One of the biggest energy zappers on the planet is sugar. Although we’ve been taught that sugar gives you energy, it actually does nothing of the sort. In fact, it does quite the opposite.
The number one reason why sugar ultimately saps your energy and makes you feel like an extra from the cast of Night of the Living Zombies when 4:00 p.m. rolls around, has to do with dietary sugar’s effect on blood sugar.
Here’s how it works: eating any food triggers a whole bunch of responses in the body, not the least of which is the release of certain hormones that have a profound effect on your energy (not to mention your weight). Those hormones like in wait for the right signal for food, at which point they jump into the bloodstream like a sleeper cell given the “go” command, sending little messages to the important cells, tissues, and organs that they control. They’re like a giant email system, each with a screaming headline in the subject line: Build some muscle! Burn some fat! Store some fat! Burn some muscle!
All those hormonal message have a great deal to do with how you feel and with your energy levels.
FOR KILLER ENERGY, TAME THE HUNGER HORMONE
One of the big players in this little hormonal dance, a player that has a profound effect on your energy, is a hormone called insulin. When you eat almost any food (except pure fat), your blood sugar rises and your pancreas responds by saying, “Uh-oh, blood sugar is going up; let’s do something”. And what it does is secrete a powerful anabolic hormone called insulin, also known affectionately as “the Hunger Hormone” 9for reasons which will soon be clear). Now insulin has a lot of jobs in the body, but one of its most important tasks is to get blood sugar back down to normal levels, which is a good thing indeed because over time, high blood sugar is extremely damaging to the body.
You may be shocked to learn that your body treats a bagel, most cereals, pastas, rice, and potatoes – all the low-fat staples of the high-carb diet so popular in the 1980s – exactly the same as it would a big, fat, incoming ball of sugar. Once you chew up that bread and swallow it, the body sees a incoming bolus of sugar, and treats it accordingly. From a hormonal, and an energy-related point of view, this is a complete disaster.
Here’s why. Those “unsupervised” sugar molecules float around the bloodstream like teenagers after curfew, and much like those teenagers, they will eventually cause mischief. They glom on to protein molecules in the blood, resulting in sticky substances that clog up the works and eventually interfere with circulation, particularly in small capillaries such as those in the eyes and kidneys. They get shuttled into little packages called triglycerides, high levels of which are a definite risk factor for heart disease.
The point is, your body doesn’t want your blood sugar elevated, thank you very much! Your body would much prefer to have sugar in the cells, where it can be burned for energy, rather than in the bloodstream, where it will eventually get you into trouble.
And that’s where insulin comes in.
INSULIN RESISTANE: THE ENEMY OF HIGH ENERGY
Insulin is a “sugar wrangler”, whisking up the excess sugar from the bloodstream and attempting to deliver it to the muscle cells, where it can be burned for fuel. This makes perfect sense, and the system usually works pretty well when we’re exercising or active all the time. When that’s happening, the muscle cells actually put out the “welcome” sign for sugar.
Problem is, most of us aren’t active. The only exercise we’re getting – especially if we’re low-energy folks to begin with – is moving the computer mouse around during the day and hitting the buttons on the remote control later at night. The muscle cells say to the insulin, “No thanks, we gave at the office, go somewhere else, we don’t need your sugar”. So insulin, quite rightly miffed, takes its business elsewhere – to the fat cells.
At first, the fat cells open their doors to the insulin and its payload of sugar, which accomplishes three things. Number one, it makes your jeans fit badly. Number two, it makes your jeans fit badly. Number two, it makes you feel horrible once you notice number one. Ad number three, because you’ve eaten so much sugar in the first place, and because you’ve produced a lot of insulin to get rid of it, all that insulin eventually does its job so well that your blood sugar takes nosedive as the fat cells scoop it all up.
Your energy plummets. Now you’ll kill someone if you don’t get a bagel. You’re tired, grumpy, low energy, and out of sorts. The office snack machine beckons, and the cycle starts again.
You want more energy? Cut out the white stuff. It’s that simple. I’m not saying you can’t occasionally have a slice of bread, but I am saying that by making processed carbs a once-in-a-while addition to your diet in tiny amounts, your energy will go through the roof.
Your Paleolithic ancestors had the energy to travel and average of twenty miles per day, often dragging along the carcass of large animal they found on hunting trips. And they did it without ever eating a single slice of white bread. ‘Nuff said.
*Or anything that converts to sugar quickly, including the aforementioned bagel, or a bowl of pasta.
No comments:
Post a Comment