40 - Sugar Is Making Your Symptoms Worse... Especially Anxiety!

Sugar is everywhere in our modern diet, and while it may taste good in the moment, it can have a major impact on how we feel physically and mentally.

In this episode of the Nourished Living Podcast, Courtney breaks down how refined sugar affects your body, why it can worsen symptoms like anxiety, fatigue, and irritability, and how blood sugar spikes and crashes can leave you feeling shaky, overwhelmed, and craving more sweets.

You’ll learn how to identify hidden sugars in packaged foods, what to look for on nutrition labels, and simple ways to enjoy sweetness without throwing your body into a blood sugar roller coaster.

If you struggle with anxiety, energy crashes, or intense sugar cravings, this episode will help you understand what’s happening in your body and how to make simple swaps that support more stable energy and a calmer nervous system.

What You'll Learn in This Episode

• How refined sugar impacts blood sugar and insulin levels
• Why blood sugar spikes and crashes can trigger anxiety symptoms
• Hidden sources of sugar on nutrition labels
• The many names sugar can appear as in packaged foods
• Healthier alternatives to refined sugar
• Simple sweet snack ideas that support stable blood sugar

Healthier Sweet Options Mentioned:

• Local honey
• 100% pure maple syrup
• Applesauce
• Ripe bananas
• Agave syrup
• Coconut sugar
• Dates

Better Sweet Treat Ideas:

• 70% or higher dark chocolate
• Apples with peanut butter (a balance of carbs, fat, and protein)
• Trail mix with dark chocolate chips, nuts, seeds, and dried fruit
• Homemade baked goods using natural sweeteners

Hidden Names for Sugar to Watch For (Screenshot!):

• Ingredients ending in “syrup” (corn syrup, brown rice syrup, caramel syrup)
• Ingredients ending in “ose” (glucose, fructose, dextrose)
• Malt ingredients (barley malt, maltodextrin, maltose)
• Cane and crystal ingredients (cane juice, cane crystals)
• Any ingredient containing “sugar” (beet sugar, confectioner's sugar) 
• Anything that begins with "iso-" (isoglucose)

Always check both the nutrition label and the ingredient list to get the full picture of what’s in your food.

Free Webinar

If anxiety is something you struggle with, join me for a FREE LIVE training to help you begin regulating your nervous system and creating more calm in your daily life.

How to Stop Living in Survival Mode: Create Calm as Your Baseline

In this training you’ll learn:

• How to reduce anxiety naturally
• How to move your body out of fight-or-flight mode
• How to begin using food as medicine for your nervous system
• Simple in-the-moment tools to calm anxiety when it hits

Save your spot here!

Connect with Courtney: 

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Instagram: @healthywithcourtneyy

