55: The Scoop On Sugar + Inflammation: Is It Really That Bad?

I know what you're thinking when you see this episode title: is sugar really that bad?

Maybe you're like me a few years ago, telling yourself, "I eat pretty clean, I don't really have that much sugar." (But, you’re still struggling to lose weight, even though you think your nutrition is totally dialed in). Or maybe you know deep down you could probably cut back on sugar, but you have no idea where to start.

Whatever side you're on, get ready for some major eye-openers. Because sugar isn't just about the candy bars and soda you think it is. I'm going to pull back the curtain on how much "sugar" you're actually eating and what it's doing to your body right now.

I'm talking about the bloat, the brain fog, the stubborn belly fat, and even the joint pain you've been dealing with. We'll explore:

• How certain "healthy" foods can act like a candy bar in your body and why that matters.
• The surprising, sneaky places sugar is hiding in your daily diet (it's in more than you think!).
• Why that extra glass of wine at happy hour is making it impossible for you to lose weight.
• The vicious cycle of sugar cravings and why ultra-processed foods are engineered to make you want more.
• The connection between sugar, inflammation, and all those annoying perimenopause symptoms you're trying to escape.

This episode is your kick in the pants to start taking your sugar intake seriously.

But don't worry, I'm giving you simple, actionable solutions you can start on today. You'll learn how to track your intake, find delicious alternatives, and use everyday habits to drastically reduce inflammation and feel better fast.

Mentioned Resources

✅ Health Hacks Podcast, "How Sugar is Shortening Your Lifespan" by Dr. Mark Hyman
✅ Free healthy meal plan for the entire family
✅ Free Healthy Snack Guide

More Support For You

✅ Work with Me
✅ How I Cook Just 3 Nights/Week
✅ Mindset Framework to Stop Relying On Motivation
✅ Connect on Instagram

Transcript

Welcome back there, my friend. So I know that this title of this podcast episode has you thinking, like, is sugar really that bad? And I can imagine that you have one or two thoughts when you think about sugar. One, maybe you're the type of person that thinks, you know what, I probably could eat a little less sugar. Or maybe you're the person that says, you know what, I eat really clean and I don't think I really eat that much sugar.

However, if you're that person in the back of your mind, you might also recognize that you are struggling to lose weight even though your nutrition is dialed in in your mind, right? So if you think you could cut back on your amount of sugar that you eat, I really want you to listen in because there is some great information and some really good solutions in this episode. But if you're the person who thinks, well, I already eat healthy and I don't need that much sugar,

but you're still not hitting your health and wellness and fitness goals, I have some eye-openers for you. So you are gonna wanna stay tuned.

All right, so let's talk a little bit about sugar. So in this episode, the kind of sugar that I am going to be referring to, you can assume, of course, that's like white table sugar or refined, any sort of refined sugar, like refined brown sugar. But I also want us to think about processed sugar, things like high fructose corn syrup or glucose syrup, which you can find in a lot of like gummy vitamins and gummy bears.

And then I also want you to be thinking about starches like potatoes, white rice. Now, let me caution. I am not saying that potatoes and white rice are bad. I'm not saying that at all. But what I do want you to understand is that your body converts a potato the same way it converts a candy bar. It uses those carbohydrates for energy.

So it's really important when you are thinking about sugar that you're not just thinking about candy or kind of that white sugar that you're putting in your coffee in the morning.

