Hi I’m Lee Labrada, and welcome to this edition of Ask Lee. This week we’re going to be addressing the question “are carbs the enemy?” In other words we’re going to be looking at whether carbohydrates are as bad some dieters think.
You may have heard people say “cut the carbs and you’ll lose the fat.” For some reason, this is especially true of female dieters who all too often are afraid to consume carbohydrates. Let’s start by looking at what a carbohydrate is.
Carbohydrates are one of the three macronutrients. The other two macronutrients are protein and fat. Through the digestive process, carbohydrates are broken down into glucose, or in other words, blood sugar. Blood sugar is used by your body in many metabolic processes, including fuel for cells and muscles, and is the primary fuel source for nerve cells in the brain.
Now listen to what I’m about to tell you: Not all carbohydrates are the same. Simple carbohydrates that are found in fruit and sugary foods are quickly broken down into glucose while more complex carbohydrates, found in whole grains, yams, beans, and oatmeal require a lot more time. Because simple carbohydrates are broken down quickly they cause a quick rise in blood sugar, and in response, your pancreas releases a fat storing hormone called insulin, to bring the sugar level back down.
Whatever blood sugar your body does not immediately need for energy, or stores as glycogen in muscles for fuel, is converted to triglycerides in the liver, and that makes you fatter. Complex carbohydrates on the other hand are broken down more slowly, and so blood sugar doesn’t get elevated as much. Consequently there’s less of an insulin release, and with that less fat storage.
So you might think if there’s any chance of carbs being stored as fat, why not just cut them out completely? Good question. Cutting your carbohydrates out of your diet will cause problems to occur. By cutting carbohydrates, you force your body to give up its protein sparing mechanism. This causes the body to breakdown both protein in your diet and scavenge protein from your muscles.
The reason your body does that is to convert the protein into glucose through a process called gluconeogenesis in the liver. Needless to say it is inefficient and makes your body work hard. The net result is that you usually end up losing a lot of muscle tissue. As you’ve heard me say before, muscle is important because it is so metabolically active, and burns a lot of calories, which is desirable if you’re trying to burn off excess body fat.
Everything that you do in your training nutrition should be to optimize the amount of lean muscle that you have. That’s going to mean eating an adequate amount of complex carbohydrates, while limiting simple and sugary carbohydrates. I hope that this gives you a better idea of why you should not eliminate carbohydrates from your diet when you are trying to lose fat and increase lean muscle.
You can find more detailed information about complex carbohydrates, and which ones you should eat and how much, in my book The lean body promise, available on my website labrada.com.
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