What Is “Sweaty Butt”?

April 14, 2009 ↓ Comments (0)

This has been a popular search term, but only one has been brave enough to ask…

Question

WOW!!!! David!!! Your page is so motivating! I am a sugar addict who has not eaten sugar for 14 days now, and I know that it was time now for me to stop abusing my body. And all the signs and symptoms you write are so true and the “sweaty butt.” Can you tell me what that is because actually, when I ate too many sweets, I got short of breath, headached, sweaty and I slept 2 days straight because my body couldn’t deal with the overload…

Answer

When I created a list of the symptoms you might experience after eating nothing but sugar for long periods of time, I added “sweaty butt” as one of the results. No other symptom has attracted as much attention as that one. (Although the mention of poop does come in a close second.) People often write to me and ask what, exactly, I meant by the term. This is going to be frank and somewhat clinical but here’s what I mean when I say that sweaty butt is a symptom of chronic sugar consumption.

When you eat sweets all the time you may feel as if you have the urge to make a deposit. But when you go to the bank no bills come out of your wallet. It wasn’t like you had a false alarm, it was more like the cash just stayed in there. The end result is sweaty butt. It doesn’t happen when your body is sweating. You’re not warm. Just your butt feels sweaty. Pretty sexy, huh? (Please take a moment to really imagine it.)

I have absolutely no scientific basis to say this, but in my mind it is High Fructose Corn Syrup that causes the problem. I imagine the sugary foods you eat never really break down in your stomach or intestines. If you’ve ever left candy in a jar of water for weeks you’ll find that the candy never breaks down—the water never gets absorbed into the candy—and so I imagine that the same thing is happening inside of you. It is like there are wads of candy and cookies all balled up and stuck in your body and the High Fructose Corn Syrup is filtering through to the bottom—your bottom. I’m going to stop now because I’m sure you’re getting hungry with all of this talk about candy and cookies…

I am happy to announce that, when you stop being sweet, you’ll no longer get “sweaty butt” unless you are exercising (in which case your whole body should be sweating). However, if you are still eating sugar (which is so last century) then you might find yourself sweating even when you’re not warm. And that’s the sweaty butt of which I speak.