One of the biggest culprits of sugar in your diet, in your nutrition, that can actually cause a lot of issues with your body is added sugar. So again, of course, you assume that this is gonna be candy bars and soda and energy drinks, but you can also find ⁓ sugar hiding in things like cereal. You know, your cereal is supposed to be healthy, but if you look at the ingredient label or the nutrition label,

there's often added sugar in there. You can find that added sugar hiding in ketchup or salad dressings. Lots of condiments have added sugar. Frozen foods, for example, or bread. The reason we see this is because ultra-processed foods use sugar or sugar-like ingredients to make the food taste better. So when we're talking today, I want you to really be thinking about

everything that you eat vitamins, gummy vitamins. I've seen some gummy vitamins that have up to six grams of added sugar per gummy. That's too much if it's supposed to be a vitamin. So I really want you to be thoughtful that we're looking at a lot of different sources of sugar. Of course, the white tabled sugar, any sort of refined sugar, but also those things like high fructose corn syrup or glucose syrup.

or anything else and also potatoes, white rice, some of the tropical fruits like bananas that are just naturally higher in sugar. So I want you to think more well-rounded about what you're eating when we start looking at sugar.

So here is the deal with sugar. Your body most likely cannot use all of the sugar that you give it on a daily basis or by meal or snack. And so that excess sugar ends up turning into belly fat. know, that visceral fat, that belly fat that hangs around your midsection, that is the kind of fat that is really unhealthy for your body. It kind of

covers up your organs and makes everything, it just is harder for everything to work.

Once you have that belly fat, your body starts experiencing inflammation. That belly fat fires up inflammation and that inflammation is like a wildfire in your body. It will cause so many other issues with other operating systems like your metabolism and your immune system. And if you are

a mom and you're in midlife, so you're probably in perimenopause or somewhere on your way onto menopause, you are also losing estrogen at this time in your life. And estrogen, interestingly, is designed to help our body manage inflammation. So when you start having this inflammation, this wildfire in your body, in your brain,

and you have less estrogen because you're in perimenopause or starting to, you know, filter in a menopause, all of a sudden that excess sugar is making everything harder for your body. So it really does have a very profound impact on every system in your body.

There's a medical doctor, his name is Dr. Mark Hyman, H-Y-M-A-N, and he is a conventional doctor turned functional health doctor. And he has a podcast called Health Hacks. And I want you to go listen to episode number three, and I'll put a link for this in the show notes, but I want you to listen to episode number three. Its title is How Sugar is Shortening Your Lifespan. It is a eye-opening

jaw-dropping account of what sugar is doing to our bodies, to our kids' bodies. It is really so profoundly impactful. And I think that's, if you're curious to know a little bit more, I want you to dive into that episode. But again, I'll put a link in the show notes for you. But we can talk about the medical side of things and what is happening in your body from a physical and medical standpoint.

I am not a doctor, so that's why I encourage you to go listen to Dr. Mark Hyman's Health Hacks. It's very, very fascinating. But what you can relate to, and what I definitely can talk about, is like how you feel. What do you feel in your body when you are consuming too much sugar? So in my work as a nutrition coach, I definitely see women come to me because they are gaining weight,

very quickly or they just feel like it's so hard to lose any weight. Now this of course could be driven from lots of different issues or challenges but what I see when I dig into this with women is that sugar is often a huge driver in women really struggling to lose weight. 10 years ago this was 100 % me. I would

totally joke that like, okay, I'm just going to look at a piece of cheesecake and that would make me gain weight. It was so frustrating. And I really believed I was eating healthy. was having salads every day and I wasn't eating out a lot. was cooking a lot of my own food, but here's the kicker. If I got really honest with myself, which I've done now, fast forward 10 years, I was drinking a lot and

In that time of my life, was fun and it was easy and it was happy hours and drinking on the weekend. But the problem is that alcohol is another food item that converts to sugar in your body. And that sugar was making it impossible for me to lose weight or to really get healthy.

So again, if you are that person who said, well, you know, I eat pretty healthy. How many glasses of wine are you having a week? How many times are you going out for happy hour with friends? I really want you to think very critically about where you could be ingesting things that are sugar or process in your body exactly like sugar.

Another thing that you might be feeling or struggling with is bloating. So I hear this a lot from women, know, I really, I'm struggling to button up my pants or one of the common complaints is I, I feel like I look okay in the morning, but then by the end of the day, I just feel super bloated and my pants are uncomfortable.

