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Chapter Three The Sugar You Eat is the Fat You Wear

‘Woe is she who partaketh most plentifully of the fruit of the sugar cane,’ sayeth the prophet Tatenlyle (from the Book of Diabetes, Type 2, verse 1). ‘For verily, this will bestow upon her the gift of mighty generous thighs that overflow her airline seat and render unto her much embarrassment.’

So – let me ask you: have you got a large hippocampus? If the answer is: ‘Well, it was the last time I looked’, you may be mistaken. Eating an abundance of sugary food can enlarge just about every part of your body but could be shrinking the part of your brain that deals with memory – the hippocampus.

According to research carried out by Dr Antonio Convit at the New York University School of Medicine, higher-than-normal blood sugar levels can cause the hippocampus to reduce in size. People with raised blood sugar were shown to perform less well in short-term memory tests than those with normal blood sugar levels.

Some of us do not have enough insulin—the hormone that removes sugar from the blood—to deal with all the sugary cakes and chocolate bars we put away. As a result, sugar collects in the blood instead of being pumped to body tissues such as the brain, where it is needed as fuel. As Dr Convit explained, when the hippocampus is looking for that extra fuel during memory processing and can’t find what it needs, it ends up shrinking.

Now, what was I saying? Oh yes, moving down from the hippocampus to the parts where that sugar will ultimately settle…

My Story

Like many people, I used to grab for food whenever I felt anxious, stressed or bored. Starting with cake or biscuits, I would resign myself to the fact that I had ‘broken my diet’. This meant that I might as well go on stuffing my face with food and restart my diet the next day. Then I would gravitate towards chocolate and ice cream. After a while, as the sweet taste became more cloying, I would switch to savoury foods, usually crisps or nuts, washed down with gallons of cold fizzy drinks like diet (!) cola.

Once fully into binge-mode, all thoughts of healthy food would disappear. While serving dinners of chicken or fish I had cooked for the rest of the family, I would make a pile of toast, layer on the butter and cheese and plough through the lot, before heading back to the cake and chocolate—dessert time!

The next day I would wake in a terrible state: horribly bloated, lethargic and deeply depressed. With my clothes feeling tight and uncomfortable to remind me of what I had done, I would try and analyse why I kept doing this while knowing throughout that it would make me feel so awful. I couldn’t understand my own behaviour. I certainly had no wish to be fat. All I knew was that once the sugar craving took hold, I gave in to it every time.

A binge would usually last about three days before I could get myself back on my ‘diet’, whatever popular programme I was attempting to follow. As this was a long time ago, it was probably the Beverley Hills diet or the F-Plan.

My weight used to fluctuate by about a stone. I kept three sets of clothes, from skinny-mini skirts to saggybaggy sweat pants, to cover all eventualities. Most astonishing, though, was the extent to which my eating habits affected my mood. When I was slim and eating normal meals I felt light, happy and confident. I would exercise regularly and was fit, supple and strong. After a binge, however, I felt heavy and depressed. Even hauling myself out of bed was a massive effort. I hated being fat and hated myself for being fat. I had no inclination to go near the gym and was sure that if I ran my thighs would jiggle like a mobile waterbed. I was either bad-tempered and snappy or just limp and weepy. The slightest problem upset me enormously and I had an overwhelming sense of being out of control and unable to cope – not only with my food choices but with everything.

Why should this be? If I struggled into some jeans and the two sides of the zip refused even to make eye contact, let alone meet and engage, I could see why that might be dispiriting, but surely not enough to produce the sort of depression that was affecting my whole life.

Enlightenment came when someone recommended a book called Sugar Blues published in 1975 by the American author, William Dufty. Reading it produced a ‘lightbulb moment’ for me. Dufty described how he was extremely overweight, had no energy and suffered recurring irritations like migraine, bloating and stomach problems, bleeding gums and haemorrhoids and often felt low with depression. He wrote: ‘One night I read a book that said if you are sick, it is your own damn fault. You know better than anyone else how you have been abusing your body, so stop it.’

Sugar, said Dufty, is a poison, ‘more lethal than opium and more dangerous than atomic fallout’. He resolved to stop eating it. He then went through his kitchen cupboards reading the food labels and was shocked to discover that once he threw out any products that contained refined sugar, the shelves were almost bare.

Starting his new eating regime, Dufty suffered withdrawal symptoms for 24 hours but then described a feeling of being ‘reborn’. Over the next few weeks his depression lifted, he lost 2001b (imagine what he must have weighed before!), his skin improved and the various ailments he had suffered from gradually disappeared.

Could a food as innocuous and as readily available as sugar really cause a mental condition like depression? It seemed unlikely. I began studying the effects of sugar in more depth and was privileged to meet the late Professor John Yudkin, Professor of Nutrition and Dietetics at London University. He urged me to read his book Pure, White and Deadly, about the scourge of refined sugar. Reading it produced another ‘lightbulb moment’: I was convinced.