There is so much hullabaloo around carbs. Which ones are good? Which ones are bad? Are they the devil? Do they make us fat? Should we never eat them? Can we eat all we want if they’re from fruits and vegetables? Is it okay for thin or underweight people to eat tons of them? Should underweight people gorge on them? Should athletes “carb load”? What are the connections among carbs, illness and healing? Let’s have a little chat about carbohydrates and your body in order to clear up some of the confusion.
Not all carbs are created equal.
First, not all “carbs” are created equal, meaning different ones do very different things in our bodies. As we cover in detail in our online course, different carbohydrates impact blood sugar and burn at different rates, which is why it is super useful to think in terms of slower (non-starchy) and faster (starchy-sugary) carbs. Once you get that, your’e already ahead of the game.
The next step is understanding that not all faster carbohydrates are created equal either. First, assume here that we are talking about high vibe foods, which are foods that raise your vibration because they don’t contain any toxic chemical additives and are grown and prepared in ways that make them biocompatible and therefore health giving. The different kinds of faster carbs, like organic pumpkins, root vegetables, grains, nuts, seeds, fruits, honey, coconut sugar and maple syrup, react differently in your body for many reasons. Besides their infinitely varied nutrient profiles, they have different blood sugar and insulin impacts depending on how simple or complex the carbohydrates are, meaning how many chemical reactions it takes to break them down into monosaccharide sugars in your blood, such as glucose.
Let’s take the example of two “good” high vibe carbs: raw local unfiltered honey and organic kabocha pumpkin. Honey is a syrup, which is a simpler sugar and, therefore, faster, or higher glycemic. This means it hits your bloodstream faster and raises your blood sugar, which will go up quickly then drop just as fast as insulin races to your cells to metabolize it. Starchy veggies like organic kabocha pumpkin, have sugars that are molecularly enmeshed in fibers and nutrients, which makes it more complex and takes more time to break down. So, kabocha raises your blood sugar a little more slowly and over longer period of time, avoiding the crash that comes from an insulin spike. This gives you sustained energy and a more stable metabolism.
Even though this is over simplifying, to give you an intuitive sense of simple versus complex, imagine putting honey, cooked carrot puree and a raw carrot each into their own glass of vinegar water with some enzymes and imagine the rate at which their sugars and starches would dissolve into the water.
This means that the more complex, nutrient dense and fiber rich kind of carbs, will burn slowly on your metabolic fire, keeping you feeling fuller longer and maintaining fairly even blood sugar and insulin levels longer. Simple starches and sugars, especially when eaten alone and/ or in large quantities, will quickly spike and then drop, or even crash, your blood sugar, leaving you tired and hungry, especially for more fast carbs. This is how it becomes a vicious cycle and can turn into an imbalance.
Since proteins and fats are the most filling and burn the slowest of all macros, eating them with any kind of faster carbs can help slow the digestion and absorption to balance blood sugar, energy levels and appetite. This is why putting grass fed butter or ghee on a potato or in desserts is a good thing, and it is why non-fat, high sugar desserts are a really bad idea. In fact, this is precisely why Traci gained so much weight on a low-fat diet in the 90’s. We also cover the elements of a balanced meal in detail in our Get Started Eating Healthy 2 Week Mini-Course and our comprehensive 12 module course.
Slow and steady wins the race.
What’s this talk of wanting slow carbs? Don’t we want to burn through carbs fast? Most of us have heard talk of having a “fast metabolism” and are taught we want calories to burn fast, but this is not what we are talking about when we want sugars and starches to “burn” or metabolize slowly. It is also different from the concept of burning stored fat, which many folks want to do as “fast” as possible (understandable, but not the best way to keep weight off, by the way).
To avoid weight gain, chronic inflammation and other damage to your mind-body health, carbs must be eaten in balance, meaning appropriate serving sizes most of the time and with enough proteins, nourishing fats and non-starchy veggies. Conversely, faster carbs eaten out of balance means frequent excessive servings and not eaten with enough proteins, fats and non-starchy veggies, which is what most clients who come to use are doing and do not realize it.
