Tell Me More About Blood Sugar, Serotonin and Beta Endorphin

Sugar Sensitivity and Your Blood Sugar

You have a more volatile blood sugar reaction to eating sweet foods than other people.

Your blood sugar rises more quickly and goes higher. To your body, this feels like a panic situation and it responds by signaling your adrenal glands to release a jolt of adrenaline in order to give you extra energy to cope with whatever dangers you are facing.

The adrenaline, in turn, signals the pancreas to release a lot of insulin -- more than is actually needed for the amount of food you have eaten. The task of the insulin is to get the sugar out of your blood and into your cells where (or so your body supposes) it is needed to sustain your response -- be it flight or fight -- to the emergency.

The payload of insulin does its job well and the sugar is taken into your cells. The result of this evolutionarily sensible chain reaction, as you might guess, is that you experience a very quick and very steep drop in your blood sugar level. This makes you extremely vulnerable to the symptoms of low blood sugar: exhaustion, restlessness, irritability, and foggy thinking. What's more, your body experiences these dramatic peaks and valleys -- and the resulting symptoms -- several times a day.

Here is a graph to illustrate what happens to your blood sugar when you have coffee and a muffin for breakfast.

What are the consequences of these wild fluctuations in your blood sugar level?

The first is simple.

Your moods, like your blood sugar, fluctuate all day.

Sometimes you feel high and sometimes you feel low. You may feel focused and alert for thirty minutes after eating, but then you go blank when you answer the phone. Your calm and competent approach to life deserts you. You get frustrated and angry easily. (Sometimes I wonder if the vial that Dr. Jekyll drank was filled with sugar.) If you chart these ups and downs during the day, they might look like this.

Here is a graph that shows the peaks and valleys which result from your eating sweet foods throughout the day. Your blood sugar rises rapidly after you eat the food. Try to imagine what the graph would look like if you plotted a day of your own eating.

Once you understand how your sugar sensitivity aggravates low blood sugar, you can see that the problem you are living with is not all in your mind.

It is not a matter of attitude, willpower or self-discipline.

Unless you stabilize your blood sugar, no amount of counseling or insight will help you feel better. That's the bad news.

The good news is that doing the steps totally solves the problem. Your blood sugar will stabilize and your moods will even out.

Our sugar sensitivity story includes some crucial data that has not been available to the general public before. This information is about the vital role played by the brain chemical beta endorphin. beta endorphin and its better-known partner, serotonin, can have dramatically positive -- or negative! -- effects on your moods, your behavior, and your energy level.

Your brain is designed to communicate information.

Billions of brain cells talk to each other moment by moment via a network of interconnecting cells. However, these cells do not actually touch one another; there is a tiny space between them. Information is passed across this space by way of chemical messengers called neurotransmitters. The mood-elevating brain chemicals serotonin and beta endorphin are both neurotransmitters.

Each neurotransmitter has a unique molecular shape and carries a unique message.

The message of serotonin, for example, is "calm down." When one brain cell wants to send a message to another, it releases the relevant neurotransmitter, which floats across the tiny space between cells and looks for the receptors in the target cell that match its molecular shape.

A serotonin neurotransmitter, for example, can only pass its message to a serotonin receptor. The same is true with beta endorphin. If any other kind of neurotransmitter hits the receptors, nothing happens; the message does not get delivered.

When your serotonin is at an ideal level, you feel mellow and relaxed, hopeful and optimistic. You have a sense of being at peace with life. You are creative, thoughtful, and focused. You also have a lot of impulse control, which enables you to "just say no" more easily.

People who are sugar-sensitive have naturally low levels of serotonin. As a result, you do not have good impulse control. It is almost impossible for you to "just say no" because there is such a short time between your getting the urge to do something and then doing it. The insufficient serotonin level in your brain isn't giving you the time you need to make good decisions.

Besides being impulsive, you may feel depressed and find yourself craving foods such as bread, pasta or candy. This craving is the work of your brain, not your ego, because your brain knows that getting you to eat such foods will temporarily raise your serotonin level. Unfortunately, it will also have a devastating boomerang effect and cause all sorts of negative feelings. Having low serotonin can cause these feelings:

• Feeling depressed

• Acting impulsively

• Feeling blocked and scattered

• Having a short attention span

• Feeling suicidal

• Craving sweets and simple carbohydrates

The brain chemical beta endorphin acts likes a powerful natural painkiller.

You may have heard of the "runner's high" (also called an "endorphin rush"), when the body responds to the pain of long-distance running by flooding the brain with beta endorphin. beta endorphin produces a sense of well-being, reduces pain, eases emotional distress, increases self-esteem, and even creates a sense of euphoria.

Sugar-sensitive people have a naturally low level of beta endorphin.

Their biochemical response to foods (like alcohol) that cause the release of beta endorphin can be significantly greater than that of people with an ordinary body chemistry.

Whether you are sugar-sensitive or not, sugar, like alcohol, causes a release of beta endorphin. It can make you feel high and can reduce both physical and emotional pain. People with normal body chemistry can enjoy this without ill effects. But sugar-sensitive people respond to the beta endorphin effect of sugar in a bigger way because their brain cells have far more beta endorphin receptors than ordinary people.

For sugar-sensitive people, eating sugar can make you feel and act as if you’ve been drinking wine!

Sugar can make you funny, relaxed, silly, inappropriate, talkative, and temporarily self-confident. You feel great -- and you long to feel this way again and again.

You have probably noticed this drug-like effect after eating sugar. Unfortunately, people don't take this response seriously. They make jokes about being a "chocoholic," but rarely speak of the real pain caused by the continuing and compulsive use of sweets, the end result of which is a drop in beta endorphin.

Having low beta endorphin means:

• Feeling tearful, isolated, depressed, and hopeless

• Having low self-esteem

• Feeling "done to" by others

• Having a low tolerance for pain (emotional and physical)

• Feeling emotionally overwhelmed

• Craving sweets

The task for healing is to increase levels of beta endorphin without spiking or using. The program will teach you this.