Balancing your blood sugar helps burning fat?
When you eat carbohydrates, your body converts it into blood sugar (glucose), which is our main source of energy. Blood sugar levels dictate how hungry or energetic you feel. It also dictates whether your body should burn glucose for energy or store it. This means if you know to balance your blood sugar, you can actually use it for burning fat and getting into shape.
Burning Fat by balancing your blood sugar
How does this work?
Insulin is a hormone produced in your pancreas. It helps transport blood sugar into your body’s cells where it is used as energy. When you eat foods such as refined grains and sugar or other carbohydrate-rich food, that lacks fibres, your pancreas has to work overtime to produce enough insulin to process all the glucose. This leads to a surge in the level of insulin in your body. Increased insulin levels is a signal to the body that there is already enough energy available and it should stop burning fat and start storing it. This backfires. Increased insulin production causes blood sugar to be transported out of blood. As a result, blood sugar and insulin levels drop below normal, leaving you feeling tired and hungry.
What do you normally do in such case?
Obviously, you turn to carbohydrate-rich diet and the cycle begins all over again. Insulin is a fat storage hormone. With the rise in insulin level, your body stops burning fat and starts accumulating it in places that throw you out of shape. That means there is just more than calorie-in-and-calorie-out.
What you can do about it.
No, skipping your meal or going on crash-diet won’t help you. In fact, if you go without eating for more than 4-to-5 hours your blood sugar will become unstable. This will make you feel tired, you may feel cranky and even your brain won’t function at its best. Now when you eat next time your insulin level will spike, even if you eat the healthiest food. That’s because when you starve your body picks cues and thinks it is threatened with starvation and goes into survival mode. Your body starts working hard to conserve fat. That’s not something you really want, right? The key to losing your weight through balancing your blood sugar is all about making your body more sensitive towards insulin hormone.
Balancing your blood sugar.
You don’t have to starve yourself to lose your weight. In fact doing so is counterintuitive.
Eat meals rich in fat, protein and fibre. Fat has less impact on blood sugar than carbohydrate. In fact, when you consume fat with a meal, it slows the absorption of your meal and in the process helps avoid steep insulin spikes.
You can naturally balance your blood sugar by avoiding simple carbohydrates and hidden sugar. Read the labels when you buy foods. You can identify simple carbohydrate and sugar when you read words ending with “ose”, for example, sucrose, fructose, lactose, and glucose. Processed foods, beverages, juices and fat-free foods all have hidden sugar in them.