Human metabolism is a very complex process but for ease of simplicity I will endeavour to keep this as simple as possible. When you eat a typical meal which is high in carbohydrates your body breaks the food down into its simplest form, namely glucose and it is then transported throughout the body via the blood. Now your blood can only transport a couple of teaspoons in the blood at any one time, any more than this and it becomes highly toxic.
As a safe guard to impending toxicity and the dangers that it brings the body produces a hormone called Insulin from the pancreas and its role is to encourage the removal of all excess sugar out of the circulation as quickly as it possibly can. And it does this in one of three ways; firstly it directs the glucose to be burnt as energy. However unfortunately because most of us are far too sedentary (research suggests that most of us sit for about 16 hours in the day) we have little need for an easy fuel source. As a result the blood sugar levels continue to rise and more insulin is produced. At this point the excess glucose is then converted in to glycogen (a starch like substance) which can then be stored. Unfortunately however glycogen storage space is very limited in the body (at most ½ day supply compared with 2 months fat stores!) and again considering our sedentary behaviour these stores are rarely depleted!
Which therefore leaves one final course of action and that is for the insulin to trigger the conversion of glucose in to ………….actual fat! And this fat is then stored around the body and we put on weight. Now this problem is further exacerbated by the fact that when insulin levels are high this conversion is a one way street. In other words considering our high carbohydrate diets insulin levels are consistently at high levels which essentially keeps these fats stores under lock and key, only letting more fat in and not releasing any! And that is why weight gain is such a progressive and seemingly unstoppable occurrence!
So until you break this insulin/sugar cycle you will continue to increase your fat stores! And unfortunately we are still not done because by keeping up our high sugar diets month after month, year after year eventually the body starts fatiguing and you begin to develop a state called insulin resistance where essentially the cells stop reacting and responding to insulin and eventually this leads to complete burnout of the pancreas and you develop type 2 diabetes where you have to inject yourself with insulin! Sadly this situation is happening more and more frequently with recent reports suggesting that one-third of people born in 2010 will develop diabetes at some point in their lives! That is a staggering and frightening statistic and to reiterate what I said at the outset it is obvious that what we are currently doing is not working! Conventional advice and wisdom is WRONG!