The Real Reason You're Gaining Weight

Did you know your body only keeps about a teaspoon of sugar circulating in your bloodstream at any given time?

In this episode, Kristin Rowell explains how blood sugar, insulin, and metabolism work together, and why understanding this process can completely change the way you think about weight gain and long-term health.

What you'll learn:

• Why high-carb meals can increase fat storage
• How insulin regulates blood sugar and metabolism
• Why blood sugar spikes affect your energy and nervous system
• Where excess glucose goes once your liver and muscles are full
• Why sugar and fat together accelerate weight gain
• How walking after meals improves blood sugar control
• The difference between insulin and glucagon
• Kristin's favorite tools for monitoring metabolic health

Resources mentioned:

→ Oura Ring: Click here

→ Nutrisense Continuous Glucose Monitor (Use code GOLDEN for a discount): Click here

Watch on Youtube: youtube.com/@energeticallyefficient

Connect with Kristin:

1:1 Coaching: Apply here

The Top 5 Things I Actually Do To Stay Under 20% Body Fat: kristin-rowell.mykajabi.com/5-tips

Instagram: instagram.com/kristin_rowell_

Transcript

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The difference between someone who has normal blood sugar, meaning normal, we're at a teaspoon, I have normal blood sugar, I don't have type 2 diabetes, you're not going to believe this. The difference is, wait for it, one-fourth of a teaspoon. Okay, it's a tiny, tiny, tiny amount. Welcome back to Energetically Efficient. I'm Kristin Rowell, and today we're going to talk about how you get fat or why we get fat. I love teaching this so much because every time I talk to a client about this, every time I teach about this in a course, once people learn this information from me, they're like, oh my God, light bulb moments going off, Kristin. I now understand why you recommend the things that you do when it comes to nutrition. Okay, so this, are you ready? This is how you get fat. Okay, so I wanna start by asking you a question, and obviously because you guys can't interact with me on here, you can pop questions obviously below, but I'm gonna ask you to guess, what normal blood sugar is. Okay, so that's how I wanna start out this talk. So if you were to guess what normal blood sugar is, I'm gonna give you four choices. Normal sugar in your blood. When I say normal blood sugar, just to be clear, That means I'm not over here with type 2 diabetes, and I'm not over here with full hypoglycemia. I have a normal amount of sugar in my blood. We actually do need some sugar in our blood. So what is that amount? Is it a teaspoon, a tablespoon, a cup, or a pound? And every time I ask this question, I use this a lot when I speak to groups. I've talked about this before. I get answers in every single category, but the answer, drumroll, is. The answer is a teaspoon, okay? So if you have normal blood sugar, you have a teaspoon of sugar in your blood. That's about five grams. It's about five grams, okay? So now, because we're talking about how you get fat, let's pretend you go to McDonald's. And I like to pick on McDonald's. We could pick on any fast food chain, you guys. It's not unique to McDonald's, but I happen to know how much sugar is in a medium McDonald's french fry. So this might surprise you. So remember how I said it's only one teaspoon of sugar that we can have in our blood at any given time? And by the way, let me just stop for a second. I don't mean it's one teaspoon of sugar that we can have in our blood. It's one teaspoon of sugar that we must have, okay? We are always being very tightly regulated at one teaspoon. We don't wanna go a little bit too much. We don't wanna go a little bit too little, okay? It's very, very important that we're only at one teaspoon. And one more thing I'll say before I go back to our McDonald's example is, guess what? And when I first learned this, I was like, I'm sorry, what? I don't get it. So just bear with me for a second. This is very real. This is real science. I learned this through nutritional therapy school. I had to like rewind and learn it over and rewind and learn it over. The difference between someone who has normal blood sugar, okay? Meaning normal, we're at a teaspoon. I have normal blood sugar. I don't have type 2 diabetes. You're not going to believe this. And it's very true. The difference of the amount of sugar in that person's bloodstream who has type two versus me, who's normal, is, wait for it. One-fourth of a teaspoon. Okay, it's a tiny, tiny, tiny amount. So why am I making sure you understand that? I'm making sure you understand that because that means your body is working very, very, very, very, very hard to regulate you at one teaspoon. We just need one. It doesn't want you to be a little over this way, even a fourth of a teaspoon, because then you have full-blown type 2 diabetes. And it doesn't want you to be even a fourth of a teaspoon over this way, because then you're hypoglycemic. I mean, this is a very tight regulation, you guys. One teaspoon is very precise. So you may be saying to me right now or thinking in your head right now, well, wait