In order to obtain and maintain your ideal body weight there is no magic bullet. Obviously getting rid of processed food in your diet and increasing your veggie and fruit intake are essential, as well as weight training to preserve lean muscle mass and cardio to burn fat stores. The controversy seems to be in the low or no carbohydrate diets that are the current fad.
Weight loss without carbohydrate restriction is very difficult for most people. When you eat a carbohydrate compared to a protein or fat, it is broken down rather quickly into glucose. Once your bloodstream is flooded with glucose from your meal, insulin has to be released to make the energy accessible to the cells, but if there is excess glucose floating around, it gets stored as fat. There is a strong correlation with type two diabetes and high carbohydrate diets, as when there is a constant stimulation of the pancreas to release insulin to process the excessive glucose, it eventual “wears out”.
So what does carbohydrate restriction mean? One gram of carbohydrates equals four calories. Many low carbohydrate diets reduce carbohydrate consumption to 20% or less of your diet, but a restricted carbohydrate is a more realistic 30% of your total calories from carbohydrates. So if an average woman eats 1200 calories a day, than no more than 360 calories should be from carbohydrates, or roughly 90 grams of carbohydrates. The change to a diet with reduced carbohydrates would put the body into ketosis, and shift the focus of energy from the immediate glucose available in the bloodstream to ketones, thus accessing fat stores to lose weight.
There has been much research in the field of restricted carbohydrate diets. The New England Journal of Medicine published a clinical trial in 2008 comparing a low carbohydrate diet versus a low fat diet in obese patients and found that the low carbohydrate diet produced increased weight loss, decreased triglycerides and increased insulin sensitivity as opposed to the low fat diet.
So the bottom line is start cutting back on your processed grains, such as bread, pasta, rice, cookies, pastries; and critically look at the nutritional information on all processed foods for the carbohydrate count. Make sure any of the carbohydrates that you do consume are of high quality, preferably whole foods such as fruit and veggies and whole grains.
