Why eating sugar, bread and pasta makes you hungry

There are as many ‘right diets’ as there are people on the planet. The right diet for me will not be the right diet for you. What’s right for you will depend on your life stage, genetics, life-style and much more.

I work closely with my clients to determine what is the right diet for them. It is a learning process, and that ‘right diet’ will for sure change in the time that we work together. I also believe that the diet plan we create for them should be one that they would be willing to stick to for life. And we spend time analysing what that means and how they want to think and feel about that.

I work closely with my clients to explore what might be the right diet for them. It is a learning process. And that ‘right diet’ will for sure change in the time that we work together. 
I enourage them to consider that the diet plan we create for them should be something they would be willing to stick to for life. We also spend time considering what that means and how they want to think and feel about that.

But I do explore with my clients the benefits of giving up refined carbohydrates in the form of sugar and flour. And helping them decide whether that is something that they want to do.

Clients who do choose not to eat sugar and refined carbohydrates (NB: they still eat plenty of unrefined carbohydrates) regularly as a part of their weight loss journey still eat them occasionally. In fact, I encourage them to plan to eat them occasionally so that it doesn’t cause a mindset problem for them.

For my clients who choose not to cut out sugar and refined carbohydrates I explore with them ways that they can eat the healthier forms, and things that they can do to slow down the insulin response.

So, what happens when we eat sugar and refined carbohydrate?

When we eat sugar and refined carbohydrates our bodies release insulin to clear out the sugar (glucose) in your bloodstream (unless you are a type I diabetic like my husband). The greater the quantity of sugar and refined carbohydrate you eat the more insulin your pancreas will release, and the more often you eat it, again the more insulin you have in your blood stream.

You may think you are eating healthily, but if you are eating foods that contain sugar and refined carbohydrates regularly within your main meals and having snacks between meals you could find that often have insulin being released into your blood stream.

This is not good for you….it contributes to pre diabetes and diabetes in many people but it is a massive problem if you are trying to lose weight.

When insulin is released it delivers glucose from your blood to your muscles so that it can be used as energy. Any excess glucose is stored as fat. That isn’t a problem if we are nourishing our bodies optimally.

If we are not eating too much sugar and refined carbohydrates, then our body will access that stored fat and break it down and use it as energy. Whatever you eat gets stored, and then a bit later it gets pulled out and gets used up, so there’s no additional fat being added for the medium or long term.

When we have insulin in our blood, we cannot burn fat

The problem with insulin, and the reason why I teach my clients about it, is that when there is insulin in our blood, we cannot burn fat.

When we remember that Insulin’s job is to clear the blood of glucose and move it to our muscles and fat, it makes sense that our body can’t simultaneously be doing the reverse and breaking down the fat, because it doesn’t need to – because if we have insulin in our blood then we must have insulin available for energy already. Why would our body go to the freezer to get energy reserves when there is some in the fridge?

And if we have been doing this for years, if we have been frequently eating sugar and refined carbohydrates our bodies get lazy about getting food from the freezer, aka…burning our own fat for energy.

Our body becomes inefficient at accessing our own fat reserves and instead sends out hunger signals

What happens instead is that our body and brain tell us we’re hungry so that we eat more, and the cycle continues.

So, what happens when we give up sugar and flour is that we get good at ‘dining in’. I love the concept of ‘dining in’ which I first heard from my coach and mentor Brooke Castillo of The Life Coach School. ‘Dining in’ is when we use our bodies own fat reserves as fuel for energy instead of eating. When our body is efficient at ‘dining in’ we rarely feel physical hunger (different to emotional hunger) and our bodies are fat adapted.

Free consultations available

If you would like to explore giving up sugar and refined carbohydrates and how that could work for you schedule a free consultation today.