Low Carb: Why Does It Work? Part 2

I'm on Day 3 of my low carb adventure. I assume that eventually, after the first 30 days it'll be a lifestyle choice instead of an adventure per se. I'm starting to feel the dizzy carb withdrawls which I can only assume are occurring because my body has no more glucose to burn, no more glycogen to tap into for energy and as a result, thinks I am starving. After I go to the gym for a couple of hours tonight I'm going to assume my body will start burning fat.

Back to the low carb logic. Insulin is the hormone that basically stops the use of fat for energy. It is responsible for pulling glucose from the blood stream and converting into the glycogen for energy use. The body will only store about a day's worth of glycogen for energy use. Anything beyond what the body can convert and store as glycogen is converted to fat.

Insulin is released whenever glucose is released into the blood stream. Glucose is apparently something our bodies want regulated in the blood so insulin is something of a blood stream hero. There's some nitty gritty science going on about glucose release but we'll skip it. For low carb purposes, know that the consumption of carbohydrates results in the introduction of glucose into the blood stream which results in the release of insulin.

So how do you avoid the release of insulin in the blood stream if you need to get at least 7 servings of vegetables in per day and vegetables naturally have carbohydrates in them?

The key is minimize the amount of glucose released in the blood stream resulting in the smallest amount of insulin released into the blood stream. The less glucose, the less insulin required to regulate the glucose levels.

So what vegetables should you eat to reduce the amount of insulin released and continue to burn fat? For that answer we turn to the Glycemic Index (GI).

This is another topic that most mainstream diets fail on. Being low on the GI is not purely enough to say that you can eat as much of it as you want. The GI measures the glucose effect on blood when a particular food is eaten. That measurement is based on a specific serving size. Consumption beyond that serving size can increase the glucose load.

Most foods that have a high fiber to calorie ratio, low in glucose and fructose as well as high in fat tend to have a much lower GI rating than foods than the average food.

Particularly easy to eat, find and enjoy low GI foods include:


(Chart courtesy of southbeach-diet-plan.com)

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)