Sugar could definitely be to blame here. And what's happening is that sugar knocks your gut health completely out of balance. It can feed bad bacteria. And so you get an overgrowth of bad bacteria and then your digestion can't work properly. And if your digestion doesn't work properly, you're going to feel bloated. You might have constipation and that in turn creates additional problems throughout your body's

system.

Raise your hand if you struggle with brain fog. my gosh, this was me for so many years. Believe it or not, brain fog typically stems from poor gut health, which if we just talked about, know, sugar can disrupt our gut microbiome. And so if your gut health is off or unbalanced, it is going to be very difficult for you to think clearly because your

because that inflammation that is driving all of the challenges that you're feeling, the brain fog, the bloating, it is impacting your brain. That inflammation doesn't just stay localized to your belly area because of the belly fat, it impacts your entire body, including your brain.

Maybe you're having a lot of cravings. The interesting thing is that when you eat sugar, it automatically triggers your body to want to eat more sugar. It's this really vicious cycle. And fascinating, but frustrating, processed sugars, like in ultra processed foods, those ingredients are engineered to be more appealing and more addictive. They intend the...

makers of those foods and those cookies and those candy bars and sports drinks, they are engineered to make you want more and more. So when it feels like, know, I'm just gonna have like five ⁓ &Ms, because you think that you're, you know, just trying to have a couple of bites, but then you end up having a quarter of the bag of ⁓ &Ms, it's really because the candy is designed to do that. It's designed to make you want more. And again,

When you feel all of these things, the bloating, the brain fog, it's because you are having increased inflammation. It is the wildfire of inflammation in your body. You'll see it with constipation. Maybe you have an increase in anxiety. Are you struggling to have a good night of sleep? Maybe you have joint pain. Your joints really hurt or your knees or your hips feel stiff. Maybe you just have less motivation than you used to.

All of these can be traced back to the amount of sugar that you consume. And what's hard is that ultimately sugar has been found to be a major contributor to some of the top medical issues that women face, especially as we get older, heart disease, cancer, Alzheimer's disease, mental health issues like depression. So sugar has a very

profound impact on your body. But we can do something about it. Not all hope is lost. We can definitely do something about it. So I wanna give you a couple of strategies that I think will help you and they're actually pretty easy. You can start all of them today. So number one, I want you to start tracking how much sugar you eat. And I am talking all of it. The processed sugars from like candy bars and packaged foods.

natural sugar from fruit or from starches like potatoes and white rice. If you don't have an easy way to do this because you know your candy bar is going to say how much sugar is on it your potato is not. So I use MyFitnessPal. It's a free and easy way to be able to track a lot of nutrients that you are eating but it will give you that information for sugar specifically. Now I want you to track how much sugar you're eating for one week and

Maybe that feels overwhelming, but what I want you to change your mindset to is this is giving me some data to work with. Because again, like I mentioned at the beginning of the podcast, maybe you're that person that says, yeah, I probably could cut down on the amount of extra sugar that I'm having. But especially if you are one of those people that says, I'm a really healthy eater. I don't eat that much sugar. I have found

time and time again with the women that I work with, you will be shocked at how much sugar you are actually eating on a daily basis or a weekly basis. So I really want you to commit to doing this for one week and give yourself a data point to start with. So once you have that data point, the goal is to reduce that number. Whatever it is, the goal is to reduce that number.

So for context, I have been reducing the amount of sugar that I eat, both processed sugar and natural sugar. And my goal every day is to eat less than 50 grams of sugar total. So that includes my strawberries, my Hu chocolate that I eat every day, all of it. And so I want you to look at your number. Now, if your number is really high, I've seen numbers like

150, 200, 300. If your number is really high, I want you to make a goal for yourself that you would cut that amount of sugar per day in half in the next 30 days. You're not gonna get it down to 50 grams overnight. It's just unrealistic to think that you can do that. But I want you to start looking at what are some ways that I could reduce the amount of sugar that I'm having every single day.

