Boo! SCARY Facts About How Sugar Becomes Fat…
Sugar doesn’t have any fat in it; so why can sugar become fat in your body?
Don’t let sugar goblins scare you out of enjoying your Halloween!
Once you understand the way your body processes sugar…
You will be able to combat its sometimes fattening effects in your body.
How Does Sugar Make You Gain Fat?
Sugar (sucrose) and High Fructose Corn Syrup (HFCS) are made of two molecules.
- Glucose – which is used by the body for energy.
- Fructose – which human do not naturally produce… and which is particularly hard to make use of in the body.
When we eat sugar, fructose gets turned into fat by the liver and then deposited into the blood.
How The Body Processes Sugar
One way that the body processes sugar is through the hormone Insulin.
When we consume sugar; insulin gives glucose the green light to enter cells where it will be used as energy.
When learning about weight loss, diabetes prevention, and metabolism, you have probably heard of insulin.
That’s because it is critical to regulating your metabolism and energy use in the body..
When glucose levels are high, insulin revs up to drive glucose out of your bloodstream and into your cells.
How Do We Become Insulin Resistant?
But what if you’re insulin “resistant”?
We can become resistant to insulin; which means that your pancreas secretes more and more insulin into your blood.
When you have excess insulin in your blood, it signals your body to pick up fat cells from the bloodstream in order to store energy..
The effect of insulin resistance is that your body thinks it’s still hungry because it’s storing energy in your fat cells.
This causes you to eat more… because your brain isn’t picking up the signal that you’re satiated.
How Your Brain Works To Process Sugar
So we’ve learned that insulin resistance causes you to store energy in your fat cells.
But there’s another sneaky way sugar can cause you to gain fat in your body.
It’s another hormone: leptin.
When your fat cells secret leptin, your brain gauges whether or not you have enough fat stored in your body.
The more sugary foods we eat, the more leptin our fat cells secret.
Your brain thus realizes that you’ve eaten enough, and you stop eating.
When the hormone leptin is elevated in our bodies, we also release more fat, thereby increasing the your metabolic rate.
Sounds great, right?
Yes… but…
Too Much Of A Good Thing?
So increased leptin in the body is good because it releases more fat from your body and increases your metabolic rate.
However, the brain can become resistant to leptin in the same way our bodies can become resistant to insulin.
When your brain is resistant to leptin, you aren’t picking up on the signals that leptin is throwing down.
You don’t realize that there is increased leptin in the blood… i.e. your brain doesn’t realize that your fat cells are full.
The signal that tells your brain to stop eating will be missed…
Your metabolic rate won’t rise when your body goes into energy-storing mode versus fat-burning mode.
Tricks-Or-Treat WITHOUT Terrorizing Your Body
I’m the last person to tell you NOT to Trick-Or-Treat!
I just live to see my little niece dress up… it brings me pure joy.
When my sisters and I were little – we’d spill all our Halloween candy on the floor and make candy ‘trades’.
I didn’t like fruit candies, so I’d trade all my Jolly Ranchers for Almond Joys. 😉
As an adult, I began to realize that devouring Almond Joy’s was contributing to a ‘growing’ weight problem…
And worse yet… sugar was contributing to a hormonal imbalance in my body as my insulin levels spiked out of whack and I ate past the point of being full.
Halloween Habits To Keep Sugar Spikes At Bay
Eating loads of sugar every Halloween and the weeks that followed simply formed bad eating habits and put me on the path to being overweight.
That’s why I developed these healthy Halloween ‘habits’ to keep myself, and my family away from the scary parts of Halloween.
- Limit the number of houses you go to. If you Trick-Or-Treat in a neighborhood where houses are far apart – you’re doing more walking than if you’re pillaging a neighborhood where houses are close together.
- Take Your Candy To Work. You can share your loot and gain favor with your coworkers.
- Put the candy in a high place — out of sight, out of mind — at least for young kids.
- Make Candy A Game. If your kids are resistant to having their candy confiscated, have them “trade in” their candy for a toy of their choice.
- Start planning your post-Halloween cleansing. Halloween is a fun holiday… just make sure you have a plan for how to deal with all that candy consumption.
The best way to reset your body after Halloween is by replacing the sugary candies with something that is equally as satiating.
Any time you feel a snack attack coming on, make yourself a cup of delicious, slimming Oolong tea.
To make it taste sweeter – add lemon or orange zest – which will provide your body with tons of Vitamin C.
(You may even want to add a drop or two of Stevia.)
Drinking Oolong tea is linked to slimming your waistline, and most importantly – drinking lots of Oolong will help you stay hydrated… which inherently makes you feel less hungry!
Together, we can enjoy Halloween AND maintain healthy bodies and waistlines. <3
Happy Halloween!
~ Stephanie
P.S.
Go here to stock up on your post-Halloween Slimming Teas and Capsules…
And then cut yourself some slack come Thanksgiving 😉