On the Chef Deb Diet I recommend that you avoid sugar as much as possible. This isn’t always easy. Sugar is added to many foods, and often shows up where you least expect it. Worse than sugar is high-fructose corn syrup, which has been linked to various medical problems. Even fructose, when extracted from its natural source — fruit — is questionable, as it can play havoc with your glucose levels, and make dieting more difficult.

I decided to go sugar-free several years ago, when a friend’s father went on a low-carb diet. At first I was skeptical — as were many people at the time. But I told him that I would try it, and that I would give him my opinion after a week or so. Well, it’s been a lot longer than a few weeks, and I liked the sugar-free lifestyle so much that I never went back.

Of course, many sugar-free products have as many calories as sugar-sweetened ones, so cutting calories is not my only criterion. Whenever I am tempted to have "just a bit" of something containing sugar, I stop myself and try to find a way to have something like it without sugar. It may not be available in stores, but if I try, I can usually come up with something quite satisfying in my own kitchen.

My reasons are simple. If I give in and have that little bit of whatever with the sugar in it, then the next time the nasty stuff is proffered to me, I might have just a bit more. And I might do it more often. It’s the desire to avoid putting a toe on this slippery slope that keeps me from falling off the sugar-free wagon.

I am not fanatical about this. In today’s world it is just about impossible to avoid sugar completely. I have heard that some fast food restaurants add sugar to everything — even the salads and the potatoes! And when visiting friends, I might take a tiny taste of something with sugar in it, just to be polite. But that’s all I will have. A taste is all I need to be able to say how good it is, and then later I can re-create my version of the goodie, and feel even better about it.

So I always keep my mental "track shoes" on, in order to avoid slipping on that sugar-frosted slope, and also to be able to escape all that temptation. Who needs it? Not me!