The good thing is that the more you reduce your intake of sugar, the less inflamed you'll be and the less you will crave sugar and sugary foods. Your taste buds actually change and you'll find the less that you eat, the less you desire it. Because remember, we talked about that sugar, your body, just the way sugar works in your body, it's designed to ask for more when you give it more.

So one of the ways that you can cut your grams of sugar per day in half over time is our number two tip, which is looking for alternatives. So one of the fastest ways to cut your added sugars and to cut sugar overall in your daily nutrition is to stop eating ultra processed foods.

It is really just shocking to me how engineered those processed foods are with ingredients, not just sugar, but artificial colors and artificial flavors. All of that is engineered in a lab to make you want to eat more and more. So literally one of the fastest ways you can support the reduction of inflammation in your body is to stop eating so many processed foods.

You can also swap soda for sparkling water, maybe squeeze some fresh lemon or some fresh lime in there. Definitely give yourself some help and eat fewer processed snacks, which this is where I see a ton of added sugars hiding.

This can all feel really overwhelming if some of the ultra processed foods are more of a daily staple for you. So I want you to look into the show notes. I have linked to a couple of free guides that are really gonna help you with finding some alternatives to the snack foods and meal items that you might be eating today that are already filled with a lot of sugars.

You'll find a meal plan there that has breakfast, lunch, dinner, and snack ideas. And then there's also a really awesome snack guide that is just snacks that you can buy that are going to be lower in added sugars and healthier ingredients overall compared to other ultra processed snacks. both of those guides, they're free. They're going to be a great way for you to start making some of those swaps.

and finding alternatives that both you and your family, this is really important for your kiddos. We talked about this in the last episode, but really reducing the amount of sugar that you have available to yourself and your family is going to help everyone in your family.

The third thing that you can do to reduce the amount of sugar that you're eating is to get more sleep. you probably already know this, but when you have a really bad night of sleep, have you ever sort of like woken up in a groggy state and you're really hungry for carbs? You want a bagel, you want a muffin, you want some pancakes, you want something that's full of carbohydrates. That is because when you have a bad night of sleep,

your cortisol increases. And when you have more cortisol in your body, your body has higher cravings for sugar and high carbohydrates. Your brain in this situation is really thinking like, my gosh, something's wrong. My body needs more energy. And so it's sending out these signals for cravings because it wants you to go find more energy. And if you think about it, you're probably gonna get more energy

at least a quick burst of energy from a big pile of pancakes, a stack of pancakes in the morning, than you are from two eggs, right? So you can help yourself not give into those cravings by getting more sleep.

And finally, I want you to drink more water. This goes without saying, but a well hydrated body has lower inflammation. And if you have less inflammation, it means you're going to have fewer cravings for those high sugary foods. Your joints are going to feel better. You will sleep better. You will think more clearly. It's just overall.

one of the best and fastest and easiest things you can do to reduce inflammation in your body.

So hopefully hearing some of this, are convinced now that sugar does have a major impact on inflammation. And I think it helps to pull away from the medical explanations and really recognize how you can see excess sugar in your everyday complaints like bloating and brain fog, not being able to lose weight. But keep in mind that sugar

too much of it, it can have serious consequences like heart disease and cancer and mental health challenges. So while these solutions may seem pretty simple, it's really important that you start by tracking. Tracking is gonna give you this true number of how many grams of sugar you're eating every day so that you can actually understand how sugar is impacting inflammation in your body.

Because without that number, you're just kind of guessing. And then once you know, you can easily dig into some of those easier solutions, like just drink more water and get more sleep.

All right, thank you for joining me today. I want you to make sure that you are checking the show notes for some of those free resources that are going to help you reduce inflammation simply by lowering the amount of sugar that you consume every day.

You're going to feel better. You're going to lose some of those stubborn pounds. And you might even live longer with some of these simple adjustments that you can make to what you eat.

Thanks for joining me and I'll see you here next week.