a second, Kristin. I've for sure eaten more than a teaspoon of sugar in one sitting. I've eaten 20 teaspoons of sugar, whatever. How come I don't have type two diabetes? And the answer is what I'm about to share with you in terms of the sophisticated mechanism that your body goes through to keep you at one teaspoon all the time, okay? All the time. Newsflash, your body actually doesn't want you to get diabetes. Your body is actually working very hard to make sure you don't get diabetes, okay? So it's like, oh no, person's eating all the sugar. We gotta go into some work here to make sure we bring them back down to one teaspoon. So that's what's happening in your body to clear the sugar out of your blood. And I'll relate this to how we get fat in a second. So let's go back to my McDonald's meal because this will help put this all together for you. So when you go to McDonald's and let's say you were to order a medium French fry, okay? Now, remember I told you we can only have one teaspoon of sugar in our blood and we need to be at one teaspoon at all times. A medium McDonald's French fry has We'll see you next time. Five teaspoons of sugar. Okay, five. Now, when I say five teaspoons of sugar, I'm not just talking about like white table sugar that they sprinkle on the french fries, although they do put table sugar on the french fries, which is part of the reason they're so delicious. I'm referring to all of the potato carbohydrate content. I'm using sugar and carbohydrate interchangeably. They're the same to me. Okay, and they're really the same to your body for the purposes of your blood sugar. The only thing that's going to take a very carbohydrate rich meal and make it healthier for you is if it had loads and loads of fiber. And newsflash, McDonald's french fries don't have loads and loads of fiber, okay? So five teaspoons of sugar is in a medium fry. So now let's pretend that you went through the drive-thru, okay? And you got a Big Mac. You got a large fry. And because you were feeling you're super generous with yourself that day, you decided to get a large McFlurry too. Okay. So this is, I present to you the Niagara Falls of sugar meal. I mean, you have just dumped so much sugar into your body that your body is like, hold up. Okay. Remember guys, we can only have one teaspoon and you probably just consumed. I really need to like put pen to paper on this. But if there's five teaspoons of sugar in the medium fry, I'm going to say the Big Mac, the large fry and the McFlurry, we're talking somewhere between 50 and 100 teaspoons of sugar, right? It's like real bad. Again, Niagara Falls of sugar is your example. So. I want you to think of this event as creating a crime scene in your body. Like the Niagara Falls of Sugar is like a crime scene in your body. And it actually, you guys, it's actually an extremely stressful event. This is one of the reasons that people who consume more sugar and who eat lots and lots of carbs tend to run higher in stress because they're on a blood sugar roller coaster every day, all day, which creates a tremendous amount of stress in the body. Okay. So you've just eaten your meal. You're like so happy about life. You're sitting in your car on the way to a road trip somewhere a few states away. And in response to this crime scene, what happens inside your body is it literally does this. Do, do, do, do, clean up on aisle four. It's like emergency central. It's a crime scene. It deploys the police cars and the fire trucks and the ambulance and everyone is going to the scene of the crime that you just created in order to clean up this crime scene. Okay? These are your first responders, the fire trucks, the ambulance, the police cars. And what's actually happening in your body is they're saying, we have to clean the sugar out of this person's blood. Because remember, you can only be at one teaspoon and you just put in however many teaspoons. We got to get you down to one teaspoon because your body does not want you to get diabetes. And remember, diabetes happens when you go from a teaspoon to just a fourth of a teaspoon over time, okay? It takes a while to get there, but let me tell you, if you eat meals like this every day, it's not going to take you that long to get to full-blown type 2 diabetes. So your body says, oh my God, clean up on aisle 4, and it runs to start cleaning. It's going inside of you to start cleaning the sugar out of your blood. So how does this happen? Well. This happens because one of the organs that I talk about all the time, which I love, is this magical little one called the pancreas. It's on your left-hand side behind your left ribcage. And your pancreas' job is to shoot insulin out. And insulin is a hormone whose job is to clean the sugar out of your blood. Okay? It is responsible for getting you back down to that one teaspoon. So when the pancreas releases insulin, insulin goes to scrubbing. Insulin is the fire trucks, the police cars, the ambulances. It's like must clean, must clean, must clean, must clean. It's cleaning all of the sugar out of your blood so that you can have regulated one teaspoon of blood sugar, which is what you should have. Okay. And while it's doing