What does the level of sugar in your blood have to do with your skin?
Any food you eat can potentially be turned into sugar in your body, which is good. Our cells need glucose (sugar) to produce energy. That doesn't mean we need to feed ourselves the actual food called sugar. You know, white, granular and comes in really big packages.
When you eat fats your body uses some for immediate energy and stores the rest for later fuel sources. When you need energy later your liver converts the stored fat into glucose to be used by your cells.
When you eat carbs it is instantly converted into glucose and offered to the muscles, and the liver. Upon the happening that every system has used what it can and there is still some left over it is stored in the fat cells for later use. This is common as eating a large amount of sugar is easy to do. When extra glucose is stored in fat cells it forces those cells to grow bigger and bigger, this is the leading cause of body fat!
Adding insult to injury, every time you eat too much sugar your body has to go through the stress response of delivering glucose all over as if it were cleaning up a mess from a crime scene. Your body becomes less responsive to the hormones that deliver sugar to cells. This means that a dangerously high level of glucose gets left in your blood. The deadening of your cells' response to the sugar delivery hormone (insulin) is called insulin resistance.
All this trouble starts when you eat excess amounts of refined sugar which are not found in nature. Every time you eat carbs (grains, potatoes, corn, rice etc), natural sugars (raw honey, and fruit) or refined sugars and carb (processed flours, any type of sugar) your liver and pancreas have to go through the process of releasing insulin to shuttle the sugar around to different cells. If you continually feed your body sugar, whether good or bad, in excess amounts, this process has to keep restarting just to keep your hormones balanced and your body functioning properly.
Remember, if your liver is always worrying about your blood sugar it will not take time to process toxins out of the body.
What does this have to do with your skin?
1. Blood sugar that is out of control will lead to unbalanced hormones and inflammation; both can be the cause of acne and irritated skin.
2. Every time your blood sugar is out of control you body gets robbed of B vitamins and other necessary vitamins that are needed for detoxing.
3. When you feed your body more sugar and carbs than you feed it healthy fats, your body gets accustomed to using this for fuel and will make you crave more, leaving you avoiding healthy fats that supply fat soluble vitamins (such as vitamin A) found in animals fats that you need for healthy skin, and healing scars
4. Sugar in the body feeds bad bacteria and pathogens, which leads to overall toxicity and can be a leading cause for acne
The Big Fat Lie
You might be worried that if you ‘indulge’ in high fat foods such as butter, fatty meats, avocados, eggs, etc. that you will start to gain excess body weight. Have no fear, excess body fat is usually the result of toxins and unbalanced blood sugar.
Just like I stated earlier when you eat more sugar than your body can handle, your body uses what it can and stores the rest in adipose (fat) tissue. Eating fat does not mean you will gain fat, spiking your blood sugar and forcing your body to dump a lot of sugar into your adipose tissues will make you gain extra weight. Eating properly raised animal fats as well as avocado and oils will allow your body to be more satiated (the feeling of being full and satisfied) at each meal. Your body will get the nutrients it needs and signal you to stop eating. The fat that you have eaten is a dense source of nutrients. It is very hard to over eat pure fats while it is exceedingly easy to over eat empty carbs and sugars.
Some things you can do
1. Eat healthy fat - Good fats are grass fed butter, avocado oil, raw olive oil (not a good oil to heat), pasture raised, organic chicken eggs,
2. Eat less sugar - Sugar is an addictive substance. Our bodies get attached to the temporary high we get when eat indulge in this nutrient devoid food. If you are willing to break your sugar addiction and aren't a black and white, all or nothing type person, I highly encourage you to start slowly and start with reducing your normal sugar intake by half. After that go from there and get down to only one sweet treat a week. Through the process you will notice that natural food has so much more flavor than before!
3. Don't be afraid of healthy carb and sugar choices. - Sweet potatoes, squash, carrots, sprouted or fermented grains, berries and smaller servings or higher glycemic fruits (apples, oranges, bananas, grapes, cherries etc) are all good God made sources of sugar and carbs for you to enjoy. Each person needs a different ratio of fat, carbs and protein in their meal so play around with it.
4. Do not fall into the trap that an apple, banana, and an orange eaten within the course of one day or within the same meal setting (such as a loaded fruit smoothies) will not spike your blood sugar, because it will. Even though fruit is all natural and good for you in the right amounts it is easy to take it out of context and eat a ton of it making it just as harmful as processed sugars.
5. Consider taking probiotics - probiotics are the good bacteria that belongs in your gut. Due to c-section births, antibiotics and the lack of eating traditionally fermented foods, as a culture, we no longer have as much of these good gut bugs as we need. I highly encourage everyone to either eat fomented foods everyday such as kombucha, keifer, raw fermented sauerkraut, raw fermented pickles etc or take a high quality probiotic.
Have you ever broken yourself of your sugar eating habits? What tactics did you use? I’d love to hear from you.
