Transcription
The reason that fat burning is important is not because it's going to make you lose weight; it's because if you're able to burn fat for fuel, it means that you are metabolically [Music] flexible.
Hello angels, and welcome to the Glucose Goddess show. I'm Jess, a biochemist obsessed with helping you understand your body, steady your glucose levels so that you can feel amazing. So today's episode is going to focus on how glucose levels and weight loss are connected. So let's get to it.
Weight loss is a big topic, and it sells. For the little story, when I wrote my first book in 2022, even though my focus was never to help people lose weight, my publishers wanted me to put "weight loss" or "lose weight" on the cover because they know that it sells. And that's because the diet industry is massive, and many companies make billions of dollars every year selling you products to make you lose weight.
Now, for me, helping you understand your glucose levels and steadying your glucose levels is 100% for health first. It's so that your organs work well, your cells are full of energy, so that your brain is clear, you don't have any cravings, you feel amazing, and your long-term health is also protected. But I often get the question, "Jess, if I follow the hacks, will I lose weight?" And the answer is probably, actually, so let me explain to you why that is the case.
I teach you things that are going to help you flatten your glucose levels, so keep your blood sugar nice and steady. Now, a few things happen when we keep our blood sugar nice and steady. Firstly, our cravings reduce, and that's because when we are on a glucose roller coaster, after every glucose spike, there is a glucose dip, and this dip activates the craving center in our brain that tells us to go find some cookies, some chocolate, some chips, and to eat them. So when we steady our glucose levels, those cravings diminish.
Second, when we steady our glucose levels, our hunger reduces. That's because we're eating nice, sating protein in the morning because our hunger hormones, ghrelin and leptin, are nice and steady and not doing crazy, crazy swings all the time. So we tend to be just less hungry generally, and we feel like we're less victims to all the food around us. So we can go for hours without eating, and this doesn't cause too much of an issue, and that's because of reason number three.
So reason number three that steadying your glucose levels can often lead to weight loss is because when we steady our glucose levels, we are also reducing the amount of insulin in our body. Insulin is a hormone that gets sent out by our pancreas to grab any excess glucose during a glucose spike and store it away, and this is very good and very helpful, but there's a little bit of a catch. When there's a lot of insulin in our body, our body is told to not burn fat. So when there's high insulin, there's no fat burning. And this fat-burning thing, which you probably have seen on the cover of dozens of magazines—the reason that fat burning is important is not because it's going to make you lose weight; it's because if you're able to burn fat for fuel, it means that you are metabolically flexible. That means that you can easily switch between burning glucose for fuel—glucose from a recent meal you just had—to burning fat for fuel, and it is very important that your body can do both and can switch between one and the other. People who are not very metabolically flexible, so who rely mostly on glucose for fuel all the time, they are hungry every 2 hours; they get what's called low blood sugar, and if their meals are delayed or if they don't have a snack with them in their car, they can get really shaky and nauseous. That's because their body does not know, does not have the muscle, the memory, the habit, the capacity to switch to burning fat for fuel. So when we steady our glucose levels, we also reduce how much insulin is present in the body. This allows us to burn more fat for fuel, to be more metabolically flexible, and it helps us just feel better and go about our day without thinking every 2 hours, "What am I going to eat next before I get too shaky?" So, in that sense, being able to burn fat is incredibly, incredibly helpful and important and healthy.
Now, if you take those three things combined—the reduction in cravings, the reduction in hunger, and the increase in burning fat for fuel—yes, when we flatten our glucose curves, that often also leads to some fat loss on the body, but this fat loss is something that is a consequence of all of these other health-promoting situations going on.
Hey, really quickly, if you can't always do my food hacks and you want to eat the carbs that you love with less impact on your glucose levels, I created a capsule just for that. It's called Anti-Spike Formula. You take two before a meal; it cuts the glucose spike of carbs by up to 40%, 100% made out of plants and tested by over 25 clinical trials. Link is in the description. Okay, back to the episode.
So what I see in my readers is that they tell me, you know, they've been on diets their whole life, and then they've done all the crazy extreme stuff, they gain all the weight back, they're miserable, they tried cutting out entire food groups at a time, and that's diet culture; that's not where we want to go. That is absolutely not what I would ever recommend. And I think if your main focus is losing weight at all costs as quickly as possible, that often leads to very unhealthy habits that are not sustainable and that can actually be worse for your health and cause damage. So do not succumb to any of the crazy diets promising you fast 10-pound in two-day weight loss, etc., etc. That's not what we're here for. We're here to learn how to keep our glucose levels steady, how to build the healthy foundation in the house that is our body, and as a result, so many things will fall into place.