all this cleaning and it's at the crime scene, this is an emergency. It's very stressful in your body. If you are very in tune with your body and you don't eat like this often, you will feel it. You could sit down or lay down on a bed and you could feel your heart racing more. You could almost feel your heart in your neck. I've tested this on myself before, not with a McDonald's meal, but with eating like a tremendous amount of pasta or something. And I feel ill. It's not good for you. Okay. Eating that much carbohydrate in a sitting is not good for you because it creates a stressful event. So how does this actually help you get fat? Well, here's why. When the insulin comes out of your pancreas to do all of this cleaning of the sugar, it would be my dream in life if insulin was such a magical hormone that it could simply evaporate the sugar into thin air, okay? It can't, unfortunately. It has to put the sugar somewhere that you just ate. So if you ate that meal and you weren't on a road trip going three states away from where you live, but you instead ate that meal and you were sitting there with a friend and you got up from the table and you started walking and you walked for three hours, which is probably how many hours you'd have to walk to make a dent in that meal, if not four hours or five hours, your body would preferentially divert a lot of that sugar you just consumed, those carbs you just consumed, to fuel your movement in your walk, to put that sugar to move your quad muscles, your calves, your butt, your arms as you're walking. You would be preferentially diverting that sugar to the muscles that you were using for your movement, which is why I tell everyone, I don't care whether you had a ton of carbs in your meal or very few, one of the best things you can do after you consume a meal is to go and walk for at least 20 minutes, okay? I walk for at least a half an hour after every meal, sometimes longer, but I just want you walking away from your house for 10 minutes, walking back for 10 minutes. It's all you gotta do. And if you need more motivation for walking, okay. Be like me and get a ton of golden retrievers or get a bunch of dogs. They have to go outside and go on walks. So you have to walk with them. So you're going to be more active. I actually, every time I'm in a client call or a new client call with someone who's thinking about hiring me, I ask them and I say, tell me about your movement. And they're like, oh my God, Kristin, this is one of the reasons I called you because I need the accountability. I'm not that move. I don't move that much. And I'm like, do you have a dog? Because if you get a dog, you will move a lot more. There's actually science behind this. You guys, We've studied this. People who have pets that they have to walk are healthier. They live longer. It's better for your gut microbiome. Like the benefits go on. But one of the primary benefits is you will be a more active person if you get a dog. So that's my plug for a dog. And I highly recommend Golden Retrievers. I think they're amazing. Okay. Going back to how you get fat. Now, when the insulin gets out of your bloodstream, because I'm sorry, when the insulin gets the blood sugar or the sugar rather out of your bloodstream, because again, it's trying to keep you back down to one teaspoon. And you're not on a walk. You're on this drive to wherever on the road trip you're going on. And you're like shoving down all the French fries in your mouth and so excited about your life right now. You're meanwhile getting fat because what's happening is your pancreas sending the insulin. The insulin is cleaning, cleaning, cleaning. It's like, oh, God, oh, God, She's just sitting here. He's just sitting here. Now what do we do? What do we do with all the sugar as we're cleaning it up? We have to put it somewhere. So the insulin that's talking to each other all of a sudden says. I found somewhere, guys. I know. Boom. Your liver. Your liver's on your right side behind that rib cage. That is the first place that carbs get stored when you've eaten them in excess. And newsflash, your liver can only store approximately 400 calories of carbohydrate. That isn't that much, okay? 400 calories isn't a lot. And by the way, that meal has way more than 400 calories of carbs. And it's not like your liver has zero carbs in it right now. And by the way, the storage form of carbohydrates in your liver is called glycogen. They don't actually get stored as carbs in your liver. The sugar, the glycolysis production or the glycolysis synthesis that happens, stores the sugar as glycogen. So it's a glycerol molecule, that's the sugar, that gets converted to the storage form, which is called glycogen. or the glucose rather, gets converted to the storage form, which is called glycogen. Okay, that gets stored in your liver. But your liver can only hold, like I said, 400 calories. So if you had pasta for dinner yesterday, if you had a bagel for breakfast yesterday, if you had oatmeal the day before, if you had mashed potatoes with your dinner, newsflash, especially if you weren't active, your liver's probably already full or close to it, you guys, of carbs. So you may have, let's