So, to be clear, the more excessive, frequent and low vibe your fast carb consumption is, the more sluggish your metabolism, the more accelerated your aging, and if you have the propensity, the more you store fat. A healthy metabolism likes a little challenge and surprise to keep it on its toes, but it mostly likes stability, trust, consistency, nurture, nourishment and high vibes. Isn’t that what good relationships look like? So, can you see how having a healthy relationship with yourself will make it easier to get on well with your metabolism?
Weight problems are a hormonal issue, tied to toxic stress and blood sugar.
Before we get much further into this, let’s clarify a common misunderstanding. Weight issues are not simply a caloric issue, they are a hormonal issue. Insulin is a hormone secreted by your pancreas that governs energy metabolism by regulating the amount of glucose (sugar) in the blood and, because excess glucose must be stored as fat, it is also a fat storage hormone. You may already know that eating carbohydrates triggers varying amounts of insulin depending on how slow or fast they are. However, did you know that stress hormones actually trigger excess insulin?
So, your body doesn’t just store fat when 1) we eat fast carbs, but insulin is released, and we may subsequently store fat when we 2) consume stimulants like caffeine, cacao, tea, mate and guarana, 3) when we are exposed to toxins and 4) when we are mentally and emotionally stressed.
That’s right! This means that any form of toxic stress can trigger fat storage, particularly around your belly. Evolutionarily speaking, this is an adaptation that protects you from toxins (we store them in adipose fat cells), gets you to overeat and store fat for the periodic experience of famine and to store as much energy as possible in times of danger.
High insulin levels make your blood sugar drop rapidly, which triggers you to crave fast carbs. This is why all toxic stress (which raises insulin) can lead to appetite control and weight issues. Chronic high levels of insulin in your blood is toxic and can actually damage the arterial lining, causing cardiovascular disease. So many of today’s worst diseases can trace back to blood sugar and insulin imbalances. Even being underweight is just another type of metabolic imbalance and actually must be addressed by balancing blood sugar and overall hormones as well. Of course, it is way more complex than this when we bring in thyroid, sex hormones and a whole host of other hormones and neurotransmitters you may or may not be familiar with, but let’s start here with stress, blood sugar and insulin.
Keep in mind that insulin and stress hormones are our friends when we don’t abuse them through habitual destructive thoughts and behaviors. However, anything we don’t treat lovingly can become a source of pain. Insulin is a fat storage and muscle building anabolic hormone, which is great if there’s a famine or if you are giving your body weight bearing exercise. Likewise, stress hormones are great for escaping short-term danger and activating our immune systems. However, when modern society becomes an excuse for so much chronic stress, toxicity and dietary excess, we need to make a conscious effort to have a healthy relationship with our insulin and other hormones, which, again, requires a loving relationship with ourselves.
Weight issues are a symptom, not a disease and blood sugar imbalances can cause serious health problems in thin people, too.
We don’t want to provoke chronic high insulin via toxic stress or by dumping more fast carbs than we can immediately utilize into our bloodstream. This is actually why, in order to maintain a healthy weight, we need to keep our toxic stress, blood sugar and insulin levels in check. This applies whether your current body weight is healthy, over or under. Also, remember that weight problems are a symptom and not a disease in and of themselves. The real issue is accelerated metabolic aging, or aging in a way that is unnecessarily fast and painful, due to inflammation via toxic stress and malnutrition, or imbalanced eating.
Folks with chronic high insulin tend to:
1) store more belly fat (visible) and/ or fat around their organs (often not externally visible at all, known as “skinny fat”)
2) have higher risk of metabolic syndrome, or some progression of weight issues, diabetes, heart, liver and kidney disease, and cancer
3) have an increased risk for brain fog, chronic fatigue and chronic pain
4) have an overall increased risk of all chronic disease
5) have an increased likelihood of mood disorders like depression and anxiety as well as even more severe mental illness
Can I just carb load in the morning and then burn it throughout the day?
