in.
It’s like a plant, Kate. If that plant that we see on the table starts to wilt, most doctors would say, give it drugs, give it surgery. Now, if that plant was going to die, if that plant was in a crisis, by all means, we have the best crisis care system in the world. But we don’t have a healthcare system, we have a sick care system. So we have to start to think about this from a common sense standpoint. Let’s give that plant water. Let’s give it sunlight. And let’s get some nutrients into the soil.
But here’s the other thing, if there’s some toxins going into the root system of that plant, I don’t care how much water, sunlight, nutrients you give it. That plant is still going to wilt and die. And the reason being is that the two causes of all things, whether it’s sugar, craving sugar addiction, are deficiency and toxicity. Give the plant what it needs, take out what’s making it toxic. And if it’s not too far gone, that plant will heal itself. And guess what? We’re no different. We have to think of ourselves as a plant. And when you do that, it’s going to be so much easier for you to get to the results that you want.
Now, I don’t expect you to walk us through the whole seven steps of your program. You know, we’re trying to keep it to the Cliff Notes version type of thing. But you do have a 21 day program. It’s broken down into seven steps. So that’s three days for every step. And what are some of the other highlights of the program? Just so people can kind of start to get an idea, like, okay, I’m going to be eating more greens, but what else are we talking about here?
I’m laughing right now because you know, when you asked me the CliffsNote version, my CliffsNote version is always like a full on book. I can keep going on. But, let me go through it in the shortened version, as best as I can do. So it’s about a stacking approach, Kate. The first three days, I don’t want to overwhelm people. So let’s just focus on minerals. So we add in those things I was talking about. You know, let’s try to get three of those things in every day. So if you can get in a green juice, a smoothie, and a salad, you’re doing fantastic. Let’s do that for three days straight. And we get a lot more examples of things that you can add into the book and ways to go about it. But that’s simple.
So now on day four, what we do is we keep on doing what we did on days one through three. We keep on doing those minerals, but now we move on to the second step, which is adding healthy ketogenic fats into your diet. That could be something like an avocado with extra virgin olive oil. And some hemp seeds, and some sea salt, pepper, and cumin. More things like that. You know, raw nuts, raw seeds, raw oils. Things like coconut oil, avocado oil. So we add a lot more of those into the diet. And why is that the second step? Because as you increase the fats again, what it’s going to do, it’s going to lower your cravings for sugar. So setting you up for success.
But what it also does, it moves your body away from burning sugar as your primary source of fuel. And now your body can start to try, cause it’s still not there yet, but start to burn fat. And that’s the ultimate goal. We want to become fat burners. And what we call metabolically flexible, where our body can choose to burn what it needs to. So that’s the next step. We’re adding more healthy fats into the diet.
And then the third step we move on to protein. Here’s the reality about protein. This is not a matter if you’re keto, paleo, vegan, vegetarian. This is about making this fit into your lifestyle. So we give you plenty of plant-based protein options. But if you are eating animal protein, that’s totally fine. We have to make sure that we’re focusing on two things, quantity and quality. The average American consumes five times the amount of protein they need in their diet. And when that number goes over 20% of your total calories for the day, here’s the crazy thing, it actually turns to sugar in your body.
So you can be super clean, eating, no sugar at all, but if you’re eating too much protein, which a lot of people do when they go to Paleo or Keto. You know, the average person eating paleo eats 38% protein. So it becomes too much. So it’s about moderation. The protein needs to be the sideshow, not the main event. And it’s gotta be from a very clean grass-fed source, if it’s a land-based animal protein. If it’s fish, it has to be wild-caught. So, so important.
So that’s step number two. And by the way, we even give you a calculation. So you can determine for your specific weight or ideal weight, what the amount of protein you should be consuming in your day. And then we split that up between how many meals you’re eating. So whether that’s eating three meals a day or two meals a day, if you’re intermittent fasting.
Step four, we go into herbs and spices, such an important thing to make your food taste better. But also spices and herbs have this powerful way to alkalize your body. And again, lower your cravings for the sugar. They help with insulin resistance, they help lower your fasting blood glucose. So that’s the fourth step.
The fifth step is called timing of your meals. We have to understand is that the average American who’s addicted to sugar–again, like I was–is consuming 17 meals a day. I’m talking breakfast, lunch, dinner, and all the snacks before, during, and after. And the problem is when you’re eating all that sugar, you’re constantly dumping insulin into the blood. The research shows the more insulin we dump into the blood over the course of our lifetime, the less longevity we have, the earlier we die. So I take you through how to go from eating 17 meals a day or 10 meals a day, which is grazing whatever number you’re at. And we ease you into going from that number all the way to the other end of the spectrum, which would be three meals a day.
But eventually going to intermittent fasting, which I think is the most powerful strategy for longevity, for weight loss, and for lowering inflammation. But we get you there in a safe, healthy way. We can’t go from one extreme to the other. And that’s why so many people quit. You know, they’ll do keto, they’ll do intermittent fasting. And after two weeks or three weeks, they’re like, Oh, I’m stopping it didn’t work. No, it always works if we go about it the right way. So that’s timing of your meals. And we talk about diet variation.
And then step six, we get into supplementing your efforts. So we talk about adding back into your diet or getting the right supplement mix based on again, the deficiencies that you need. It’s not about just taking the supplement, Kate. It’s about what the research shows we are all deficient in, no matter how healthy you eat. Even my son Brayden, he’s six, about to turn seven. My daughter is three. Even they need to have these supplements.
So I’ll just rattle them off real quick. Number one is magnesium, no surprise. Number two is Omega 3 fatty acids, number three is probiotics, number four is vitamin D3. And number five is K2. And many times we’ll do the D3 and the K2 in one supplement together. Then there’s other supporting supplements that we can add to that based on what’s going on with your unique bio-individuality. Because that’s the reality is that we are all different in terms of what our body needs.
And then the last step is, it’s exercise. You know, I think this needs to be the core of everything we do. I know in my life, when I haven’t been exercising, I’ve been off purpose, eating badly, right? But when I start to add exercise in, I always make better choices. So we really get into aerobic versus anaerobic. We talk about the right ways to exercise. We talk about exercise variation.
And my favorite part is the eight minute acid kicking workout by my very dear friend, Anna Kaiser. She’s my trainer. She’s also the trainer for Kelly Ripa and Shakira. And, Anna is one of my favorite acid kickers. So we created an eight minute HIIT workout, specifically for everybody reading the book. And it kicks acid. I’m telling you eight minutes of this, you are going to be like, wow. And that’s the thing–who doesn’t have eight minutes? We all do. You just got to put into action.
Now, listen, listeners. I told you that Daryl has put a lot of thought into this, and I think you can hear it. I mean, he just rattled that off in I don’t know, three minutes. But oh my goodness, it’s like decades of thought.
So Darryl for listeners who want to get off their sugar and they want to connect with you, where can they find you?
Oh, thanks Kate. You can check us out at getoffyouracid.com. And we’re on Instagram @getoffyouracid and @drdarylgioffre.
Daily Tiny Assignment
So if getting off sugar is one of the habits that you want to break, your tiny assignment is to take Dr. Daryl’s advice and get something green in your body today. It’s going to replenish some of your minerals, which is going to help you need sugar less. It’s also going to start to retrain your taste buds, which is something that we didn’t get into in the interview, but something that he talks about in the book.
He always says that he tells his patients, you know, if you’re having a craving for a Coke, you can have a Coke. But drink a green juice first, and then it’s going to change the way that it tastes. You have to start giving your taste buds new information for them to start to favor the healthy stuff and not create the sweet stuff so much. That’s it! Good luck. A
