Get Slim, Live Longer, Be Healthier ■^17“metabolic momentum.” The body continues to burn the fuel it is ac-
customed to burning. Being essentially a 24/7 sugar burner can be very
damaging. Your body can’t store very much sugar. To continue to feed
its sugar habit when you don’t eat, your body will break down the pro-
tein in its lean tissues—including muscle and bone—into sugar. Your
body would prefer not to destroy itself in this way, so it will make you
hungry and make you crave sugar. This makes you more and more lep-
tin resistant. And instead of burning off excess fat, you make more of it,
and you store more of it away. Over time you end up turning your mus-
cle and bone into sugar and fat as you get fatter, weaker, more frail, and
flabbier. And you will always be hungry.
If you eat sugar (or foods that turn into sugar) and fat together, thebody will burn the sugar and store the fat. Sugar and fat is a common
combination—think of buttered toast! Our cells are hardwired to burn
sugar first: no one knows why this is so, but there are probably good rea-
sons for this. Excess sugar poses a far greater threat to your body than
excess fat (which isn’t good either, but is not quite as bad as sugar—
diabetes can kill you faster!). When sugar combines with the proteins in
your body (called glycation), it triggers chemical reactions that can be
very damaging to healthy cells and can cause aging, disease, and death.
Sugar burning also promotes the formation of potentially high amounts
of toxic chemicals called free radicals, unstable oxygen molecules that
can damage cells and ultimately lead to numerous diseases. My hunch
is, the body probably burns off sugar first as a defense mechanism to
protect you from the potentially lethal effects of sugar. Thus, if we
bombard our bodies with sugar-producing foods, it becomes harder for
our bodies to switch to fat-burning mode.
Being a chronic sugar burner can have serious health conse-quences, but the primary one is that it causes weight gain (because
you rarely burn up your fat) which can cause serious health problems,
including insulin resistance. Being a sugar burner will also age you
faster, and can shorten your life, as I will explain in Chapter 4. By eat-
ing good fat, we can retrain our bodies to become fat burners. Being a
fat burner has its advantages—once your cells begin to burn off fat
for fuel, metabolic momentum takes over. Even when you don’t eat,
your cells will continue to keep burning stored fat, making you feel