How Does Sugar Affect You?

This week’s Fitness Post is brought to you by personal trainer Igor Klibanov from Fitness Solutions Plus.

Are you feeling tired, sluggish and slow? Pay attention, because we’re going to talk about how sugar affects you both short-term and long-term.

But first, let’s clarify something. When I say “sugar”, I don’t mean just the plain ol’ sugar you put in your tea. I’m also referring to all products that contain refined sugar: breakfast cereals, donuts, muffins (even the “healthy” muffins at Tim Hortons, Starbucks, Second Cup, etc.), pastries, etc.

Short-Term

It makes you fat. Let’s waste no words here. Specifically, it makes you fat in the belly, love handles and upper back (we measure 12 different spots on our clients, so we know how different nutritional strategies affect fat storage patterns). It decreases your energy. Why? Because when you eat sugar, it’s basically a poison to the body, so the body has to release its resources in order to neutralize those toxins. Those resources are the B vitamins, chromium, magnesium, and calcium. All nutrients needed for energy production.

It decreases your mental sharpness (and if you’re an athlete, throw reaction time into the mix). Sugar negatively affects your memory and mood. It makes you feel good for the first 15-30 minutes, when you’re on your “sugar high”, but after that, you don’t feel so upbeat and peppy.

As one of my clients remarked on facebook “lately, I’ve been having a lot of sugar and junk food, and I felt it slowed me down by a large margin when teaching and training at AIMA (Academy of Integrated Martial Arts). I stopped eating all that and in just a matter of a week I felt back to normal.”

There’s no teacher like experience.

Long-Term

It makes you REALLY fat. If you’re a man, not only will sugar grow your belly, love handles and upper back fat, it’ll also grow your chest. And I don’t mean your pecs. I mean your breasts. But hey, on the bright side, I see that Victoria’s Secret is having a sale on C-cup bras.

It causes diabetes. Diabetes is high blood sugar, and leads to a ton of disgusting complications. Like the death of skin cells, poor vision, and problems with your reproductive system (gentlemen: that’s impotence!)

It causes cancer. Do you know how doctors find out if you have cancer or not? They inject radioactive sugar into your bloodstream, and see where it goes. Cancer cells are the biggest consumer of sugar in your body, so that’s the first place sugar goes.

In a regular, healthy bodies, there are cancer cells all the time. But, in the presence of good nutrition, your immune system gets to these cells way before they become a problem, and kills them. However, if you’re feeding the problem, not only are you making the cancer worse, but sugar also inhibits the cells of the immune system. Double whammy.

But…

I know. Here comes the big but (pun most definitely intended). You must be thinking “but I eat donuts/cereal/whole wheat muffins on a regular basis and I’m fine.” I’d have to argue with that. If you’re eating those foods on a regular basis, then you don’t know what it feels like to not eat those foods on a regular basis.

Most people who eliminate those foods for just a week notice a drop of 2-5 pounds. Yes, the first few days they may experience a headache, changes in bowel movements, changes in skin quality, etc., but that’s just a detox reaction. It’s perfectly normal to feel worse before you feel better. Stick it out for an entire week, and your body will thank you. Then, if you want to try bringing it back into your diet after a week, be my guest. Once you bring it back, you’ll likely feel so awful, that you’ll voluntarily want to keep it out.