Why is Sugar and Processed Flour so bad for us?
Sugar and Processed flour cause high insulin. High insulin causes fat storage. Fat storage is the opposite of losing fat. There is a reason why food manufacturers put sugar and flour into everything.
Sugar and flour make insulin high, super high. Why? Because it is concentrated food. Our body evolved to eat berries, not juice and soda all day long. The concentrated substances cause our insulin to accommodate a sugar spike. Insulin’s job here is to bring down sugar but unfortunately, when it’s there it’s storing all that sugar as fat as fast as it can.
High insulin levels affect the hormones Ghrelin and leptin as well. Ghrelin lets you know when you’re hungry and leptin lets you know when you are full.
In regards to Ghrelin with sugar and flour, they are concentrated and don’t fill the stomach the way something naturally occurring would. For example, one glass of apple juice is the equivalent of four apples. If you ate four apples, the Gherlin would signal you to stop eating, but when you drink a glass of juice the hunger signal is still very strong—so you stay hungry.
Leptin makes us feel full and encourages us to move. When insulin is abnormally high, insulin blocks the signal of leptin at the brain. The result is hunger, way too much hunger, over hunger. Over hunger is the cause, and overeating is the effect.
There is our Hormones being affected as well as our desire. Think about the things we most desire. We desire food, alcohol, Facebook, drugs and gambling. Anything that provides us with a reward in our brain will do the trick of generating powerful desire and overdesire.
Most of the things that cause overdesire are concentrated. If you look at how things occur naturally and then how we have now condensed them into a huge hit of something all at once, you can see how those things that give the biggest dopamine hit are the most lucrative to the sellers. Sugar and flour are concentrated food. What used to be a natural and powerful conditioning trigger is now a false pleasure giving us a concentrated dopamine response.
Flour and sugar are concentrated foods that give a concentrated dopamine neurotransmitter response. The more we eat these substances, the more we want them. The more dopamine that gets released in the brain, the more our neuroreceptors down regulate to accommodate it. This is very bad new, because it means we need even more of the substance to get the same reward, and we desire it twice as much. Our brain tells us well, if a little is good a lot would be better!
So how do we unlearn this?
Have you heard of Pavlov’s dog? Just like Pavlov’s dogs who used to drool at the sound of a bell, we too start drooling with desire when we get exposed to a concentrated stimulus (flour, sugar, alcohol, drugs, etc) with immediate reward. If desire is always answered with a reward, then the desire will continually increase after every exposure.
This is why, so often, we set out with the intention of not overeating, and then overdesire drives us to seemingly eat against our will. The brain’s job is to seek pleasure as a survival mechanism. When pleasure is concentrated, then the brain’s motivation is accelerated and increased. Overriding this desire becomes a force of will when we don’t understand it. It’s a battle that most of us end up losing.
So how to unlearn your overdesire? Is for you to be willing to be uncomfortable. Not rewarding yourself by having that sugar or flour will be uncomfortable, but you can do it. You can tolerate it. You can manage it. Your ability to be uncomfortable is directly related to your ability to be successful. If you are willing to feel temporarily uncomfortable, then you will get the long-time comfort of being in a thin body. To be free of the constant chatter about food and weight.
If this resonates with you and you would like help in losing weight, please reach out to me at karenschaible.co