say, 100-calorie storage room left. So now it's like the insulin is saying, oh, no, oh, no, the liver is full. And depending on, like I said, what you've eaten over the last several days and how active or inactive you've been, that's either going to happen real quick, or it's going to happen after, let's call it a half an hour or an hour or whatever, because your liver is already full. So then the insulin is like, oh, no, guys, oh, no, oh, no, the liver is full. Now what do we do? And it says, oh, I found somewhere else. OK, and the next place that the sugar gets stored after your liver is full is in your skeletal muscle. If I had a sleeveless shirt on right now, I would show you guys that my storage tank for carbohydrates is much larger than other people because I'm fairly muscular. I have more musculature on my body. That's intentional. I work very hard and have been for years to develop a lot of lean tissue on my body. That's muscle, lean mass. I want a lot of muscle in my body rather than fat because muscle, as my friend Gabrielle Lyon would say, is the organ of longevity. It truly, the more muscle you have, the longer you are going to live, the better brain health you are going to have, the less likely you are to fall and break a bone. There's all sorts of reasons for putting more muscle on our body. But one of the primary benefits is muscles are a sink for carbohydrates. Muscles love carbohydrates. They will suck them up like a sponge and they are a storage tank for carbs. So that means when we get carbohydrates stored in our muscle tissue, and by the way, where I told you your liver can only store about 400 calories of carbs, your skeletal muscle on average, and this obviously depends on the person, the average person can hold around 1,200 calories of carbohydrates. So we've got 400 in the liver and now we have around 1,200 calories of carbohydrates in the skeletal muscle. And keep in mind, you guys, the more muscle you have, the more calories you can store, The less muscle you have, the less calories you can store. And so putting more muscle on your body is actually going to do wonders for you in terms of preventing you from putting on body fat as easily. Because guess what? Once your liver is full and then your skeletal muscle is full of carbs and now your insulin is going around and saying, oh my God, we still have all these carbs and the liver is full and the skeletal muscle is full. And now what? Then the body goes, oh, I found one more spot, you guys. Don't worry. I found it. And that is, like I always say, everywhere else, which is your fat tissue. Your adipose tissue, your fat tissue is your third place for storing carbohydrates, okay? And when your carbohydrates get stored in your fat tissue, they are not stored in the form called glycogen. Glycogen is the storage form for carbs in your liver. Glycogen is the storage form for carbs in your skeletal muscle. But when carbs get stored in your fat tissue, they get stored as a word that you've all heard before, and it's on your blood work every time you get it, triglycerides, okay? That is the storage form of carbs in your fat tissue. Triglycerides are simply, okay, think about tri. Tri is three. Triangle, tricycle, tri means three. And what a triglyceride is, is it's three tri fatty acids, three fatty acids, three fatty acids, three fatty acids. Tied to a glycerol molecule, triglyceride. Three fatty acids, one glycerol molecule. You cannot make a triglyceride without this glycerol molecule. And what is this? Sugar. Three fats and one sugar. Okay? So if I want to get fat, if I really am like, I want to get fat as fast as I can, I wouldn't say that, but let's just pretend we're doing a challenge and we want to see how fast we can get fat. What would I eat? I would eat a ton of fats and sugar together. That is what is going to make triglycerides. This is what's going to go into my fat cells to make me fat. So where do we find fats and sugar together, guys? Newsflash, it's all the things we like. Donuts, cookies, brownies, pasta with Alfredo sauce, pizza, french fries, you name it. Chips, anywhere where you get fats and sugar together, especially where there's no fiber, those are the foods that are gonna make you fattest the fastest. When you put fats and sugar together, it is a fast train to weight gain, and I say it all the time. So it's going to get stored in your adipose tissue, and unlike your liver, which doesn't grow bigger, and unlike your skeletal muscle, which doesn't grow bigger unless you lift weights, unless you actively do things to make your muscle grow bigger, your adipose tissue can just keep growing and growing and growing and growing. The cells themselves aren't growing. You're just putting on more tissue. You're putting on more fat and you can continue to grow. You've seen these people that have massive amounts of mass on their body of fat mass because they've continued to become a storage tank for carbs. So when I work with clients one-on-one, when they hired me, I don't care if they have 10 pounds to lose or 100 or 300 pounds to lose. I've worked with clients of all varying degrees Please. Clients who are carrying more body fat on them, and