Crazy Sexy Diet: Eat Your Veggies, Ignite Your Spark, and Live Like You Mean It! (15 page)

Before we start our lesson
on sugar and other stimulants, let’s get one thing straight: You are sweet enough. You are sharp enough. Your natural, holy state is more than enough. You just think you need that extra boost. But your body knows exactly how to create it naturally. Keep it clean and lean. Dump the crack!

The real you knows exactly what I mean. In your original state you ooze magic honey. Unicorns want to lick you. Cupcakes and vodka just won’t do. They distort your connection to your base energy. A bump, hit, sip, or snack will definitely make you soar for a hot mess of a minute. But like Icarus flying so high, the race to the sun will burn your wings and drop you on your fat, sugary ass!

Excess sugar (especially the devilish white stuff) robs your bod of minerals, lowers your precious pH, rots your teeth, wigs out your pancreas, feeds candida, fires up inflammation, osteoporosis, diabetes, and cancer, stresses your nervous system and adrenals, and screws with normal hormone function. It also makes you feel crappy after the initial jolt subsides. Sugar taxes your immune system and is highly addictive. Are some sugars better than others? Heck yeah, and you’ll learn the best to choose. But in all cases moderation is key. Sweets are a treat, not an everyday event.

Look, I know firsthand how hard it is to heal addictions. I come from a scarf-and-barf, drinktoo-much history. Date night with myself was
a debaucherous romp into coma-ville. I’d buy a bunch of cookies and wine, pop the top button of my jeans, and chow down. Occasionally my higher self would guide me to the trash can before I finished every last crumb. An hour later my lower self would bark orders to pick through the trash and retrieve the delicious drugs like a back-alley junkie.

Elegant people don’t dig through the trash. The chic and stylish don’t attack their doughnuts with Windex. Yes, I admit it. The only way to keep my paws off the contraband was to blast it with Windex. Clearly, I was out of control.

Some of the most dangerous
drugs are legal. And I’m not talking about the celebrity-killing pills; I’m talking about the narco-sweeteners that have overtaken the aisles of your grocery stores. Corporate yahoos do their best to greenwash and brainwash, but even the American Heart Association (AHA) is getting on board and imploring people to drastically reduce the amount of sugar they consume. In an article published in 2009 in the major medical journal
Circulation
, AHA researchers recommended that women limit their sugar intake to no more than 100 calories a day (about 6 teaspoons). For men, a limit of 150 calories per day (about 9 teaspoons) is suggested. That’s way below the average of 355 calories (22 teaspoons) from sugar the average American consumes each day.

Still, even the low amount the AHA recommends is too much, in my opinion. Plus, do you know how hard it is to limit sugar when it’s hidden in everything? You know that a 12-ounce can of cola has sugar in it—that’s no secret (the equivalent of 10 teaspoons of sugar in the form of high-fructose corn syrup, or HFCS, in fact). Okay, but did you also know that HFCS is found in, well, many if not most packaged foods, including brands of applesauce, sushi, bread crumbs, baked beans, cough syrup, canned soups, and hundreds of other packaged products that have no real reason to include the sweet stuff? The US Department of Agriculture has estimated that we eat 79 pounds of corn sweetener per year. Not surprisingly, on average, a typical American consumes 150 pounds of sugar per year—and we don’t even know it!

Manufacturers know that people like sugar, and they also know it is addictive. They play on the fact that sugar makes us feel better—temporarily—and that it’s a comfort food. When you were a kid, were you ever bribed with cookies or candy? “If you’re good and do such-and-such, you can have a tasty reward.” Perhaps your BFF got dumped and desperately needed a shoulder to cry on. A perfect time for a “my condolences” pound cake! Or maybe, like me, you savored pound cake at funerals. Sugar is a delicious salve, and what used to be reserved for special occasions is now a 24/7 addiction.

Sugar makes us feel better for real reasons. It stimulates the release of dopamine (mood lube) in the brain. Naturally, when something makes us feel better, we crave more of it. It’s a well-known fact that the cravings, withdrawal, and relapse symptoms of sugar addicts are similar to those of cocaine and heroin abusers. Their brains are actually wired in a similar way; yet another incentive for rethinking the sweet stuff bribery strategy. How about buying yourself a nice moisturizer when you’re feeling low; or taking your kid to the movies or having a tickle fest, instead of indulging in candy when they’ve had a rough week at school?

Now let’s talk about my favorite organ, the liver. Excess sugar is stored in the liver as glycogen. Your liver is the cabinet and the glycogen is a stash of energy that your body can raid when it needs a boost between meals, during exercise, overnight, or while fasting. Like all storage spaces, however, there’s only so much room. Someone who consistently overeats sugar and carbs will fill up all the storage space in the liver.

