Carbs = sugar = glucose = glycogen.

You have probably been running on carbs all of your life. Have you ever, at work or out and about, suddenly had the feeling like all the energy has just drained from your body? That is your body coming down from carbs, you’re literally crashing and need another fix.

When you eat too many carbs, your blood sugar rises. Your pancreas then releases insulin to bring your blood sugar down and store some of it as energy for later. In simple words Insulin is a fat storage hormone, your body converts the carbohydrates to fat and stores it on your body. This is weight gain.

Too much sugar in the brain can lead to cell aging and death, and insulin regulates blood sugar levels to prevent this.

If you eat too much sugar your body can build up an insulin resistance and that can lead to type II diabetes.

Ever heard of glycogen? Glycogen is basically the storage of sugar or in science terms glucose, a collective of glucose together is called glycogen, to store glycogen you need potassium.

When you consume carbs your body releases insulin and it starts storing glycogen (sugar) and anything extra will be stored as fat. Now you do need sugar in the body, mainly for Brain function but its only about 1 teaspoon for the entire amount of blood in your body, but your body can produce this by turning protein into sugar or fat into sugar, more on that in a later blog. But again in simple terms we do not need to consume sugar, our body will naturally sort this out for us.

Your brain can not store glycogen (sugar) it gets it from the blood, our muscles store about 75% of our glycogen and the liver stores the rest.

But your body and brain do not have to run on glucose, the brain and the heart love ketones, its a much cleaner source of energy for them. Like I said earlier the sugar our brain and some other parts of the body do need, our body can make from other sources not just carbs, this is called gluconeogenesis.

What are Ketones?

Ketones are a fuel source our body can produce. It is a by-product of fat being burned, it is our bodies preferred fuel source over glucose.

When you stop eating carbs for around 12 hours your liver will start producing ketones but keep in mind your body wont start running on ketones for around 6 weeks. When your body starts to produce ketones we call this process ketosis.

When you stop consuming glucose ( sugar ) your body lowers the production of insulin, once insulin is out of the way it lets fats flood through the blood system this is stored fats and fats were consuming, when all of this fat hits the liver some of it will be used as energy straight away and some will be stored as ketones, your brain runs on glucose (sugar) remember so we produce these ketones for the brain to run on, ketones are the only other energy source our brain can run on other than glucose.

This goes way back to primitive times when we would hunt for food, and when food is there its great the brain has fuel to run on but when the hunt is few and far between the bodies natural protective instinct is to produce this other energy source for the brain to survive on and use stored fat for the brain to run-on in the form of ketones.