Why your body is telling you to eat more sugar (and how to stop).
Key Points:
- Do not listen to your body if your metabolism is broken and your body is in an inflammatory state (obesity, type 2 diabetes, etc)
- Do listen to your body if you’re lean and healthy, and its obvious you’ve established your homeostatic eating system over your hedonic eating system. To do this,
- Eliminate common inflammatory foods (vegetable and seed oils, refined sugar and carbohydrate, gluten, A1 casein-containing dairy, processed soy)
- If after you remove the aforementioned foods for a while (months), have already lost weight and feel healthy, and are still feeling inflamed, embark on an elimination diet which may involve eliminating typically “healthy” foods.
- Move more! Exercise intensely enough to get the endorphin rush, which can satisfy the dopaminergic system in place of a bolus of sugar.
Many Paths to the Goal
When it comes to your fitness and nutrition goals, there are many paths you can take to get to them. They all have parallels with each other; with fat loss, this ultimately includes obeying the laws of thermodynamics – you need at least a modest weekly caloric deficit (that deficit can generally be greater the more fat mass you have). With muscle gain, it ultimately comes down to the same thing, except maintaining a modest weekly surplus.
With tracking macros, some people adhere to strict “clean eating”, which is a loaded term in and of itself. Many bodybuilders still adhere to this dogma and routinely wolf down their dry chicken breasts, rice, and broccoli for every meal.
Some people go the opposite end of the spectrum and just do IIFYM (if it fits your macros) and wolf down ice cream, pop tarts, and whey shakes to get lean. While this will still work to get lean (not healthy), it robs you of valuable micronutrients and will lead to deficiencies if practiced long term.
Listening to Your Body
How Does Your Body Talk to Itself?

Carbs and Your Hormones

Emotional Eating
Then you have the hedonic vs. homeostatic system. Humans are complex creatures with complex emotions. Everyone’s had that day. You didn’t get great sleep the night before. You drag yourself to work. Boss has an extra large workload for you today. A lot of your clients are being demanding or uncooperative. A huge deal just fell through that you thought was in the bag. Your disgruntled co-worker is complaining more than normal and its grating on your last nerve. You keep glancing at the clock, waiting for 5 PM to roll around. 4:55 and your boss comes in, asking you if you can stay a couple extra hours. Finally, you get to go home. That pint of half-baked B&J is looking mighty good right now. Or a few chocolate chip cookies. Or the whole box. Emotional eating is real.
When You Shouldn’t Listen to Your Body
When you’re preparing your body to be stage-worthy

When you CAN listen to your body

- Vegetable and seed oils (stay far, far away no matter what) – Canola, corn, safflower, soybean, sunflower, cottonseed, etc.
- Instead, use: Extra virgin olive oil, avocado oil, coconut oil, lard, tallow, grass-fed butter or ghee
- Dairy that contains casein protein (even if you’re tolerant to lactose)
- Gluten containing foods and most grains
- Instead, use tubers and squashes (if already fairly lean and carbohydrate sensitive): potatoes, sweet potatoes, taro, cassava, butternut squash, spaghetti squash, hokkaido, etc.
- Soy – Especially processed soy foods (Tofu, tempeh, etc)



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