As I stand in front of my food pantry, I can hardly remember the three bowls of Doritos that I just inhaled with my son, as we mindlessly watched yet another poorly acted battle on the WWE network. The only thing more fake than professional wrestling is the powdered nacho cheese coating that I am now sucking off of my orange fingers as I desperately search for something sweet to off-set the saltiness. I settle for a handful (or two, who remembers) of Teddy Grahams.  I cannot say with any certainty that I am even hungry, I just want sweet…NOW. As I stand there throwing these tasty little bears down my throat and start regaining consciousness, I start thinking What the hell is going on?  I just ate a mound of chips – how can I possibly be so hungry? No wonder I am gaining weight! Why did I just ground my daughter when she tried to take one from me, as if there wasn’t three quarters (well, half at this point) of a box left?
With all the health and fitness blogs and medical websites out there I would have thought this would be an easy question to answer. I assumed thousands of people had asked these kinds of questions before – Why can’t I stop shoving my face in a bag of chips? How can I still be hungry after I just downed a sleeve of Fig Newtons?  Why does fresh Italian bread make me happier than a new pair of Italian leather boots?, but much to my surprise, not really.  Or if they did, it required me to either call upon lessons from my 8th grade biology class that are long forgotten, or I needed some sort of medical decoder ring to understand the response. I was looking for a straight up, easy to understand answer, not one that brought me down a rabbit hole of medical jargon and technical terms that I needed to further research. I needed one for the laymen – this laymen.  With my limited medical knowledge (my brother and sister-in-law are nurses, does that make me qualified?), and some extensive research, I think I figured it out…it has a lot to do with my liver.
To be honest, a few weeks ago if someone had asked me to point to my liver, I am not sure I would have gotten it right (below rib cage on right-side!), let alone know what purpose it served. I felt a little better when I asked a couple of friends if they knew how their liver worked, and they didn’t know either. We all just assumed that if it’s working, we never really thought to ask or find out. But as I am learning, that’s probably not the best attitude to have, especially when it comes to food and health.
Turns out, the liver is pretty important – it’s one of the 5 vital organs that are essential to survive (brain, heart, kidneys and lungs are the other 4).  Huh – who knew? As I read more about it, I kept thinking that the liver functions are somewhat analogous to when I get the mail.  As I sort through the pile of bills, credit card solicitations, magazines, weekly circulars and unknowns that look important, I quickly determine where they should go…bills to be paid pile, papers to be shredded basket, bathroom, recycle bin, and the “open when I have more time” pile. The liver does the same thing as it sifts through the nutrients that I just ate or drank – what to keep, what to filter out, what should be stored in the liver for immediate energy, what should be sent to other parts of my body and stored as fat to be used for energy later.
Once the liver has decided to “keep” something, its job is to transform it – no matter if it’s a carbohydrate, protein or fat – into glucose (fancy name for sugar) to be used for energy. Yes, everything becomes sugar! Once transformed, it then needs to be transported. The liver takes care of itself first and ensures that its gas tank is full, since it is the first place the body goes for fuel. Once the liver is full, the excess sugar is converted into fat and transported to all of my favorite places for storage – thighs, butt, stomach, hips.  I think of these places as my “open when I have more time” pile, because my body will only start burning the fat from these storage bins as fuel when it has more time and doesn’t have any immediate sources of energy.
At this point you are probably wondering what does any of this have to do with Doritos and grounding my daughter…let me explain. When I inhaled the Doritos, a couple of things happened in my body – first, my body started to release insulin, a lot of it, because I ate the chips at warp speed which spiked my blood sugar levels (insulin is a hormone in the pancreas that helps to keep blood sugar levels from getting too high).  With excessive amounts of insulin now flooding my body, my fat burning process has shut down so that the sugar, the fresh batch just made in my liver, can be used immediately for energy. Problem is, my liver produced an excessive amount of fuel, certainly way more than my body needed to sit and watch sweaty grown men in embarrassing outfits, pretending to wrestle.
So what did my liver do with all that extra fuel? It converted it to fat and dropped it in the recently established moat of bloat circling my waistline that I fully stocked with a school of goldfish crackers the day before. And if that weren’t enough, after my blood sugar started to come down as it shipped out all the fat, the feedback mechanism that tells my pancreas to shut off the insulin spigot is on a delay, so my blood sugar levels fall even lower, which causes an immediate increase in appetite (and lashing out at my daughter), which can only be cured by handfuls of Teddy Grahams…which then triggers more insulin, more fat storage and round and round it goes.
So what kinds of foods will put my pancreas in a sleeper hold, keep my blood sugar levels from going on a roller coaster ride and allow my daughter to maintain her social calendar? Foods that have a low glycemic index, such as apples, oranges, grapes, grapefruit, oatmeal (not the instant stuff in a pouch), brown rice, whole wheat spaghetti, bran cereal, sweet potatoes, nuts, pumpkin seeds, hummus, beans, Kashi and other whole grains, milk, and plain yogurt, just to name a few. The glycemic index (GI) is a system that measures how a food affects blood sugar levels. The lower the number, the more gradual the rise in blood sugar and the easier it is on the body. Conversely, I now know that foods with high GIs, like Doritos and Teddy Grahams (and fresh Italian bread…sigh), make my blood sugar and insulin levels spike fast, setting off a fat storing chain reaction that is about as desirable as watching tonight’s WWE Monday Night Raw.