The Skinny On Carbohydrates – To Eat or Not!

There is a LOT of miss information out there on carbs or carbohydrates. I hear it a ALL the time, even in my own family. What’s even more scary is some of the reasons I hear people using to justify maintaining their eating habits around carbohydrates. So, whether you’re reading this becasue you just have to lose a few pounds or you’re considering weight loss surgery; by taking a quick look at carbohydrates, we can clear up some of these misconceptions for you.

In simple terms, all carbohydrates have starch in them. Your body breaks down carbs/starch into sugar. Sugar is the fuel of the body. All cells need it to live. Sugar or glucose is used by cells to produce energy. Obviously this means that some carbohydrates would be good for us and actually required to maintain health and energy assuming we’re not over weight.

Along came modern man. In our drive to simplify life we discovered that refining and processing carbohydrate rich foods made products that were easy to cook and package for our busy lives. Eureka!  – “Simple” carbohydrates were created. The problem with simple carbohydrates is that the body can so easily break them down that we get instant and incredibly high levels of sugar into our blood stream. Our bodies can’t utilize or cope with extreme levels. It does however try and  in doing so it does all kinds of wonderful things. Some tricks it uses are:

• Drastically dumps insulin into our blood stream
• Tries to flush the sugar out through our kidneys
• Stores excess sugar in fat cells – I’ll say that one again > STORES sugar in our fat cells!

Simple carbohydrates are processed exceptionally fast. It’s like throwing gasoline on a fire. You get an instant whoosh and then it’s gone. After the heady rush is over, and no more fuel is available, our body tells us we’re hunger again. With simple carbohydrates this can be as short as 1 hour after our feast of simple carbs. Yeap! – that means that we set up a cycle that dooms use to repeating this mistake of throwing even more gas on our fires, often many times through out a day. No wonder 60% of us are over weight in North America!

So if you want to lose weight, the best diet is high in proteins, vegetables, and fruit with “SMALL” amounts of “complex” carbohydrates. Lets take a look at what defines simple verse complex for carbohydrates.

Basically a simple carbohydrate is anything that is already processed like, any kind of  sugar (white or brown), white breads, pasta, rice, jam, cakes, doughnuts, potato-chips, pasta, chocolate, most packaged cereal, fruit juices, non diet soda pop and all junk foods. A rule of thumb to use is if you’re looking at a carbohydrate and it’s white; it’s BAD for you.

SMALL amounts of complex carbohydrates are good for you and can be a very important part of your weight lose diet if you place them 4th on your list of foods – after protein, veggies and fruit. Complex carbohydrate work for you becasue your body processes them slowly, decreasing the spike of sugar rush over a longer periods of time. They do provide fuel for your body and they can actually help you diet because they will make you feel fuller over a longer time period and will increase the time between “hunger signals” from your brain.

You can add complex carbohydrates to your diet by eating foods like  lentils, whole grain products like oatmeal, whole barley, buckwheat, buckwheat bread, oat bran bread, oat bran cereal, museli, wild rice, brown rice, multi-grain bread, pinto beans, navy beans, garbanzo beans, kidney beans, whole meal bread, and split peas. (there are more)

If you’re over weight and want to lose fat, your body must use that fat as a fuel; there is no other way. The only way your body will use its stored fat as a fuel is if you force it to. That means depriving it of its present supply of fuel – the blood sugar or glucose produced from carbs. This will make your body have no choice but to burn reserved fat and the sugar stored in it.

There are three ways to cut your body’s glucose supply:

• you either starve — which is what low-calorie, low-fat dieting is
• you reduce the starches and sugars from which glucose is made and make it up with a source of a different fuel — “your body fat“.
• You exercise or burn more energy

Additional Reading:

http://www.second-opinions.co.uk/carbs-weight-gain.html

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