If you’re doing all you can to eat well, exercise regularly and make healthy lifestyle choices, yet you can’t seem to lose weight or drop a dress size, then could sugar be the culprit?

If you have a sweet tooth, then you’ll know that cutting down on the obvious sugars is tricky. Fizzy drinks, sweetened tea and coffee, sweets, chocolate and cake are all high sugar foods that we know we should avoid. But it isn’t easy! Then there’s the hidden sugars to contend with in foods that we don’t always associate with having added sugar.

So here’s our 9 tips for cutting down on both the hidden, and the unhidden, sugar.

1. Drink sparkling water with a squeeze of lemon in place of sugary fizzy drinks. Warm herbal teas or tap water with added mint and cucumber will also help to quench your thirst whilst avoiding sugar.
2. Often, shop bought smoothies and juices have high levels of fruit sugars in them. No matter how natural these sugars, these drinks have a lot of fruit crammed into one bottle, more than you would consume in one go if you were eating fruit. So go easy on these to make sure you’re not consuming large amounts of fruit sugars.
3. Try sweetening your bakes with honey or maple syrup, like we do with these Apricot Honey Energy Balls. These types of sugar are digested more slowly and therefore don’t spike blood sugar levels so quickly.
4. Become a label reading pro! Added sugar can be listed on ingredients lists as many other names including beet sugar, brown rice syrup, corn syrup, dextrose, fructose, glucose, invert sugar, malt syrup, maltose and molasses. The more sugar a product contains, the higher up an ingredients list it will appear.
5. Sugars are often hidden in ketchup and salad dressings, so opt for vinegar and oil dressings or low fat mayonnaise instead.
6. If you’re trying to avoid sugar more than fat, then opt for full fat yoghurts, pre-mixed coffee drinks and dressings. This might sound counterintuitive, but low fat versions tend to contain more sugar to compensate for the lack of flavour from fat. Just choose to consume them less often.
7. Eat wholegrain or brown pasta, rice and bread. White versions of these foods are more refined and spike blood sugar levels much more quickly, which will lead to sugar cravings soon after eating them.
8. Opt to get your energy from protein instead of carbohydrates. The body converts all carbs into sugars, even wholegrain ones, so go easy on the carbs at some meals and opt for high protein foods to sustain you instead.
9. Don’t start the day with a high sugar breakfast. Many shop bought cereals and even granola and muesli that are marketed as healthy, contain shocking amounts of sugar. Try making your own granola It’ll keep fresh in an air tight container for a few weeks.