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You must keep your blood sugar balanced to avoid crashes of energy. This sounds more complicated than it is.

We have about a teaspoon of sugar (glucose) in the blood at any one time. Sugar is our fuel and powers our system, but too much of a good thing is not necessarily wonderful. In fact, too much sugar is positively not a good thing at all. The body is always trying to maintain a state of balance and has complicated feedback systems to keep everything in check. The blood sugar is lowered by a hormone called insulin, which allows the cells of your body to open up and ‘put away’ the sugar. Therefore, if we eat foods that produce too much sugar and raise the blood sugar too high, our bodies panic, pump in a lot of insulin and the blood sugar is rapidly lowered. Slump!

At this point you say to yourself, ‘Hmm, I feel a nice chocolate biscuit calling.’

Because that chocolate biscuit is quite sweet, up shoots the blood sugar and in comes that hormone insulin to lower the sugar in the blood. You have a rollercoaster of blood sugar, instead of a nice even, consistent energy supply.

Stimulants will also raise and crash blood sugar (think caffeine or nicotine—surely not still smoking?). What I should just mention is that insulin’s other job is to store fat—so if you have too many of these big rushes of insulin, caused by a rush of sugar, your body is going to decide to store some fat and this fat loves to deposit itself around your tummy and hips.