During the class I hosted on Saturday, we touched on how the body metabolizes sugar. At that point, many of the participants realized that they had been working against their own efforts to lose weight. They weren’t alone, I had the same misunderstanding that kept me working against myself for years.
I didn’t understand that when there is sugar present in your system, your body can NOT burn fat. What this means is that even if you haven’t eaten anything all day except a doughnut – around 400+ calories – you still won’t lose any weight. That goes against everything I had learned! A trainer at a gym once told me that weight loss was simple, that weight loss is simply intaking fewer calories than you burn – which is supposed to be somewhere between 1200-2000 calories.
For years, I tried to follow this advice. I starved myself and ate less than 1000 calories a day. It was no wonder I couldn’t sustain that! Because that is not how the body works.
Here’s the truth that helped me:
- Your body has to burn its sugar stores first before it switches to burning fat
That means your body has to burn through all of the sugar molecules that cookie, that donut, that candy bar contains before it can ever burn one ounce of fat. And most likely due to the sugar rush that happens too quickly, your body is going to release extra insulin to remove it from the bloodstream and store it as fat somewhere else (belly, thighs, etc). Then, as your blood sugar drops thanks to the insulin, as a result, you begin to feel hungry again, you eat more which means you’re just going to store more fat.
If you want to get into fat-burning mode, you’ve got to reduce your sugar intake, which includes fruit, bread, pasta, rice, and other grains. Now… this doesn’t mean you have to go “low-carb” forever, because the body requires healthy carbs. It just means that you need to spend some time in “low-carb” land until you get closer to reaching your weight loss goal.
For me, it took about 6 months before I began increasing my resistant carb intake and revisiting “in-season” fruit. During this time, I really had to monitor my weight and keep track of how my body responded to certain foods. For you, it may be less time or it could be more.
This is just one of the things we discussed, we also talked about how understanding how the body heals itself can help you better understand why certain changes are needed. If you missed the 1-Day Class, you can still catch the replay and get all the resources the participants received. Visit this link to find out more: 1-Day Class Replay
Photo by Caju Gomes on Unsplash