The fat vs. sugar breakdown

Your gut is your second brain – if you want to improve your mood, your energy and your complete outlook on life, then improve your food choices.

The fast, high-sugar foods can be massively hard to resist, especially if this is something you have struggled with in the past, but make it your mission to get past this sugar induced dopamine hit first thing in the day and reap the rewards for the rest of the day. (The less sugar you have, the easier it gets).

Make the simple but crucial switch from sugar to fats in the morning and reap the rewards of sustained energy all day.

Sugar

Quick deep dive: Getting away from simple sugars will make a massive difference in your life. When sugar passes through the digestive tract, it enters the bloodstream, and blood sugar rises. If left alone, it becomes toxic. So as a response, the body releases insulin, and the liver converts this into fuel in the form of glycogen. But the liver can only convert so much before the glycogen storage becomes maxed out. Therefore, the body converts the excess into fat.

Sugar is hidden in everything, so it can be hard to even notice you are eating it. They disguise it in ridiculous names like evaporated cane juice, maltodextrin, brown rice syrup, fructose, fruit juice concentrates, etc. Companies even get their drinks labelled as sports drinks because they managed to get some famous sports star to do something cool while drinking it… and somehow it’s now healthy.

So, you are nearly always better off to choose slow-release complex carbohydrates (whole foods) as a better option to give a slow release into the blood stream and not allow any spill over.

If you get to the point of insulin resistance, your body is not able to shuttle sugar from the blood as efficiently. At a certain point this becomes type 2 diabetes, where additional insulin is needed to help shuttle these nutrients because your body can’t do it on its own.

Quick fact: In 1980, 15% of Americans were obese, that number is now pushing past 40% (NZ is not far off).

One of the major changes between 1980 and present day, is the demonising of fat in our diet. This caused a massive rise in sugar to substitute the fat removed from foods. Which made for a massive flood of inflammation and insulin issues across the world.

Just for the record, the original research that said fat caused heart disease has been debunked 101 times saying there is no conclusive evidence to say this is the case.

Fats

Rather than just leaving you more confused than when you started like the rest of the fitness industry, let’s give you some actionable steps. Firstly, stay away from refined fats/trans fats and vegetable fats. The good fats we want you to be having are in unprocessed meats, dairy, nuts, avocados, butter (not spreadable margarine crap), eggs, etc.

Side note for our friend Cholesterol:

Cholesterol is essential for maintaining good health and hormonal levels. There is very little correlation between eating fats and an increase in LDL (bad cholesterol) though 54% of doctors still believe that dietary cholesterol (like egg yolks) significantly affects LDL, which is a dangerous association if only measured by itself (yet they are the ones handing out the drugs). A fact that was implicitly stated when the US health board released the new dietary guidelines and didn’t specify an upper daily limit of cholesterol.

A good representation of this is that fasting (considered one of the healthier diet choices out there) will significantly increase LDL because of this increased transportation of fat. So, the reason this measurement is ineffective is because it doesn’t show the correlation to insulin resistance (ability to use glucose/sugar) in associated with LDL having negative side effects – the issue comes back to the utilisation of sugar.

Actionable steps

We are going to start with breakfast. This is going to be one of your most important decisions of the day. What you eat here is going to dictate your hormone profile, your energy levels, mood and fat burning for the rest of the day.

So, I want you to take this seriously…

Simple rule: No sugar, more fat, or don’t eat.

Break the habit of a fast-easy breakfast. Breads and sugar are out, fats and fiber are in. You want foods that are slow and simple (whole food).

Make this change to your diet and reap the rewards for the rest of the day. There is so much conflicting information out there, so no wonder we get stuck in an information overload. Let me know if this article cleared things up, because at the end of the day its only valuable if it makes sense to you enough to implement.

The value in working with a coach is receiving information that you can ACTUALLY put into practice. Rather than consuming ALL of the information out there and getting mixed messages, it is more valuable to receive less information that is actually personalised to you. While the world is stuck in an information overload, the value comes in knowing what should work for you RIGHT NOW.

In your corner – Olly

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