Life After Sugar

Laura Bonicelli grew up with Italian food in Minnesota. With home-cooked meals and surrounded by a close community, she became a chef. She created a meal delivery service to bring fresh, organic meals to people. Her business allowed her to learn about all kinds of different needs and eating habits, and this led her to develop a meal plan for weight loss. After she closed her own restaurant, she op...

Dr. Jen Unwin is a clinical psychologist and a self-confessed lifelong carbohydrate addict. She's the author of Fork in the Road. In this episode, she tells her own personal story about her addiction to sugar and all processed carbs. From her early childhood, through her teens and into adulthood, Jen had a love-hate relationship with food, especially sugar. Her mother was always on a diet and...

Vikki Jones is a former competitive athlete. She moved from the UK to the US in the 1980s and excelled in the pentathlon. She had a coach for every sport she did, as well as being supported by the US Olympic Committee. In this episode, Vikki tells how as an athlete, she wasn't taught how to eat. Because she was so active, she would pick herself up with sugar to get quick energy. She would &qu...

Megan Lifto  is a nurse who's had her own health issues, including having her ovaries removed. She knew that the decrease in estrogen would affect her metabolism, and indeed her weight went up 60lbs, mostly around her belly, even though she was still active. With the extra weight, she started to have joint pain when she bent down, as well as in her hands.  Some hormone therapy (low dose estro...

This is our special holiday edition of the Life After Sugar podcast! This week I'm talking to Holly Howe, a Fermentation Educator, a cookbook author, photographer, and blogger. Holly's goal  is to have sauerkraut fermenting in 100,000 homes... including yours! If you're anything like I was a few years ago, you may not know much about  fermented foods. Maybe you know that yogurt is f...

Jackie Fletcher and Louise Reynolds are the hosts of the Fabulously Keto podcast. After starting on her low carb eating journey in May 2017 and then moving to a ketogenic way of eating in January 2018, Jackie  discovered a passion for everything low carb and keto. Jackie tells about her childhood, when she always felt left out and overweight. She tried yo-yo dieting, but she couldn't sustain...

Dr. Vera Tarman is the author of the book Food Junkies: Recovery from Food Addiction.   Her book (as well as the podcast Food Junkies ) tackles the complex and often poorly understood issue of food addiction. It's so poignant because it's written from her own clinical experience with dozens of her patients who suffer from overeating, binge eating, obesity, anorexia, and bulimia. But Vera...

Colli Christante grew up eating whole foods and very little sugar, and she brought up her daughter that way too. She doesn't remember her daughter being sick as a child. Naturally, as she grew up, Colli's daughter experimented with sugar and other types of processed foods, but then when she herself became a mother, she reverted back to whole foods. Colli tells about her experience with a...

When Nikola Howard was still eating sugar, she had no energy, she was in pain, she had skin issues, and she was often moody and "hangry" (which is when you're so hungry that you're angry). She had to eat every two hours or so, otherwise she would become impatient and bad-tempered. It wasn't until  she was in her 40s that she realized how sugar was affecting her brain and h...

Janine knew all the facts about sugar: what it does to your health, how it can feed cancer and cause inflammation... but she still ate it because she liked the taste, and it made her happy to eat it. When she'd tried other diets, like keto, she realized that the fake sugars and the recreations of desserts that she was making were just causing her to miss the "real thing". And when s...

Michelle Hurn is the author of the book "The Dietitian's Dilemma". As a health professional, the oath she took was to "do no harm". And yet, after several years in the profession, and after several challenges with her own health, she realized that as a dietitian, she was actually hurting people more than helping them. That was her dilemma: Do I continue to repeat the offic...

Like many of us, Jennifer's sugar story goes way back. Her health-conscious mom had the family try all kinds of diets, and her dad and her grandparents had a huge sweet tooth. And this solidified Jennifer's sweet tooth. She experimented with different ways of eating and various diets in order to control her weight and her health. And now she works as a coach to help people eat healthier....

