I talked about our obsession and addiction to refined foods, about how convenience foods affect our health and how these foods all contain carbohydrates. It is important to keep in mind that carbs include all grains, starches, and sugars and the more refined they are the worse they are for us. You will get carbs from an apple, a baked potato, and you will also get carbs from a chocolate bar. Of course, the apple is the best overall choice because it is in its natural state.
So what is the deal with the carbs? Why are they so bad when
they are consumed in large quantities and when they are refined as
well? It all has to do with insulin.
Many of the health problems we face, aside from the obvious
diabetes, can be linked to insulin. Even obesity can be linked to
insulin.
Insulin - Who's the sucker?
I had a client who was a hair dresser. Normally, a person's profession would not weigh so heavily on the results of the diet, but in this case it did. She was adamant that she was following the diet properly, that her calorie intake was lower than her maintenance level and that there were just the right amount of carbs, protein, and fat, yet she was not losing weight.
I recommended she have her hormone levels tested because I knew this diet never failed and it seemed to be the only option left to us. We had even taken desperate measures like carb cycling, detox, lowering the calories, increasing the calories, different supplements.
Every time it was weigh-in day, I dreaded it. I wanted her to lose weight so much and I was researching everything it could possibly be. It even went to the point where she would start crying when she got on the scale and she kept saying that she was following the diet. I felt awful because I knew she was paying me to help her get from A to Z. I had tried everything and I was out of ideas.
One day as I was going out for lunch with a friend of mine, I passed by the hairdressing shop where she worked and saw her with a sucker in her mouth (you know how hairdressers give kids those suckers.) Well it turns out she was eating one after every appointment as a habit. It was only 10 calories per sucker so she figured it was no big deal and didn't tell me.
Now that is the power of insulin. Even though there were not many calories in the suckers she was eating, the sugar in them is so pure that it is absorbed very quickly, too quickly, into the bloodstream. This will definitely stop someone from losing weight. Think about all those chocolate bar companies promoting chocolates bars that have "only 100 calories." Now you know that it's not about the 100 calories; it's about the insulin response.
How does this work? Have you ever done the sugar high? You drank that cola or you ate that chocolate bar (or both) and you went soaring? You felt a wonderful rush of energy? Unfortunately, that rush was short-lived and after about 30 minutes you were wishing you had a couch in your office so that you could lie down and take a nap.
So what is happening in your body? The job of insulin is to regulate your blood sugar levels. When you ingest a lot of sugar or carbs (which are converted to sugar in the body), the pancreas releases insulin to lower the amount of sugar in the blood. However, the pancreas is too thorough. It overcompensates for the amount of sugar in the blood stream and sends out so much insulin that the blood sugar levels take a dip. This is when you crash and need that nap.
Then, because your blood sugar level is low, your body tells you it needs another fix any way you can get it. You need to get more food to pump up your energy level and your body automatically wants to have that quick fix carb that got you into this mess in the first place. Next thing you know, you have that midmorning chocolate bar, a high-carb lunch that makes you crash, then you need to be saved in the afternoon with a pick-me-up. Then it's dinner time and you follow dinner with a dessert that keeps you going until you need that late evening or bedtime snack. Recognize a trend?
When you eat those carb-rich foods and your body releases insulin like that many times in a day, there are two things that happen. One, those foods are also generally high in calories and this means that your calorie intake in a day is very high. In addition to this, insulin also acts as a catalyst for the body to store fat. The more insulin is released, the more those calories will be stored as fat in the body. Next thing you know you are overweight and out of shape.
As you can see, controlling insulin is what it takes to control your weight. High insulin production goes hand- in-hand with a diet high in carbohydrates. The more carbs you eat in one serving, the more your insulin levels rise. The more your insulin levels rise, the less fat you will burn. The fatter you get the more insulin resistant you become. This is a snowball effect and to put an end to it, you need to become insulin sensitive.
When you are insulin resistant, your body does not respond to the insulin rushes caused by eating a high-carb diet for the long term. When your body stops responding to the insulin rushes, this causes the body to store fat. To repair the damage and become insulin sensitive you need to go on a lower-carb diet. The more weight you lose, the better your insulin sensitivity will become.
You need to watch out for labels any time you purchase packaged food. Something that boasts that it is "low-carb" or "low in sugar" might actually not be. When you read the ingredient list the ingredients are listed in order of abundance so the most important ingredients are the first three. If you don't see sugar listed there, that does not mean there is very little sugar present. Sugar goes by many names including:
Sucrose
Maltose
Lactose
Dextrose
Fructose
Glucose
Molasses
Treacle
Malt extract
Raw or brown sugar
Cane sugar
Castor sugar
Corn syrup
Syrup
Disaccharides
Monosaccharide
Polysaccharide
Honey
One of the many tricks of the big companies is to list the different sugars in the product separately. When they are listed as separate ingredients, they can avoid ending up in the top three. There might be five different sugars in the product and you wouldn't know it unless you know what to look for.