We see this a lot. We get why people with a history of the calories in, calories out mindset, might transfer the concept to a “carbs in, carbs out” mindset. While in the mainstream diet world, carbs are the new “calories,” this does not appear to be a biological reality. While we are all bioindividual, or individually unique, carb loading in the morning then carb starving in the evening does not appear to work for most people.
You could be an exception, but it appears that most folks are better off eating appropriate amounts (varies person to person) of high-fiber, nutrient rich carbs with proteins, fats and non starchy vegetables with each meal, rather than carb loading in the morning and hoping to burn it off throughout the day. Not only do you need carbs later in the day to soothe your adrenals, make serotonin and convert that to melatonin so you can sleep and wake up with healthy cortisol (adrenal or stress hormone) levels, carb loading at any time of day can put you on a blood sugar, fat storage and carb craving roller coaster, especially if you are not very active right after you do so.
To make all of this clearer, we will walk you through a common scenario we see. Let’s say you eat a mostly faster carb breakfast of oatmeal with apples, raisins and honey then some orange juice and coffee with milk and sugar in it, reasoning that:
- this is all real food (which it is)
- fat is unhealthy (this is NOT true-good fats are essential for health, can be used for energy and can help you burn body fat)
- protein makes you too acidic and animal protein has saturated fat and cholesterol, causing heart disease and cancer (NOT true at all if it’s the right kind eaten with veggies)
- it’s too weird to eat vegetables for breakfast (this is simply a limited and damaging cultural belief that is thankfully shifting).
- I see skinny women and fit men on TV, consciously or unconsciously, imprinting this idea of a “healthy” normal breakfast into my brain (it’s nuts how the mainstream media really can shape our behaviors in ways we do not even realize)
This leaves you eating mostly carbs, but that’s okay, you reason. You will just go to work at the office and burn the carbs all day long (and perhaps not eat any at dinner).
However, if we look at this metabolically, what you just did was spike your blood sugar, which you might initially feel as pleasure and an energy boost, which could reinforce your brain to do it again tomorrow (or, more likely, at lunch). No matter how good it felt for a few minutes, your body knows that it is toxic to leave your blood sugar that high, so insulin (all hormones are communicators) announces to the body, “There’s too much sugar in the blood! We need to get it out and do something with it!”
What does your body do with it? It does you a favor via a complex metabolic symphony of conversion and stores a little of that extra glucose as glycogen in your muscles to burn over the next little while (kinda like the cash you keep in your wallet), but glycogen is heavy liquid, so your body did you another favor and stored the rest as light fluffy fat (money in the bank, but here’s where the metaphor breaks down, because, unlike how most folks think of money, for health reasons you only want so much of this fluffy fat stuff stored on your body).
So, all that excess glucose gets handled, but the result is that your blood sugar crashes, you get sleepy, cranky, hungry and inflamed. That’s okay, here’s where I burn my stored fat (and have a cup of coffee “for energy”), right?
Well, it was a lot of work to go to all that trouble to store the extra breakfast glucose as fat, so guess what? Your body would rather make you hungry again, to see if you can get your hands on more carbs, than go into storage and convert the stored fat back into energy again. It’s kind of like when you put something in the freezer. When you’re really hungry, you might be more likely to just buy more food, even go to a restaurant, than to go thaw food from the freezer and prepare it. Just sayin…
Here is where the false, self-defeating, notion of “willpower” comes in. Once your blood sugar is that low, if you think you are going to just use willpower to fight your body’s urgent call for food, you are setting yourself up to feel like a failure, which is a very unloving thing to do to oneself. If you spike then crash, your brain will have it’s way with you and the more stressed and desperate you get, the worse choices you make because you go into primal, short term thinking survival brain.