Transcript

0:00

Welcome to the Nourished Living Podcast, where we go beyond diets and quick fixes, and reconnect with what it really means to feel good in your body. I am Courtney Podany, nutritional therapist, personal trainer, energy worker, type one diabetic, and mom here to guide you toward health that feels simple, sustainable, and aligned. Each episode will explore how to nourish your body. Balance your energy and strengthen your intuition so you can thrive and actually understand what your body is telling you. So grab your favorite drink. Take a deep breath, and let's jump into your new nourished life. welcome back to the Nourished Living Podcast. I am your host, Courtney Podany. Thank you for being here with me today. It has been so warm out lately. It is crazy, and it is only mid-March. We've got temperatures in the high eighties all week, and even though we already had spring break, it is just getting me really excited. For not necessarily summer vacation, but the produce that comes with summer. All the berries. And my daughter has been asking about watermelon nonstop, and she doesn't quite understand that things grow in seasons and cycles and we don't always have access to everything. So, but I am also too excited about all of the. Summer produce that will be upon us soon, even though technically we are still in winter, I'm not trying to bypass spring or anything, but this weather just has it feeling like it's summer already. It's wild. So today on the agenda, we are going to be talking about sugar We will be covering hidden sources of sugar, what to look for on your nutrition labels, healthier sugar options, and also how sugar is affecting your anxiety and not for the better. First I would like to go into. The physiology of it, get the science portion out of the way, so when I say sugar, I am talking about refined sugar. So if you were to go to the grocery store and you go down the aisles, it's gonna be like the c and h refined white sugar or brown sugar, things of that nature. And when we have sugar, either by itself or just in large quantities, it goes basically like directly into our bloodstream, hence why it's called blood sugar. And when the sugar goes that quickly into our bloodstream, it spikes our blood sugar. So we might be going from a nice controlled blood sugar range, and then all of a sudden we have this huge spike, and that is when anxiety will hit you. But on a deeper level, when we have that much sugar in our blood. Our body has to counterbalance that, and so it has to release insulin to try to get us back into a controlled range. Our body is always looking for homeostasis, so it's going to do whatever it needs to do to get us back into the preferred range for whatever. Is happening. However, the more sugar you have, the more insulin our body has to produce and release to then get the sugar out of our blood to bring it back down. The thing with that is the more insulin that is released. The more susceptible you're going to be to then a blood sugar crash, a blood sugar low, that 2:00 PM feeling. And when that happens, we don't have enough sugar on board, so we go from having too much sugar to not any sugar, and we do always need a little bit of blood sugar present and on board, right? Our brain needs carbs and sugar, so obviously there are better sources of the blood sugar, but. When we go into that low, that is when we're feel anxious, we're gonna be irritable. We will be short with people because we feel like we can't even think and put our thoughts together. We're going to feel lethargic and tired, and we're also going to start craving sweets because our body needs carbs for the energy for our brain to function. And so a lot of times. The best way for our body to get what it needs is to crave sweets because we need some sort of carbs and yes, you know, like carrots are carbs as well, right? Um, but typically you won't have like a carrot craving. You'll have a sweet craving because you need something quick. You need blood sugar quickly to again, get that energy going and have carbs on board to fuel your brain. So that could be a reason that you find yourself craving sweets. So it doesn't necessarily mean you need refined sugar, it is just looking for carbs for that quick energy source. But I am here to tell you. That refined sugar exacerbates any symptom that you are experiencing, that could range from joint pain or even just being tired. That's going to exacerbate it, make you feel more tired. It could be migraines, it could be allergies. It could be coughing, it could be a cold if you're sick or like I experience, it can be anxiety. So for me, if I'm already in an anxious state, which can be hard to get out of, I know that it's best for me to not have any sugar at that time. Right. Like there might be another time that is more suitable for me to have sugar, and it's probably when I do not feel anxious. But the caveat with that is that if I'm not feeling anxious, but then I have sugar, most likely I will be feeling anxious after that. So it's like a catch 22. It's like, oh, I don't feel anxious right now, but do I want to feel anxious soon because I could have this, you know, donut that was just brought to my house and then I can go into an anxiety spiral all day, or I could just hold off. Other healthier options from sugar are going to be local honey, 100% pure maple syrup, apple sauce, ripe bananas, agave syrup, coconut sugar, or dates. And so most of those are liquid form where sugar is a solid. So if you're baking, you might want to choose the coconut sugar if you need something to be like, I don't know, more dry, more put together, not as moist. Um, but those are some other healthier options that you can try out if you are baking or making food at home. And when we