Get the sugar out.

Hopefully you all had a great Thanksgiving. It's hard to beat a holiday devoted to eating. It also makes for a pretty good opportunity to discuss one of the biggest diet killers there is...Relapse. It's easy when faced with holidays, birthdays, anniversaries, reunions, etc to fall off the wagon and overindulge in all the foods that we know aren't health promoting. Don't allow the nutritional indiscretions you may have committed over the Thanksgiving holiday to derail your quest for improved health. Even if you totally went off the rails last Thursday it's not the end of the world. This is a new week and we have a new challenge, but first let's recap the last two weeks. In week one we got rid of wheat.  In week two we replaced processed seed oils with natural fats like butter or coconut oil. This week we're going to take on sugar. 

For some folks, this will be nearly as difficult as eliminating wheat.  Sugar is everywhere in the standard American diet. It's added to almost all processed foods. Soda is loaded  with it.  Just about anything that's advertised as "low fat" will contain added sugar. It's one of the key ingredients used in place of fat to make processed food palatable.  In addition to sugar explicitly identified on the label of packaged foods we need to realize it comes in other forms as well.  Dietary starches are simply long chains of sugar molecules.  When we eat starch, amylase, an enzyme found in saliva begins to break that starch into its constituent sugars.  This process continues as the food travels through the stomach and small intestine until it's absorbed into the bloodstream as sugar.  The speed at which this breakdown occurs is what determines a food's glycemic index.  The faster a starch gets absorbed the higher the glycemic index. 

So why is sugar so damaging? Because of the hormonal response it elicits. When we eat sugar or starch it's quickly absorbed into the bloodstream through the lining of the small intestine. To deal with this elevated blood sugar the pancreas secretes the hormone insulin. Insulin is a storage hormone. It's the key that opens the door on your cell walls allowing them to take up sugar so it can be burned for energy. It also signals the liver to start pulling sugar out of the blood and start packaging it into glycogen, a storable form of sugar, and triglycerides. Glycogen and triglycerides are released back into the bloodstream for storage in the muscles where it can be accessed relatively quickly to fuel activities like bootcamp.  The problems start when sugar/starch intake are chronically high.  A continuous stream of dietary sugar/starch keeps blood sugar elevated and your pancreas pumping out insulin to bring those blood sugar levels down.  This storage signal prevents you from ever accessing stored body fat for energy.  Using your fat stores to fuel your daily activities is key to improving body composition and that’s why this week’s challenge is to eliminate added sugar entirely and limit starch consumption to the window 30-120 minutes after your workout.  Replace these calories with extra veggies, dense protein (beef, chicken, fish, eggs) and some of those healthy fats we discussed last week.