let's say their body fat percentage is, heaven forbid, over 50%. And I will tell you, I have worked with clients who have over 50% body fat, which is a dangerous level of body fat to have. They have fat stored on their body that we need to get rid of. So I've just walked you through how you get fat, which is we eat a lot of carbohydrates in a meal. We don't move very much. And we store those carbs in our liver, in our skeletal muscle and then in our fat tissue because we're not active and we're eating too many carbs. That's really what it comes down to. So if you wanted to lose weight, which I'll preview, I will share all about this with you in another video, and I'll walk you through that very simply. But the short version is, you guys, the real answer to this question, how do I lose those body fat, that body fat that I put on, Kristin, is we have to mobilize the pancreas to stop sending insulin out so much because insulin is your fat storage hormone. Insulin's job is to clean the sugar out of your blood and put it in storage. We need to tell your pancreas to not shoot out insulin. We need to tell it to shoot out insulin's opposing hormone, which is called glucagon. And I'll do that all in a future video. Glucagon is your fat burning hormone. And glucagon can reach into those fat cells and go grab that triglyceride, triglyceride, break it apart, and use this glycerol molecule to bring you back up to one teaspoon. That's the short version. Just like when you go over one teaspoon of sugar because you ate so much carbohydrate and insulin needs to come out of your pancreas to store all of that sugar, you can just as simply send the signal from your pancreas to release glucagon from your pancreas to go and grab the triglyceride to break it apart and bring this up to one teaspoon so that your blood sugar is regulated. And that's really how you lose weight. And I'll talk about that in much greater detail in a future video. So one of the things I want to highlight quick for you guys, just in terms of thinking about how we get fat and, of course, how we undo that is movement is critical to this. As I've shared, we store sugar in our liver, we store sugar in our skeletal muscle, and then we store it in our fat tissue. And one of the ways that we can start to get rid of that stored sugar is we can engage in more movement. So one of my absolute favorite tools for engaging in more movement is the Oura Ring. I have been wearing an Oura Ring for more than five years. I've had three of them over the years. I love the Oura Ring. And the reason that I think it's such a valuable tool is it tracks your steps every day. It tracks your heart rate variability, which is a very important metric. It tracks your heart rate. It also tracks your body temperature when you sleep. For us ladies, it's actually gonna create a period tracker for you. And it gives you really good metrics on how much REM sleep you got, how much deep sleep you got. All of those things I just identified, you guys, which you get as really good data with the Oura Ring are related to how much carbohydrate you are consuming and how we're gonna get you healthier so that you can lose that body fat instead of gain it. So we're gonna put a link below this video for the Oura Ring. I love it. I recommend it to all clients. I also would say about the Oura Ring, it's the most minimally invasive tracking device. So a lot of people wear an Apple Watch. I hear all the time that the Apple Watch doesn't even last with a charge throughout the night when you sleep. Even if it did, people don't like to wear a watch when they're sleeping, and I agree with that. So I like the Oura Ring because it's minimally invasive. We'll put a link below, but that is a great tracking device to understand your health and to make sure you are moving more. My other favorite biohacking tool, and this relates very much to how we gain weight or lose weight, or rather gain fat or lose fat, is the Nutrisense Continuous Glucose Monitor. And I've worn a Nutrisense continuous glucose monitor for many years now. They last for two weeks. You replace them each two weeks. You take them out. But truly to me, there are no better tools than the Oura Ring and the Nutrisense CGM for learning more about your metabolic health. If you put a Nutrisense CGM in your arm and you start to see, wow, I'm having huge blood sugar swings where I'm going up, I'm going down, I'm going up, I'm going down. It's really awesome information for you to realize, I can start to change the way I eat so that I don't get these blood sugar spikes so that I don't continue to send that signal to my body, store fat, store fat, store fat. So if you really want to understand more about your blood sugar, I can't recommend the Nutrisense CGM enough. Like I said, I've been wearing it for years. Their app is fantastic. I love the way it works. We'll put a link below and you can get that here. I hope this video was helpful. If it was, please feel free to hit subscribe. I didn't share any links or anything with you today in here. And that's okay, because I'll have future videos where I do. But stay tuned for more videos coming from my channel. Thank you again for being here.