What's also important is that in diet culture, most crazy diets ask you—because they're crazy—to do crazy things, and I don't want you to do any crazy things. The hacks that I share are sustainable, easy partners that you take along with your days and your weeks and your months and your years and do whenever you can. They're not restrictive; they don't ask you to count any calories; they don't ask you to cut out any food groups; they just teach you about what molecules are in your food and when, how, and what combination to eat your food so that you help your body be as healthy as you can while still eating all of the things that you love. So some examples are: when it's easy, start your meal with vegetables; or if you're going to eat something sweet, make sure it's as dessert after the main meal, not first thing in the morning or between meals as a snack; go for a walk after eating, etc.
So I see the hacks as being additive to your life, not things that take away any foods, that take away any joy. We're just here to build and create these good, easy habits, and I like to say that they're a little bit like "drink water" and "brush your teeth." If you can't do them one day, one week, one month, it's not a big deal. My method, the Glucose Goddess method, is not a diet; it's a series of key principles that you should do whenever it's easy, and if you cannot do them, that's totally fine. I have entire weeks where I can't do a hack, and I don't even worry about it. The point is not "you do everything right or you're not doing it at all"; it's purely "take the principles with you and do them when it is easy," and that's going to help your body a lot. If you want to see all of my 10 key hacks in one page, there's in the description of this episode a link to a PDF that you can download to do so.
And one more thing I want to mention. So let's have a look. This is my second book, this is *The Glucose Goddess Method*, and I want to have a look at this with you guys. So in my second book, *The Glucose Goddess Method*, what I did is I took the four most powerful and important glucose hacks to start with: that is savory breakfast, vinegar, veggie starter, and moving after eating. And in this method, you add one hack a week for four weeks, and the rest of the time you do exactly whatever you want. There are no restrictions; you can eat and drink whatever you want; you're just adding these four hacks into your life and not changing anything else. And because the hacks are like gentle giants or fairy godmothers, by just, just sprinkling them into your days and not changing anything else, slowly your health improves; you crave less sugar; vegetables start becoming your friends; you feel great after your meals; you wake up with energy; you're no longer controlled by looking for a chocolate bar at 3 p.m.
And as I was writing this book, I also really wanted to do an experiment and test the method with a bunch of people from the Glucose Goddess community. So I recruited 2,700 people, uh, from Instagram actually, who tested the method before the book even came out. So they were the pilot group, and as they were going through the method and following all the easy recipes and adding the hacks into their lives, I also asked them for feedback and for data on how things were going, and I want to show you the results, and of course, as they pertain to weight loss as well. So you can see that a lot of people lost weight doing this method as a consequence of their body becoming healthier. So here are the results of the experiment on 2,700 people. As you can see, after four weeks, 90% of participants were less hungry; 89% of participants reduced their cravings; 77% of participants had more energy—lots of other really cool stats—and importantly, 38% of people who wanted to lose weight did, in fact, lose weight in those four weeks. This goes to show you that if your objective is weight loss, if that's something that you really care a lot about and you want to do, doing a restrictive diet that is not sustainable is not the answer; you're going to probably not be able to sustain it for very long, and it's going to cause some issues. If you instead focus on steadying your glucose levels, if you do the hacks, the easy hacks, if you add them into your life, you will most likely naturally also burn fat and lose fat on your body as a consequence of the rest of your health improving.
What I like to hear the most is stories from some of my readers who had been really trapped by diet culture for decades, who had done all the diets, who were super stressed out, and what they find in these hacks is actual science teaching them about their body, easy principles that don't ask you to cut out any foods, count any calories, or do anything crazy, and real results. And they realized that what they had been after for a very long time was not necessarily weight loss; it was actually just to feel good in their body, to have a clear brain, to be happy, to wake up in the morning with energy, to not feel so addicted to sugar all the time. And as a consequence, they often lose weight as well, but that becomes almost secondary. So if this resonates with you, I hope you'll check out this science because it's been truly life-changing for many, many people. And you can have a look at my 10 core hacks in the description of this episode, and of course, if you want to have a look at my four-week method, which is the four most important hacks with 100 super easy recipes to do them, it's out everywhere in many languages. There's also a link in the description of this episode for the page that is about *The Glucose Goddess Method*, and that is all we have time for today, my dear. Thank you for being here, and I will see you next time. [Music] Oh [Music]