Health Hotline Magazine | February 2022

Trying to Maintain a

Healthy Weight? Keep Your Blood Sugar in Check.

By Lindsay Wilson

Gone are the days of counting calories, strict diets, and deprivation. Well, maybe they’re not completely gone, but they should be (because, spoiler, these methods don’t work, at least not for the long term). As the body positivity movement has grown and more of us are learning to love and respect the body we’re in , we are seeing a shift

away from the strict weight-loss diets of our parents’ days and a movement toward embracing a healthy eating lifestyle—one that supports overall health, including a healthy weight. Let’s move away from a mindset of eating to be skinny to one of eating to be healthy! And one key way to do that is to eat to support healthy blood sugar balance. Healthy weight…what’s blood sugar got to do with it? In short, everything. Keeping blood sugar, or glucose, balanced is so important to health that our bodies have a tightly regulated system of hormones to ensure levels stay within a very narrow range. When you eat sugary foods and simple carbs like bread, pasta, bagels, white rice, potato chips, etc., they are rapidly digested and converted into glucose, which can lead to sharp spikes in blood sugar. The pancreas responds by releasing a surge of insulin, the hormone that directs the glucose into the cells to either be burned for energy or stored; this removes excess glucose from the bloodstream, bringing blood sugar levels back to a normal range. When sugar and/or refined carbs are occasionally consumed in small amounts, this is an e ective system. But when these types of foods are regularly consumed (looking at you, typical American diet), the body is constantly struggling to keep blood sugar levels in a normal range by continually pumping more insulin into the bloodstream.

Think of insulin as a key that helps unlock your cells to absorb the glucose circulating in your bloodstream to use for energy. When your cells are so full of glucose that they can’t absorb anymore, insulin signals the body to store the excess as fat. This is the problem with eating an excessive amount of carbs—when there is too much glucose in the blood and cells are saturated and can no longer take in glucose (because we can only burn a certain amount of energy at a time), the healthiest thing insulin can do with it is signal the body to store it as fat for future energy use. Chronically elevated insulin is also a potential cause of leptin resistance; leptin is the hormone that tells your brain you are full and to stop eating (sometimes called the “satiety hormone”), and also regulates how energy is burned. All of this can lead to weight gain. But insulin is not the villain in this story —it is doing exactly what it’s supposed to do. A carb-heavy diet is the culprit.

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