Denice Whiteley always had a problem with sleep. She'd fall asleep, but then she'd always wake up during the night and not be able to fall back asleep. She also had two young kids at the time. She stopped eating sugar because she was having yeast infections, but then she noticed that she also began to  sleep through the night. That was over 25 years ago. Since then, she's only had s...

Lynn Louise knows all about emotional eating. In fact, she did all kinds of activities in order to distract herself from her feelings: drugs drinking running eating She freely admits that she had lots of distractive habits. The trigger was a traumatic experience that she had when she was a teenager, but she didn't know that at the time. She first drank alcohol socially, but it soon turned to...

Ever since she was a small child, Florence Christophers suffered from debilitating, blinding migraines. She grew up on sugary and processed foods and never thought that what she was eating had anything to do with her suffering. In her teens, Florence started dieting, restriction, and bingeing. And she put on weight, she had brutal PMS with cramps and moodiness, and her migraines continued and got...

Judy Wolfe describes herself as "a person of more". In other words, after that first bite, she always wants more. In this episode, Judy talks candidly about her journey to freedom from sugar, grains, starches, sweeteners, and alcohol. She's been living that freedom for 16 years, maintaining a 130 lb weight loss. How Judy eats can be perceived as restrictive by many, but as she says,...

Daneen West began getting interested in brain health after the birth of her third child. She saw specialist after specialist to try to get some clarity on the symptoms her oldest son was experiencing in pre-school. Daneen learned more about the brain through research and therapy. And that genetics "loads the gun, but doesn't pull the trigger". Environment and eating habits play a bi...

Gin Stephens is well-known for her books about intermittent fasting: Delay, Don't Deny, Feast Without Fear, and Fast, Feast, Repeat.  Now she's written a new book called Cleanish, which is more about how to live and eat in today's modern world. Listen as Gin and I talk about: how food labels can fool us (if we let them!) the concept of "eating clean" orthorexia, and not ne...

Jen found that reducing sugar and gluten has been good for all her family. Back in 2007, when her 3-year-old son began showing signs of a speech delay, a friend suggested that she try taking gluten out of his diet. At first she thought it was weird, but then Jen started researching it. So she decided to take all of the products with gluten out of the house, and the whole family started eating glut...

Even with her active lifestyle and background in nutrition and science and eating behaviours, Lauren knew that she needed help with her exhaustion, stress eating and cravings. She knew she needed to listen to her body more, especially during lockdown. She had a healthy lifestyle on paper, she says, but she felt like trash: she was tired, couldn't focus, her work quality was suffering, and she...

In this episode Véronique Morissette talks about her life after sugar over the last 3 years, and how her relationship with herself has been transformed since she cut out sugar. Gone is the toxic relationship she had with sugar... and with herself. Just before her decision to cut sugar, she quit cigarettes and alcohol because she wanted to feel more connected to the people she loves... including he...

So what's the difference between Life After Sugar and keto? And why does it annoy me when people ask me: "Netta, are you keto?" In this episode I explain what keto is and its history, and how it's become so popular today. Yes,  it's understandable that people confuse how I eat with the keto way of eating, because both approaches cut out sugar. But I also rant a little abou...

Kathy had followed every diet out there. Sure, she was able to follow the rules for a while, but then she "fell off the wagon". She was used to tracking and following a meal plan, but what she wasn't used to was thinking for herself.  But when she joined the Life After Sugar Program, she started looking at things completely differently.  ​Yes, there's a food list and recipes, b...

When she was still consuming sugar, Melissa was very anxious, overwhelmed, exhausted, and angry. As a young child, she used to hide sweet foods in her room, and she continued to eat lots of sugar into her adult years. Then when she became a mother and had her second child who wasn't sleeping, and her first child who had sensory challenges and food allergies, it was her chiropractor who asked...

In this episode, Mario tells me about how he grew up in Québec, Canada. At home, his parents naturally ate what would now be considered a keto way of eating: low in carbs and starches, no snacks, plenty of meat. When he got together with his then-girlfriend, he started eating a "normal" diet like she'd grown up with. Despite his active lifestyle and "healthy" diet, he kept...