In the first article in this series, you learned that body fat is actually triglycerides, created and stored because your body wasn’t able to properly deal with glucose in the blood stream. To understand how the body gets to this state and ends up storing fat, it’s important to understand how sugar is (or isn’t) dealt with, and where all this blood sugar is coming from.

Insulin Resistance

We know from the previous article that insulin is the hormone that deals with excess glucose in the blood. Well as it turns out, insulin can begin to lose effect when certain conditions are met in the body.

• Excess weight. Insulin tends to be less effective when excess weight is carried on the body, particularly in the abdomen. This is one reason weight gain has a snowball effect; as the weight gain increases, insulin resistance is increased. Glucose is dealt with increasingly poorly, leading to more weight gain.
• Physical inactivity. Physical activity stimulates insulin sensitivity. Unfortunately, as one packs on more body weight, physical activity gets more challenging. Again, the snowball grows as weight gain impedes physical activity, causing increased insulin resistance.

Insulin wouldn’t be so important if there wasn’t a frequent excess of glucose to deal with. Why exactly is it that the glucose overage is frequent enough to cause insulin resistance in many people?

Sugar, Everywhere

I mentioned in the previous article that low-fat diets are much more likely to make you fatter than help you get skinnier. There’s a simple reason for that. As you’ll learn, sugar is really the reason we get fat, not dietary fat. We like our food to taste good, and do you have any guesses as to what makes food taste good when most of the fat has been removed? Bingo! Sugar.

For this reason, the first step in the fat loss journey is to start avoiding processed foods of all kinds. When it’s been molecularly messed with, you never know what weird effects the pseudo-food is going to have on your body. It’s best to stick to whole foods that haven’t been tampered with.

What’s more shocking to many people is that foods that have been considered healthy for longer than I’ve been alive are…basically the opposite. Here’s a few examples:

• Dairy products. Most people are familiar with the phrase “lactose intolerant.” Do you know what lactose is? Sugar.
• Fruit juices. Fruit is full of the most metabolically brutal sugar of them all: fructose. A glass of apple juice contains so much fructose, you might actually be better off drinking a Coke, and I’m not kidding. As a matter of fact, apple juice DOES have the same amount of sugar as Coke by volume.
• Even some vegetables, like corn. Corn, as an example, has been bred (and now genetically modified) to be the vegetable we know over millennia to be incredibly sweet (at least as it compares to the plant it was bred from). There’s enough sugar in your blood after you eat corn that you might as well eat a Snickers.

The copious amounts of sugar contained in pretty much all of the mainstream Western diet is a big part of the reason we get fat. Most of it, actually. But it gets worse. Gaining body fat has a snowballing sort of effect thanks to a condition known as insulin resistance.

Up Next

So, it’s understood at this point that although I will admit there are a variety of other more subtle reasons, my implication is that sugar is the reason we get fat. It should follow then that cutting out sugar is precisely what will make us un-fat. And at least anecdotally, that has been the case. In part 3 of this series, I’m going to explain what a proper diet for fat loss might look like, and explain why it’s far superior to the commonly accepted “healthy” Western diet of today.