Today is Episode 60, which means it's exactly 28 days
til Durham, James and I have our next body comp weigh in.
And I'm feeling reasonably confident.
Other than that little running quad set back I had awhile ago,
training's been pretty smooth and pretty consistent.
But today, it's time to kick things up a notch.
Today will be my last day of sugar.
Metabolically, not all calories are created equal.
Carbohydrates, fats and proteins, there slightly metabolised and digested differently within the body
and even within those families of fats, proteins and carbohydrates, the subtle variations and twists
on how the body metabolises and deals with those nutrients.
When it comes to sugar though, sugar is particularly harmful, and here's how.
Let's start with a slice of toast, which has about a hundred calories,
most of it coming from starch. Starch is made up of glucose.
It's basically glucose on glucose on glucose on glucose….
When we eat glucose, it stimulates your pancreas to secrete insulin.
Insulin in the body kind of works like an Uber.
It takes that glucose, shuttles it around the body and takes it where we need it most.
Some of that glucose is going to stay in your bloodstream where it can feed the brain.
The brain only runs on glucose and ketones.
It's really important to keep your blood sugar nice and steady for that reason.
The rest though, the majority of that glucose is going to go into your muscles.
Now it enters your muscles with the help of the little valet service
called GLUT4, which sucks that glucose into the muscle.
Any excess glucose that you've got in your body will be taken to the liver where it's stored for safe keeping for later use.
You can over eat on glucose like anything. But I’ll talk about that in a second.
Now let's talk sugar.
Because my mum loves me and because she loves Christmas, yesterday she sent me this package with these festive treats in it.
Coincidentally, these two guys here combined have about a hundred calories most of it coming from sugar.
Sugar, or sucrose is 50% glucose, 50% fructose.
The glucose half, it does exactly the same as what happens with the toast.
It gets Ubered around the body with that insulin
and then gets taken with the valet service, the GLUT4, into your muscles,
some of that stays in the bloodstream to feed the brain.
Now this is where things change.
Fructose, it doesn't call for the insulin Uber because it doesn't respond to it.
Instead it walks and heads straight for your liver.
That fructose, once it enters the liver has to be chemically rearranged and turned into glucose.
That process, that fructose to glucose process, it is really expensive and it's really energy demanding.
It takes a lot out of the liver.
As a result, it creates and releases a lot of inflammatory by-products.
These make that liver sick and sorry and they spread to the rest of the digestive system,
making the entire organ system in your visceral system sick and sorry.
That explains how sugar can make you sick and sorry and make your liver inflamed.
But how does sugar make you fat?
Because sugar is 50% fructose and that fructose has to go straight to the liver to be processed,
there's no insulin or GLUT4 to drip feed it in.
So the liver just gets slammed with this big dose of fructose.
As a result, the liver kind of freaks out and the first process, the first thing it is to do it's like
"I'm just going to store this as fat because there's just so much, I'm just going to deal with it, I'm just going to turn it into fat."
More specifically though, the fat that the liver produces from fructose is called VLDL or Very Low Density Lipoproteins,
which is another name for cholesterol, the bad cholesterol.
In fact, VLDL is the worst cholesterol.
Basically, sugar or more specifically, the fructose component,
it cheats the digestive system, cheats the liver and accelerates that fat producing process.
When you combine that without the insulin situation and then the liver stress and inflammation,
you've got a perfect storm of Lipogenesis.
The same thing can happen when you over eat with glucose.
This isn't an exclusive to fructose but there are four key reasons why sugar is particularly harmful.
Number one. Inflammation.
In an inflamed liver, in an inflamed digestive system from that fructose,
it becomes harder to metabolise them and work efficiently.
As a result, the liver is more likely to start shifting towards making that bad cholesterol,
storing that visceral fat and making us sick.
Number two. There's just a volume issue.
When you eat sugar versus starch, because of the 50% fructose that goes straight to the liver,
that liver is going to fill up with glycogen faster.
As a result, it's going to shift into making fat and making VLDL a lot faster and a lot quicker.
Number three. Glycemic Index.
Sugar has a super high glycemic index which means it hits the blood stream fast out of the gut.
As a result, you get these big spikes and troughs in your glucose levels, your blood glucose levels.
Number four. When we eat sugar, there's not as much of a leptin response.
Leptin is closely linked to insulin. It's the hormone that tells you've had enough food.
It's the satiety hormone. When you eat sugar, which is 50% fructose,
which doesn't stimulate insulin, we don't get as much of an effect.
You finish your meal, it's time for dessert, you can easily fit it in, that's always the way,
you always have room for dessert, it's like you've got a second stomach.
You don't. There's no such thing as a dessert stomach.
But what's happening is because sugar bypasses that satiety signalling system,
you can always just squeeze in a little bit more dessert.
And so that is why I'm going zero sugar for the next 28 days.
Starting from tomorrow.
It seems like a contradiction that I went and ate that chocolate after talking about how bad sugar is.
The problem with sugar isn't the single doses or the treats here and there.
It's the accumulation of fructose and sugar over the course of a day.
Have you ever looked at your diet and see what sorts of foods and especially packaged foods are particularly bad
See how much sugar is in those, that's when you get in trouble.
It's not the one offs here and there or a little bit of treat on a Friday, that's not the issue.
It's the accumulation of sugar over the course of the day that really causes the trouble.