were at the store buying things. You always want to look at the added sugars column to see if any additional sugars have been added. So that is located underneath where it says total carbs. So if you get something that already has fruit in it or wheat, you know, something that is already. Carb based, that's going to be the carb number. So say I was getting like a blueberry bar for my kids, you know there's already going to be blueberry carbs present. But what we want to know is if in addition to those blueberries were there other sources of sugar added because that's already. Something that's sweet if it has fruit in it. So I don't want more sugar in it. It will already be sweet by nature. So we do not need to have the added sugar nonsense, and I'm pretty sure that with marketing and stuff, products can say no sugar added, but what's sneaky is that sugar can actually go by like. I think it's like 80 different names on a nutrition label, which is why it's so important to not only look at the nutrition facts, but to look at the actual ingredients that are in the product. Because just looking at the nutrition facts alone only gives you part of the picture. You might know the composition of what you're buying. Based on carbs, fats, and proteins, but you don't know what exactly those things are. So I always, always recommend looking at the ingredients. And so when you are trying to identify if there is added sugar, there are certain names that they'll go by. So anything that ends in syrup. Is sugar, so that could be brown rice syrup, caramel syrup, high fructose corn syrup or corn syrup. Those are all sugar. Anything that ends in sugar of course will be sugar. But I've seen, you know, beet sugar, date sugar, raw sugar, things like that. If you see malt in the name, so barley malt, Malto, dextrin, maltose. That's sugar. Anything that ends in OSE will be sugar. So dextrose, fructose, glucose, sugar, anything that has cane included. So cane juice or cane juice crystals and anything that has crystals in it. So cane juice, crystals. These will indicate that there is sugar included in this product, so just something to keep an eye out for. I will include that in the show notes so you can take a screenshot and have it with you wherever you go so you can double check that you are getting. The ingredients that you would like, and also I would suggest if you do have anxiety, but you also have a sweet tooth, that you are able to find some type of sweet treat that comes from healthier sources than refined sugar. So you can keep that in your house readily available to go to when you are getting that sweet craving. But having it in a way that's not going to induce anxiety later. Right, because it's the I, at least for me, I feel like it's the worst when you're like, okay, today's been a pretty good day. I haven't felt any anxiety, but I have just been thinking about this cookie all day long and I wanna enjoy a cookie because. If you've been thinking about something nonstop, I am a believer that you should just have it, but then to enjoy your cookie and then, you know, within an hour now you feel anxious. That's just not fair. Right? So some sweet treats that you could keep on hand that don't necessarily have the refined sugar could be a dark chocolate square. Make sure it's 70% dark chocolate or above, because I think anything less than that than they have to start adding things in and you're just getting less of the dark chocolate. And fun fact, dark chocolate actually has magnesium in it as well. And magnesium naturally helps decrease anxiety and is good for muscle relaxation. So I love magnesium. What I've been going to lately for me is apples with peanut butter. The apples are providing that sweetness for me, but then I am counterbalancing it with some fat and proteins from the peanut butter so that I don't go into a blood sugar spike later as well. Trail mix is good too, you can have, chocolate chips, dark chocolate chips in there and then. Your choices of, you know, nuts or seeds or dried fruit. So there's again, some sweet, some salty, but you're not going to like throw off your blood sugar all day with that or if you are a baker, it could be something that you bake at home with one of those healthier swaps that I mentioned earlier. Cookies, muffins, anything like that. So I hope this helps you to. Become better informed with added sugars and the products that you're buying, how you can swap sugar to make it a little bit healthier, a little more nutrient dense for yourself, where you will not need to encounter, any anxiety later and let you know how to best navigate your anxiety with a sweet tooth, and I have some great news for you while I have you here. Next week, on March 26th, I am hosting a free training that I would like to invite you to. How to stop living in survival mode to create calm as your baseline. I am going to be talking about how to reduce your anxiety naturally, how to get your body out of fight or flight. How to start using food as your medicine and quick. In the moment, tools that you can use when your anxiety hits to help your body and your mind come back to calm. The link is in the show notes. All you have to do is save your spot. I would love to see you there. All righty. Thank you so much for being here with me today and I will see you in the next episode. Thanks for hanging out with me today and tuning into the Nourished Living Podcast. I hope you enjoyed today's episode and found something you can start implementing right away to kickstart your nourished transformation. If you loved this episode, don't forget to subscribe, leave a review, or share it with someone who could benefit. You can also connect with me over on Instagram for more resources and support. Until next time, stay nourished.