Kamilah Stevenson explains why eating sugar after a meal beats eating it on an empty stomach. Sugar alone causes a glucose spike followed by a crash 90 minutes later, triggering cravings and a cycle of addiction. Have dessert after lunch instead, and keep breakfast savory.
If you really want to eat some sugar, let's say a cookie or donut or whatever, the best time to eat that sugar so that you have maximum dopamine from it, maximum pleasure and less impact on your body, is going to be after a meal as dessert. You want to always avoid eating sugar on an empty stomach and always avoid eating sugar in the morning. Okay, really? Yes. So breakfast should be savory in the morning. Nothing sweet. Really?
Yeah, man, those pastries though with chocolate inside and just, oh man, the donut in the morning.
Keep them for dessert after lunch because if you have them in the morning, then what's happening in your body as you digest that sugar and those carbs, they turn into glucose molecules, and these arrive into your bloodstream really quickly and cause what's called a glucose spike. So a blood sugar spike. And then about 90 minutes later, your glucose levels are going to drop. You're going to feel a crash. And now it's 10 AM, 11 AM, and all of a sudden you feel more cravings for sweet foods. You're like, I need a cookie, I need some chocolate, I need a snack.
I need that spike again.
And then you spike again, and then all day you're on a roller coaster where you feel addicted to sugar because your brain, when you're experiencing a glucose crash after a spike, the cravings center in your brain actually activates. And you want to avoid that because then you cannot fight against the craving center in your brain so hard. Yeah, that center is very powerful.
All right, so I mostly agree with her, but we do need to clarify something, and that is when she says don't eat sugar in the morning, she's talking about donuts and pastries. Those are processed foods with refined sugar and fat. That's good advice, but now you're gonna have people thinking that they can't eat maybe oatmeal or fruit for breakfast, and that's where this gets a little bit confusing. There is a mass difference between a donut and maybe a bowl of oatmeal with berries. The fiber in whole foods slows glucose absorption down, so you don't really get that spike and that crash in the same way you would with processed foods. So the real message should be to avoid processed, refined carbs in the morning, but whole food carbs with fiber, those are fine. Don't let this bad advice make you afraid of fruit in the morning. If you're about that growth life, tap subscribe.
