Are carbs fattening? Are low carbs diets better than high carbs diets? What carbs are the best? What’s the deal with blood sugar? What’s insulin? Does the glycemic index really matter? The short answer is – it’s complicated. But stay with me, and I’ll show you how you can use carbs to lose weight.
How Carbs are Stored as Fat
To understand how you can use carb to lose weight, you need to understand how they affect your body and fat storage. Here’s how it works.
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The Dreaded Condition: Insulin resistance
High carb and high sugars diets, combined with inactivity and other health conditions may make your body use insulin less effectively than normal. That’s insulin resistance, where your body converts less carbs into glycogen that may be used for energy, and stores even more fat instead. Long term, this blood sugar dysfunction can lead to type 2 diabetes. Anyone that carries around more fat than they should be has some form of insulin resistance. To revert it, you need to make sure you keep your blood sugar low by consuming the right carbs, in the right quantities and in the right timing.
Carb Storage Summary
--> Your body has a limited capacity to use carbs as immediate energy.Carbs not used as energy will be storedas fat.
--> High carb consumption raises your blood sugar and insulin.
--> Raised insulin levels slow down your fat loss, increase your hunger and make you crave carbs even more.
--> Carbs and sugar abuse will lead to insulin resistance, making it even harder for you to lose weight.
--> There’s no way around it: you need to adjust your carb consumption to your activity levels.
Certain Carbs are More Fattening
Not all carbs have the same effect on your blood sugar and insulin. That’s why you probably heard refined carbs like sugar will make you fat faster than fruits or veggies. Carbs can be split in two main categories, based on how your body takes care of them :
Simple carbs
Break down quickly in your digestive tract, raising your blood sugar rapidly. Include: natural sugars like fructose in fruits or lactose in dairy, but also added sugar in soft drinks and other treats.
Complex carbs
While chewing, these carbs break down into maltose, a simple sugar. Then, maltose breaks down and is absorbed as glucose in your small intestine. Because the whole process is much slower, you don’t experience a rapid raise in your blood sugar.
Fiber
In veggies, fruits and grains.
Starches
In certain veggies, potatoes, legumes and grains.
Carb Types Summary--> As a general rule, simple carbs will raise your blood sugar and insulin faster than complex carbs, so we can argue they are more fattening.
--> Now, that doesn’t mean you should avoid all simple carbs.
--> Simple carbs need to be used in certain contexts, like right after exercise when you might want a fast energy source to recover quickly.
About The Glycemic Index
The glycemic index (GI) is simply a measure of how quickly certain carbs make your blood sugar rise. For example, breakfast cereals like Corn Flakes™ have a GI score of 93, while oatmeal has a score of 55. In principle, that means oatmeal has less chance of being stored as body fat. But the glycemic index is not the only thing you should use to determine if a certain carb is “good” or “bad”.
Here’s Why It’s Not That reliable:
1. The GI score of certain foods varies depending on the preparation method or the particular type of food ingested.For example, baked potatoes tend to score higher than boiled potatoes, while new potatoes and some varieties of white potatoes score the lowest.
2. The GI index is only valid when a food is eaten by itself. It doesn’t factor the fact that eating protein with a carb-heavy meal slows down digestion and prevents the rapid raise of your blood sugar.
3. How your body absorbs carbs will depend on a ton of other factors including how much you eat; how the food is ripened, processed or prepared; the time of day it’s eaten and health conditions you may have, such as diabetes.
4. Packaged foods don’t generally list their GI rank on the label, so it can be next to impossible to estimate what it might be.
How Many Carbs Should I eat?
It all depends on your activity levels. Consider carbs as your fuel. If you’re very active, you’ll need to eat more carbs or you might have a hard time recovering properly and will probably experience chronic fatigue in the long run.If you barely exercise, you need to minimize your carb consumption at all costs.
Glycemic Index Summary--> The GI index is NOT a reliable way to determine if your carb source is fattening or not.
--> Instead, focus on eating natural, unprocessed carbs (veggies, fruits, potatoes, etc.) instead of processed carbs (sugar, refined grains, etc.).
