For thrill-seekers riding a roller-coaster can be a real blast. But it’s considerably less fun when the ride you’re on is the alternating highs and lows of your energy level. Not to mention the effect this may be having on your waistline, without you being aware of it. In this article I’m going to talk about a subject which is near and dear to my heart, and should be to yours, especially if your goal is fat loss. Understanding how your body reacts to sugar can give you head start on your nutrition plan.

So let’s break this down, and I’ll try to simplify it as much as possible. When you ingest a simple sugar, it is quickly absorbed by the body, and almost immediately enters the bloodstream. So, for that moment, you have what is known as "high blood-sugar." Your body then reacts by asking the pancreas to make more of a hormone called insulin. What insulin does is take the excess sugar out of the bloodstream and transport it into your muscles where it can be stored and used later on. So it basically functions as a "storing" hormone, and your body switches into a fuel-storing mode.

The problem with that is, while your pancreas is churning out more insulin to help regulate your bloodsugar, it manufactures a lot less of its "release" hormone, known as glucagon. Glucagon is needed to release fat from the adipose cell where it is stored and transport it into the muscle where it can be burned as energy. So effectively, when you take in a simple sugar, you are turning off your body’s fat burning mechanism!

In my live seminars I use a pretty cool visual demonstration with a can of Coke or Pepsi and a bag of sugar to drive home this point. You can try this at home. A can of cola has approximately 40 grams of sugar. That’s the equivalent of 10 teaspoons! Take an empty glass and dump 10 teaspoons of sugar into it, you’ll see where I’m going with this. It’s disgusting! And when you consider that, according to Statistics Canada, the average Canadian consumes a staggering 55lbs. of sugar per year, is it any wonder so many people struggle to lose weight?

So it would be easy to make the mistake of thinking you can just get on a treadmill or do a spin-class and burn fat. But it is important to understand that fat loss is a two-step process. If you don’t first release the fat, you can’t burn it. That means that if you are not in a state where your body is hormonally willing to release fat, you can do cardio all day long and it won’t burn any. In fact, it is much more likely that you’ll burn muscle tissue.

Not to worry, it gets better! There’s another side to this story. If we can get you to a place where insulin release is stabilized, such that your body is still able to produce glucagon, you can release fat on a much more consistent basis. This means you can burn more fat, almost around the clock! Now isn’t that a place you’d like to get to? It really isn’t that hard to do. It starts by avoiding simple sugars in your diet and replacing them with higher quality, non-refined, complex carbohydrates (e.g. brown rice, oatmeal, yams).

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