What 21 Days Without Sugar Does to Your Brain

Sugar doesn’t just expand your waistline—it also causes brain fog and fuels long-term neurological decline. In this video, I’ll share the worrying effects of sugar on the brain and explain how to beat sugar addiction within a few days.

Today we’re going to talk about what would happen to your brain if you ate no sugar for 21 days. That’s 3 weeks. And I’ve done a lot of videos on how sugar impacts the whole body. Today, we’re just going to focus in on this brain. It’s fascinating.

And this video, it was inspired by a research paper out of the journal of clinical endocrinology and metabolism. And this study revolved around doing the ketogenic diet for three weeks and what it does to the brain just in three weeks. It’s mind-blowing. It increase the blood flow to your brain by 22%. Now, you might at first say, “Well, 22% doesn’t seem like a lot.

” But let’s say you’re an Olympic athlete and you’re running around the track and someone just turned up the oxygen by 22%. Just think of the advantage of what 22% more oxygen could do in a race. We’re talking about a significant boost in oxygen and nutrients to your brain. Even if you think when you exercise, if you were to restrict your oxygen by 22%. You would feel it.

I mean, just think about if you go to sleep at night and someone turns down the blood flow and turns down the oxygen by 22%. Well, they actually call that sleep apnea. You’re not going to sleep that great. You’re going to wake up feeling tired. Well, just by going on low carb, you can increase your blood flow significantly.

And there’s something else that’s really cool. Your BDNF increases by 47%. What is BDNF? Brainer derived neurotrophic factor. This is a protein that tells your brain to grow, repair, and rewire itself, making more connections, growing new brain cells.

They also consider it an anti-depressive molecule because it helps prevent depression and it helps boost your IQ. Three weeks, no sugar, almost 50% more brain derived neurotrphic factor. This is like incredible. What would happen in a month or two months or 3 months or a year of doing low sugar? At the end, I’ll cover what would happen specifically at week one, two, and three.

And then I’m going to give you some real simple tips of how to do it. In order to talk about the benefits of coming off sugar, I first need to talk about what happens when you eat sugar specifically to your brain. And I think most people might know this right here. But I’ll tell you one thing. Many people do not know this.

In fact, I haven’t even talked about all of this in any of my videos. So, this is interesting because it’s kind of general knowledge that people know that when you sugar, you’re going to create a blood sugar swing, right? And you’re going to increase insulin. I think also people know uh when the blood sugar goes down, you’re going to feel irritable because you’re starving your brain of fuel. You’re going to have brain fog.

When I was living on sugar long ago, I was in a permanent brain fog. I didn’t even know what it was like to actually think clearly and not be in the fog. And I was also highly irritable as well. And also your sleep is messed up. This is why when you wake up in the morning, you’re not really awake.

It takes you a long time to wake up. Anxiety. Your attention will be low. You’ll have less focus. Your memory is not going to be as great.

Uh I already mentioned the mood swings. Usually you’re going to be hungry an hour and a half after you ate. How can you actually be hungry? You just ate an hour and a half ago. It’s illogical.

It’s not real hunger. It’s the blood sugar crashing, which is not a lack of fuel. The problem is at the cellular level. Because when the brain becomes dependent on sugar, it starts to create a resistance to sugar. That’s called insulin resistance.

And so the more sugar you eat and the longer you do that, the less of that sugar will get into the cells. This is the brain or body trying to protect itself against this toxic sugar. When you take a diabetic for example, they’re not getting a lot of sugar into the brain. And this is why they have a higher risk of dementia, memory problems. So a lot of these symptoms are merely the fuel not able to get into the cells.

So literally the cells are starving for fuel despite all this food coming in. It just you have all this fuel available, but it’s not actually being delivered inside the cell. So, in other words, eating in sugar makes you hungry. It makes you crave sweets. I was so addicted to sugar, I had to have it every single night.

Uh, a pint of Ben & Jerry’s every single night. I wouldn’t even think twice. And also, right when you eat sugar, right after that, your vision is kind of blurry. It’s kind of wild. Now, if you’ve never heard of the data that a B1 deficiency can be created by consuming too many carbs, you’re going to want to stick around and really uh listen to what I’m going to talk about because this is super fascinating and it could explain a lot of your symptoms that you’re having right now that you’re not connecting the dots because a lot of these symptoms that I’m going to talk about are like all over the place.

They don’t sound like they’re connected, but they are connected to a B1 deficiency. What is B1? B1 is thamine. It’s one of the B vitamins in a whole complex of B vitamins. When you actually consume too many carbs, the demand for B1 goes straight up and vertical.

You need a lot of B1 to be able to deal with all that carbohydrate. Let’s say for example with a car, you put a lot of gasoline in there, right? You have the perfect ratio of gasoline to air, but the spark plug doesn’t work, right? B1 is the spark plug. B1 allows the combustion of that fuel.

If you flood too much fuel into the system without B1, then that fuel does not get burned correctly. You cannot make energy. So without B1, you can’t make this, you can’t make this, you can’t make ATP, and you starve off the nervous system because those cells have a high metabolism and they are majorly dependent on B1 more than a lot of other cells. This is why out of all the tissues in your body, the nervous system in the brain are the first one to show up with a B1 deficiency because the large amount of sugar and carbs that people eat are depleting B1 and they don’t know it. So, I’m going to talk about all the bad effects that happen from this.

So, then we can talk about all the good things that will happen if you don’t consume sugar. One of the biggest things that suffers with a B1 deficiency is the autonomic nervous system composed of the sympathetic and the parasympathetic nervous system. And that’s like rest and digest. And this originates in the brain stem in the hypothalamus. That’s where it’s located.

And without B1, these things are not going to work that well. So then what’s going to happen to the rest of the body? because we’re getting a problem in the brain, which is the origin of where this starts. Well, you’re going to get dry eyes. Why?

Because the tear ducts don’t release tears anymore. So, you might have dry eyes and think it’s maybe a vitamin A deficiency or you need to put something in your eyes. No, no, it’s a B1 deficiency. Air hunger. I used to have this.

I didn’t know what it was, especially when I would go to sleep at night. I just I couldn’t get enough air. It wasn’t satisfying me. that relates to a B1 deficiency because I was eating too much sugar. Bladder problems.

You’re urinating but you can’t get all the urine out. A lot of times men will think that’s their prostate when in fact it’s simply the autonomic nervous system problem occurring because of the B1. Same thing with women that have bladder problems. They have retention of urine and they think it’s maybe structural from the uterus or this or that. Now, it’s coming from this right here and this right here.

So, that can also lead to urinary tract infections and just a bladder th