What 36 Hours Without Sugar Does to Your Body

Dave Asprey (0:00)

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Be sure to use our link so they know we sent you. Sugar kills more people than smoking. Type 2 diabetes, heart disease, Alzheimer's, cancer, every deadly disease you can name links back to sugar. In fact, sugar is eight times more addictive than cocaine. But unlike cocaine, it's easily accessible in the form of your breakfast cereal, granola bar, and so-called healthy smoothie. People consume it every day and then wonder why they're so exhausted. They know because I was one of them. At 30 years old, I weighed 300 pounds. I was inflamed and at risk of a serious heart attack. But then I cut sugar from my life and everything changed. I lost over 100 pounds. My energy completely transformed. And biologically, I felt 10 years younger than my actual age. You can do this too in just one and a half days. So in the next few minutes, I'm going to show you the complete hour by hour timeline of what happens inside your body when you cut sugar for just 36 hours. Let's start at hour zero. Hour zero happens after you finish your last meal. But to understand what's happening at this point, you first need to understand what actually happens when you eat sugar. Every time you eat sugar, your blood glucose rises. Your body doesn't like high blood sugar simply because too much of it is toxic to your organs and your brain. So your pancreas releases insulin in response to rising blood sugar. Insulin's job is to take the sugar out of your bloodstream and either burn it for energy or store it somewhere safe. But when you eat sugar all day, insulin never gets a break. Chronically high insulin does so many things to your body. First, it locks your fat cells shut. Insulin is a storage hormone. When it's in your bloodstream, your body gets a very clear signal to store energy instead of burning it. When insulin is elevated, your body relies less on stored fat and more on incoming nutrients for fuel. Second, it makes your cells resistant to its own signal over time. This is called insulin resistance. When your cells are exposed to constant insulin flooding, they stop responding to it properly. So your body pumps out even more insulin to compensate. More insulin means more fat storage, more inflammation and a faster path to type 2 diabetes. Third, it keeps your brain running on an unstable fuel supply.

This is why you feel energy crashes, brain fog and afternoon slumps that most people just accept as normal. That's what's happening every day when you're on sugar. As your blood glucose begins to fall back toward baseline, insulin starts to fall with it. And as insulin falls, a hormone called glucagon starts to rise. Glucagon is the opposite of insulin. Insulin stores everything, but glucagon releases everything. The moment you stop eating sugar, insulin goes down and glucagon comes up. At this point, your body is still not ready to start burning fat yet. It has a backup system it needs to exhaust first. It's called glycogen. Glycogen is stored glucose. When you eat more sugar than your body needs for energy, the leftovers are converted into glycogen and stored in your liver as a reserve tank. Between hour two and hour eight, your body is burning through that reserve tank. Your blood sugar is still stable, which means you probably feel pretty normal because your liver is doing its job. It's releasing stored glycogen into your bloodstream to maintain your blood glucose levels. But there's something important happening to your insulin levels. Insulin is continuing its steady decline. As insulin drops during this window, the doors to your fat cells start to open. Your body is preparing to access fat stores it may not have touched in years. Every hour of low insulin is an hour of your cells becoming less likely to drive the fat storage and disease risk that insulin resistance creates. So during this early window, your body begins tapping into that glycogen. It does this to keep your blood sugar stable.