The vast majority believe sugar to be the main foe of the body. It increases your weight, gives you a false sense of feeling energetic, makes you sluggish, ages your skin, and increases the risk of diabetes and cardiovascular diseases. However, sugar is an essential and irreplaceable part of the diet. What is actually harmful is the excess consumption of sugar. Doctors consider 25 grams of sugar per day to be a healthy consumable amount. Unfortunately, most processed foods contain sugar and we consume it with beverages and cooked foods too. As a result, most of us end up taking many times the healthy amount of sugar. If you practice yoga, you must know that yoga and food have a deep relationship. Excess sugar can become a toxic ingredient in your yoga diet and negate many of its benefits.
Why Does Yoga Not Gel With Yoga Eating Habits
There are many ways sugar can disrupt your yoga practice. A mix of yoga and diet causes you to accomplish the advantages you are focusing on. But sugar can cancel those benefits and even take you many steps back. Here is how sugar affects your yoga practice negatively:
The most obvious ill effect is the addition of excess and unnecessary calories to the body. Your body will convert the excess sugar into fats and polysaccharides and store it. This will increase your weight above the healthy limit. Overweight and obesity have a range of detrimental effects on the body.
An overabundance of sugar can likewise expand cholesterol, which thus builds the danger of heart infections.
Besides coronary ailments, Type 2 diabetes is also a possibility with excess sugar intake. Diabetes can cause kidney failure, blindness, and many such secondary problems.
Pathological impact apart, taking sugar just before yoga practice will give you a short period of heightened energy. This is called a sugar high. Sugar high can make it difficult to focus on your practice and you will make mistakes. Therefore, you will not only receive zero benefits from yoga but maybe even hurt yourself.
After a sugar high subsides, you experience a prolonged period of sluggishness, exhaustion, anxiety, and irritability. All these are direct opposites of what you wish to accomplish using yoga.
Sugar also destroys the toned feature of your body and makes your muscles pudgy. This reduces your control over your body and makes more complex asanas difficult.
A sugar-filled diet also makes a person prone to get tired quickly. As a result, you lose interest in your yoga practice too soon and never improve.
Some Healthy Replacements For Sugar In Your Yoga Diet Plan
There are several sweet yoga food replacements for sugar that you can add to your diet instead. A person can feel the benefits of a yogic diet without sugar within a week. Some of the best foods for yoga in place of sugar are as follows:
Honey
Even when sugar is not a part of the discussion, the health benefits of honey are plenty. It contains loads of vitamins and minerals. It is sweeter than sugar and adds a unique flavor to foods. Additionally, it has a lower glycemic list than sugar. Along these lines, it doesn’t raise the glucose level so a lot. However, it still contains a lot of calories, albeit healthier ones.
Maple Syrup
Like honey, maple syrup is sweeter than sugar and adds a distinct taste to foods. Since it has a lower glycemic record than sugar, it doesn’t cause that commonplace sugar spike. It is rich in antioxidants and minerals. Maple syrup, too, has a high number of calories. Therefore, it should not be taken excessively.
Coconut Sugar
Coconut sugar is almost as sweet as sugar and is a great replacement for it. It contains only three-quarters of the amount of sucrose that sugar has. Therefore, it does not load your body with as much sucrose as sugar does. Moreover, it contains nutrients and fibers that benefit the body a lot.
Agave Nectar
Agave nectar is near-about – 1.5 occasions better than sugar. It contains mostly fructose and very little glucose. Hence, it has a low glycemic file This, coupled with the lower need in your diet due to the higher sweetness makes agave nectar a healthier alternative. It also contains some nutrients and antioxidants.
Date Paste
Dates add pretty much the same level of sweetness in foods as sugar but without the ill effects. Date paste contains the sugar alcohol sorbitol and polyphenols which act as antioxidants. Date paste also contains fibers and most of the nutrients in dates. Its low glycemic index makes it healthier than sugar.
Molasses
Molasses, or more specifically blackstrap molasses contains much less sucrose than sugar but is just as sweet. It is also full of nutrients and loaded with antioxidants. This makes it great not only for your yogic lifestyle diet but also for other parts of your body.
Conclusion
Our body does need sugar. However, it has a lot of deleterious effects too, especially when consumed too much. Therefore, a lot of people nowadays, especially yogis, are looking for healthier alternatives. The ones above are the most popular. However, they too still contain sweet carbohydrates and a significant amount of calories. Binging on them will also make them as unhealthy as sugar. Keeping a check on the amount of them you consume will help you maintain the benefits of yoga. Otherwise, replacing sugar because you wanted a healthier type of yogic diet would ultimately turn out to be fruitless.