AHHHH CARBS...

Happy bloody Friday everyone, or whatever day your reading this on! I hope you’re all doing fantastically well and keeping on plan and smashing plenty of workouts in this week. I’m going to get all sciency on you today so I hope your strapped in for this one!

We’re going to discuss the poor little misunderstood macro nutrient we like to call carbohydrates today! Now the reason for choosing this particular subject is it can get very confusing sometimes when your told you can’t eat certain foods that you believed was healthy, or you should at least restrict how much of it you eat. “But Aaron apples are good for us”, you are correct random person that I made up, but they contain carbohydrates, and overeating carbohydrates in whatever form can still cause some issues. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, when I wrote the nutrition/accountability guide, the goal was to make people healthier, weight loss is just a nice little side affect you get from this. This is why our sole focus is not just from calorie counting alone.

Of course, when it comes to weight loss, being in a net deficit is what is important, and although some days may be up, as long as we are in a net deficit at the end of the week you will lose weight, what I care about however, is how we create this deficit. A big mac meal from MacDonald’s is 1015 calories, so in theory I can eat 2 of these a day and still lose weight! My calorie allowance when dieting is 2500 just for reference. The big problem here of course is if I put my mind to it, I can eat 4 in one sitting. Now I’m not proud of this fact (honest), but one is not going to fill me up, and eating 2 over the course of 24 hours certainly won’t fill me up. It will also provide next to no nutritional benefit, and nutritional benefit is what should be at the core of all our meals! The reason for my hypothetical gluttony is what I’m going to call mouth pleasure, and the reason for this is Dopamine.

Let’s talk about dopamine then, because its more relevant when it comes to carbs. Dopamine is also known as the pleasure hormone, and even just thinking about something pleasurable causes our body to release tiny amounts of it, which is why we get cravings for certain foods, drinks or activities. Now let’s face it, all the nicest tasting foods are carbs, and if we ever go off plan, it tends to be we go for carbs in whatever form that may be, so they are by far the easiest macro nutrient to over eat on, they give us the most pleasure, therefore release the most dopamine, when we eat them. But why is that an issue? Well if you stay under your calories, it isn’t necessarily, but here is my main issue with them. All carbs in whatever form you eat them are converted into glucose, which then gets into your blood, causing high blood sugar or hyperglycaemia, which can cause the following problems:

· Damaged blood vessels to vital organs

· Cardiovascular disease

· Kidney damage

· Nerve damage

Now granted it takes a lot of carbs to get to this stage, but there are other less serious affects of increasing your blood sugar that you may be more familiar with. We associate the need for an afternoon nap with getting older, when in fact high blood sugar inevitably leads to a very sudden drop in blood sugar, causing you to feel tired and sluggish, resulting in the dreaded afternoon dip. It is not your age, it is your diet! And after going through this who really wants to go out and exercise after work? Not me! I want to get in bed and bin off exercise, so that’s my calorie deficit reduced, just the thought of that is making my muscles fade away! We encourage exercise to increase calorie deficit but most of all for heart health, you can lose weight sat on your bum not eating anything, but this not going to improve your health nearly as much, and being healthy is the goal. Don’t make exercise harder then it already is by messing up your energy systems. I will include more carb related issues of these later in the blog.

To really help to hammer home the importance of dopamine and how much it affects us I’m going to discuss a study named ‘Feeding behaviour in dopamine-deficient mice’ (Szcypka et.al). In this 1999 study, dopamine was blocked causing the mice to have no desire or motivation to do anything including eat. Now if food was placed in the mouse’s mouth it would eat it and appear to enjoy it, however when the food was left inches away, the desire to get the food and eat it wasn’t there, and the mouse starved to death. This pleasure hormone can however be used to our advantage, and that’s exactly why we have the intense option within our plans. Restricting ourselves causes the brain to open up dopamine receptors, and therefore we get pleasure from less stimulus, so restricting food will make it seem more desirable, and to come full circle, why we want to reward ourselves with off plan meals, which are usually carbs! But if we restrict even some delicious healthier food for periods of time, that will also become more desirable, giving us all that lovely dopamine when we do allow it back into our diets! Fuck dopamine by the way, never simple is it.

In our case however we are counting calories the majority of the time, so why can’t we just eat as many carbs as we like! Well there’s a few reasons. I like to encourage counting calories, and in the past, I have taken this one step further to try and encourage counting macros (the amounts of fat, carbs and protein we eat). A lot of people just aren’t interested, and where as counting calories is one thing, trying to balance your macros every day is another challenge in itself. If I didn’t put carb restriction in the diet, we would all waste our calories on carbohydrates, and a carb only diet is no good for anyone, we need protein to help recover from workouts as well as build new muscle tissue whilst maintaining what you have already. Your body can burn off muscle just like it can fat, having a high protein diet can stop that from happening, so unless you want to go for the anorexic look, let’s keep protein high, and carbs balanced.

As I previously mentioned there are major health benefits to keeping your carbs low on a diet! Thankfully the guys at healthline.com have done the leg work for me. I won’t include the studies they have cited but I will leave a link to the article I used where so can see for yourself.

1. Low carb diets reduce appetite

Studies consistently show that when people cut carbs and eat more protein and fat, they end up eating fewer calories (see above on dopamine)

2. Low carb diets lead to more initial weight loss

Now this one isn’t the best example as it isn’t fat your losing to cause the sudden drop, but a quicker drop in weight at first can be good for motivation, better the results, happier you are with the diet

3. A greater proportion of fat loss comes from your abdominal cavity

Low carb diets are very effective at reducing harmful abdominal fat. In fact, a greater proportion of the fat people lose on a low-carb first seems to come from the abdominal cavity, meaning a drastically reduced risk of heart disease and type 2 diabetes

4. Triglycerides (fat molecules) tend to drop drastically

High triglycerides are a strong risk factor when it comes to heart disease, and these are elevated when carb consumption is too high, especially in sedentary people.

5. Increased levels of good cholesterol

The higher your HDL in relation to LDL, the lower your risk of heart disease, and less carbs means you go looking for calories elsewhere, like from fat, and eating fat causes this response

6. Reduced blood sugar and insulin levels

See above

7. May lower blood pressure

Low carb diets are an effective way to lower blood pressure and therefore reduce risk of heart disease, stroke and kidney failure (see above)

8. Effective against metabolic syndrome

Caused by a collection of the other points made in this section

9. Improved bad cholesterol levels

Low carb diets increase the size of LDL particles while reducing the number of total LDL particles in your bloodstream. As such lowering your carb intake can boost your heart health

10. Therapeutic for several brain disorders

Very low-carb and ketogenic diets are now being studies for brain conditions such as Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s as the brain is forced to burn ketones which are formed during low carb diets. They have also been shown to sure children of epilepsy and one study showed a reduction of 50% in the number of seizures (16% became seizure free).

If all that hasn’t sold it to you then I don’t know what will to be honest! I am also relieved I got to throw dopamine in there because I’ve been trying to do that for a while. To summarise, carbs won’t kill you, but not eating them will make you stronger, moderation is key to your health, just like following my advice is!

Peace out,

Aaron

Ps. I wish pizza didn’t exist, then carbs could disappear from my life…