Low Carb: Why does it work? Part 1

I got a bit of a tongue lashing from my personal trainer for juicing. At first, he didn't say much about it then later reminded me of my weight loss goal for the wedding. It's fine to mess around with different nutrition ideas, apparently, but when you're 13 lbs overweight and looking to lose 30 lbs in time for a wedding ceremony so you can look like a supermodel in pictures, this just isn't going to cut it.

He reminded me that I should be consuming no more than 1300 calories per day, most of which should be veggies and protein and I should be laying low on the carbs. And by low he means not intaking 100% of my calories from fruit and veggie juice. Hmm...

Alright Mr. Munoz, I'll play your game after some research. Not that I don't trust you, my dear good friend, I just need to know where the logic comes from so that I might improvise in low carbing when certain scenarios are undefined.

Apparently, the body uses glycogen as the source for energy primarily which is found in carbohydrates. Only when the glycogen is depleted does the body move onto lipolysis, basically burning fat for energy. Low carb diets remove carbohydrates from the equation resulting in the body being forced into using fat for energy.

Now, I had a friend who told me that the low carb thing didn't work for her. That eventually, she just ended up gaining weight while on the diet. There's a caveat that most main stream low carb diets only touch upon. It's that the body will use the fat consumed in the day for energy before going after the fat in the body. Low carb is not Carte Blanche to eat high fatty foods.

But we all know that you can't avoid carbs entirely, in fact a diet that is high is vegetables will inevitably be relatively high carbs and some vegetables have such a high sugar content, they might was well be a candy (yes, I'm talking about you corn.)

Well... enter insulin's important role in the low carb diet.

(Image courtesy of 1001herbs.com)