Once your liver is crammed full of glycogen, excess glucose is converted into fatty acids (triglycerides). It then enters the bloodstream and gets stored in your tissues. The good news: You don’t have to rent a tire when tubing down the creek. The bad news: The tire permanently dangles around your middle. The really bad news: People who store more fat around their abdominal area are at higher risk for heart disease and diabetes. Are you picking up what I’m laying down? Too much sugar creates an unhealthy domino effect.

Before you graduate from my Prevention Is Hot cheerleading school, you really need to understand sugar at the physiological level. So let’s get this party started with a basic tutorial.

There’s a lot of gabbing
in the news about good carbs versus bad carbs—but what are they, exactly? First and foremost, carbohydrates are the starchy or sugary part of foods. When we think about sugar, naturally we imagine all things yummy and sweet. But in actuality, all carbs (including those that don’t taste sweet, like pasta, bread, and potatoes) break down into glucose—the sugar your body uses for fuel. From your body’s point of view, there’s not much difference between a spoonful of sugar and a slice of white bread.

Carbohydrates come in two varieties, complex (“good” or “unrefined”) and simple (“bad” or “refined”). Complex carbs such as whole grains,
beans, and veggies are good for two reasons: First, they take longer to digest, therefore your blood sugar doesn’t spike. This means your energy levels stay on a more even keel—no sugar highs and no crashes. No frantic search for guns, no scraping your torn self (in fishnets) off the concrete. Second, complex carbs come with a lot of other good stuff, like vitamins, minerals, enzymes, protein, and fiber. They fill you up and leave you satisfied.

Simple carbs often started out as complex, but they have a tragic fall-from-grace story. We humans tinkered with them. Once we started, we couldn’t stop. In the process we refined, bleached, and blasted out all their goodness and starlight. What was once whole became a fake food in a deceptively perky package.

With the exception of fresh fruit, simple carbs are all the junky foods you already know are bad for you: white sugar, white flour, white bread, some whole wheat breads, cookies, sugary snack foods, candy, cake, muffins, crackers, chips, white pretzels, energy drinks, sodas and sweetened soft drinks, concentrated fruit juices, and all the other empty calorie fillers that today make up at least a third of the Standard American Diet.

The fabulous Dr. Neal Barnard
gives us a mini glucose lesson in
chapter 4
, but let’s look at it here as it relates to our sugar tutorial. When glucose enters your bloodstream, your pancreas releases insulin, the master hormone of metabolism. Insulin has lots of jobs, but most importantly it regulates glucose levels by shuttling it to cells to use as fuel. But if a cell has all the fuel it needs for the moment, insulin carries off the extra glucose to be stored as fat. So far, so good—because everyone needs a little cushion for the pushin’. However, a diet high in simple sugar and refined carbs dumps a ton of glucose into your blood very quickly. As a result, your pancreas is forced to barf out additional insulin, which isn’t good for you or your pancreas.

This is one vicious cycle. Over time you may develop insulin resistance, which makes your body
less effective at regulating blood sugar. Insulin resistance also affects your ability to use stored fat as energy. In other words, you can’t lose weight as easily when there’s a bunch of insulin coursing through your body. But it’s not just about weight. Too much glucose and insulin is a major culprit in many diseases.

Now, I don’t want
to vilify sugar (glucose) here, because it’s the fuel that feeds all our cells, healthy or unhealthy. Everything we eat gets broken down into glucose eventually—even fats and proteins if needed. In fact, without glucose we couldn’t survive. However, if you have cancer—in any form—it’s best to avoid all refined sugars and carbohydrates and cut back on high-glycemic fruits. Why? Read on, studious vixen!

One of the reasons cancer cells are so freaky is that they are extremely hungry. Their metabolism is much higher than that of healthy, normal cells. Yet cancer cells are totally inefficient. They have to work much harder and burn more glucose to produce the same amount of energy as healthy aerobic cells. It’s sorta like comparing a Prius (healthy cells) with a gas-guzzling SUV (cancer cells).

But cancer cells are crafty, too. To obtain the amount of fuel they need, cancer cells have around nineteen times more glucose receptors than normal cells. This allows them to come to the party first and suck up the fuel fast. One of the ways that cancer cells process their fuel is through fermentation, which converts sugar to energy without using oxygen. Remember our little pH lesson? Healthy cells love oxygen; cancer cells don’t. Their clunky anaerobic metabolism produces a lot less energy. So to stay alive, cancer cells need a bigger fuel supply. What’s the best way to get quick fuel? Sugars and carbs!