Celeb trainer Harley Pasternak wants to help you curb your sugar habit

Here’s a fun (and kind of shocking) fact for you: the average American consumes 270 calories of added sugars each day. That’s about 17 teaspoons of sugar! Even if you think you’re being good all day by eating most of your sugary foods in the morning or saving sweet treats until the evening, in the long run, this could lead to health problems like obesity or type 2 diabetes.

Knowing how hard it is to break the sugar habit, celebrity trainer and nutrition expert Harley Pasternak devised a system to help you make better food choices.

Sweetkick, is a 2-week, 2-step program that helps you retrain your brain to stop reaching for sugary foods. In the morning, you mix a Body Balance Powder into your beverage. It doesn’t taste like anything, and it’s a mix of prebiotic fiber and vitamins that helps stabilize your blood sugar level so you don’t reach for the first food you see because you haven’t eaten in half a day. “Having the body powder first thing in the morning,” Pasternak says, “you’re making yourself less vulnerable to high sugar foods and beverages” like pastries and juice.

Then, throughout the day, you can pop Sugar Control Mints. They’re plant-based breath mints made with spearmint oil, inulin found in artichokes and jicama and Gymnema Sylvestre, which is a flower from India. “They bind to the sugar receptors in your tongue,” Pasternak explains, “so when you do have sugar, there’s nowhere for the sugar to attach to our taste buds and you can’t actually taste any of the sugar. Whatever you’re eating, you’re tasting everything other than the sugar.” A piece of cake that doesn’t taste sweet just tastes like flour and butter. “The same with ketchup, barbecue sauce, sugary cereals,” he says. “One bite, and you’re lucky to finish the whole bite.”

This helps us break the sugar habit in two ways: we unlearn our normal food patterns of reflexively grabbing for sweet snacks, and our brains stop releasing the chemicals that make us happy when we consume sugar, so we’re no longer getting that “reward” that can cause sugar addiction over time. “In the longer play, you’re disassociating sugar with a reward, and you’re not going to want to have it,” Pasternak adds. “After two weeks, you’ve changed your relationship with sugar.

Sweetkick has been featured on Revenge Body, Khloe Kardashians’s fitness show on E!, where the system helped a woman break a severe sugar addiction and allowed her to lose a substantial amount of weight. Celebrity clients like Jordana Brewster have also sung Sweetkick’s praises online.

Pasternak doesn’t see Sweetkick as a weight loss aid, but as something to help you form better habits. “We don’t market it as a weight loss product, but as a byproduct of changing your behavior, it inevitably happens,” he says.

“The goal is not to make you have no sugar for the rest of your life. The goal is to make you have less sugar,” Pasternak adds. As long as you’re having less than you had before, that’s a step in the right direction. “It absolutely changes everything. We don’t have to do a sell on Sweetkick. People try a mint and they say ‘I get it.’”