“So when you decided to stop eating sugar — and when I say stop eating sugar, I mean stop eating a lot of added sugar from things like soda, cookies, and candy — a few physiological changes happen within hours. The hormonal levels shift; your levels of a hormone called insulin will start to come down. It’s what we call an anabolic hormone; it favors building up body mass or retaining fat. It’s really, really hard to lose weight and to burn fat for calories when you have a lot of insulin circulating. But when you stop eating a lot of sugar, it makes it a lot easier for your body to access stored fat and burn it for energy.
Over a few days and weeks, you’ll notice that the lipid levels in your blood start to drop, especially stores of fat in your blood called triglycerides, which can contribute to your risk of heart disease. Sometimes, you’ll also see other cholesterol levels go down, especially that bad cholesterol, which is called LDL.
Another important change that we see over prolonged periods of time is that your palate changes. So things that used to taste normal to you in terms of their sweetness level will start to taste really unpleasantly sweet, and your palate adjusts to require a lot less sugar to feel satisfied. Your palate changing will make it easier for you to sustain that change in your diet because you are not going to crave as much, and sweet things don’t taste as good to you as they might have.”