Then, the next time it’s not oatmeal, it’s Oreo’s, soda, fast food or candy. Now health food stores have their own, less toxic, but still highly imbalanced versions of these very same things. This is when, if you are not armed with a balanced yummy meal, walking into the office break room becomes a hazard to your health. Store bought muffins or birthday cake, anyone?
So, carb loading in the morning can lead to cycles of carb loading all day long, which can lead to feelings of guilt and shame that you didn’t show enough willpower. Or, should you truly carb starve the rest of the day, it can lead to things like feeling tired and hangry that day, poor sleep that night and anxiety the next morning. Fun, huh?
Okay, so what does my body want?
Again, slow and steady really does win the race (a race that, by the way, is only imagined in our head and doesn’t actually exist). What we actually want to do is harmonize our blood sugar and insulin dynamic. We want gentle and loving on all levels.
While we are focusing on a more dietary dimension in this module, the mental and emotional stress aspects that we will explore in later modules MUST be addressed for successful, lasting healing of chronic illness, a side effect of which is weight normalization.
Some of these include:
- trauma
- self image
- feelings of undeservingness, shame and unlovability
- lack of healthy pleasure, play and movement
- habitual thought patterns that drive self-destructive behavior
Not only does the biology of stress itself trigger all manner of illness, including both fat storage and wasting (getting too thin), but it also leads to daily dietary choices that will either give us more or less of what we want.
That said, on the dietary end, we really want sugars and starches to enter our bloodstream slowly and gently, and for that fuel to last for hours, not minutes. This will actually keep you from eating more than you need and allow your body to use glucose (blood sugar) for fuel instead of storing it as fat, which is what, more or less, happens when more sugar enters your blood than you can burn or metabolize at the time of ingestion.
On the other hand, if you starve your body of carbohydrates too much, it will stress out and go into famine fat storage mode. Again, this is about balance and noticing how you feel when you eat, and for hours and days after you eat.
Also, keep in mind that if you want your body to burn stored fat, besides all the psychological, emotional and body image shifts we address in our Closing Your Nurture Gap Online Course modules, you need to strike a balance of:
1) keeping your blood sugar balanced, so neither giving your body an excess of sugars (more than you can use in the next couple hours), nor starving yourself of complex carbohydrates and other nutrients you need for that slow burn stable blood sugar
2) doing your best to not trigger insulin in excess or chronically via toxic stress (note: you would die without insulin so it’s not bad, but too much can kill you slowly).
This also builds your primal limbic system’s trust that you will have your needs met regularly so that it can chill out and stop triggering stress hormones. This will also prevent inflammatory cascades, which lead to chronic inflammation, which, as you have learned by now, leads to chronic disease.
Remember, this is not about carbs and insulin being “bad” or “good.” It’s about balance, balance, balance. This requires wisdom, listening to your body and nurture nurture nurture!
In order to have a healthy metabolism, we want balanced blood sugar and insulin via slowing down carbohydrate absorption, which we can do with eating:
- almost exclusively high vibe carbs
- MOSTLY complex, nutritious carbohydrates, like root veggies and pumpkins, nuts and seeds (if tolerated)
- FEW simple sugars, even the “good” ones like gluten free grain based flours, raw local honey, coconut sugar and maple syrup
- moderate sweet fruits, legumes and grains (if tolerated), which are somewhere in between
- appropriate serving sizes (varies person to person and with different foods depending on how fast or slow, simple or complex)
- in balance with high vibe proteins, fats and non-starchy veggies
Now, hopefully it makes more sense why we encourage you to eat mostly ultra low glycemic slow carbs in the form of non-starchy veggies, but you also need some of the faster carbs in moderation. And, yes, you can enjoy some high quality faster carbs, like that raw local unfiltered honey. Just be a love to yourself and do so sparingly and in balance.
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