Carbohydrates – The Bread of Life

No pun intended.  Carbohydrates are indeed one of the basic structures of life.  Without them we seem to become unable to hold ourselves together, literally.  Ask any athlete or Body builder what happens when they go into a low-carb cycle: our cells lose volume as we seem to lose our ability to hold onto water in our basic cellular structures.  The result is a rapid loss of weight with a “shredding” effect on and around any muscle tissue, the downside is that if you don’t consume enough calories during these cycles there is also a potential loss of muscle tissue.

Last week was a recovery week, which was welcomed because I was starting to feel some aches and pains.  I decided to do a low-carb cycle since the workouts get less intense during the recovery week.  The drop was dramatic (compared to a normal week), I got down as far as 192 lbs. and sure enough the body lost all sorts of filler and looks great — of course it will last only for a short time as the cells grab onto water again and settle back up to a reasonable level.

Carbs

When talking about carbs it’s always good to remind ourselves that there is a very significant difference between the simple carbs (or simple sugars) and complex carbs.  Simple sugars come in the way of our refined foods such as refined flour, refined sugar, Krispy Kreme and all those tasty goodies we seem to get easily addicted to.  In fact, it’s pretty tough to find anything out there that hasn’t been enhanced with some sort of simple carb or another for taste.  We find it in the corn batter for the corn dog, we find it in the hot dog itself even the ketchup — heck it’s probably in the stick for the corn dog!   You find that doing an Atkins-type diet for individuals like me, who seem to absorb carbohydrates through inhalation, that you can’t walk past the candy aisle without getting some simple sugar absorption.

There are also differences between the simple sugars, so simple sugars from raw fruits and vegetables differ from simple sugars from processed foods; when doing low-carb cycles I like to come off by doing what I call a sugar reset and I do this by coming off the low-carb cycle onto a heavy diet of just fruits and veggies at least for 80% of the day’s meals.  It seems that when I do that, as I re-introduce the carbos back into the normal diet that the weight doesn’t seem to come back pouring on; as opposed to when I come off low-carb cycles immediately to a normal diet, when the weight seems to come on almost with 2 or 3 days to the exact point it was prior to the cycle.  I love “You on a Diet” … it’s on of my favorite references and guidebooks and Dr. Oz as well as other books I’ve read over the years are of the opinion that we do have a metabolic thermostat, that once set it’s hard to reset.  My theory is that a low-carb cycle followed by a fruit/veggie reset seems to lower that thermostat and allows me to set my thermostat lower than when I started the cycle.  I apologize if this is obvious and already documented, it just shows that my time is limited right now so my apologies for not searching this further, I promise I will.

Complex Carbs

Moving on to the complex carb picture.  Once I get off the full cycle I re-introduce carbs by focusing on complex carbs and keeping to the veggies and fruits for the simpler carbs.  For now I’m avoiding any refined sugar, so no candy, pop, doughnuts, etc.  which I suppose should be avoided anyways, but they seem to make their way in especially during the holidays around my family.  Who can resist the apple and pumpkin pie?!  And bread, oh my goodness!  I love bread and pasta — so I switch to whole wheat and watch to make sure these are not refined flours being used.  For the most part I avoid bread anyway ’cause it’s hard for me to stop at one piece … so don’t put a piece of fresh-baked sourdough in front of me.  My normal diet is made up of oatmeal in the mornings, wheat-based pasta or breads if I have any … but it’s really tough to stay away from the corn.  I have a habit of cooking all my meals from scratch, which makes it easier to get the right ingredients — but an active professional life takes me all over the world with some amazing dishes that many times are just impossible to resist.

When we look at the chemistry of carbohydrates it’s hard to imagine that our bodies care .  They seem so similar.  I get reminded that this is the nature of living: small differences are everything.  This is the way with dieting, exercising or successful investing — it’s the little things that seem to make the biggest difference.  Something so simple such as developing the discipline to think differently about food — and how about — just making a habit of thinking before we eat.  Really … How many of us think about what we’re about to put in our mouths?  At all?  I don’t mean thinking about the pleasure we’ll derive, about how hungry we are, or how good something will taste — I’m talking about thinking things such as:

• Is this good for me?
• Do I really need this?
• Will I feel better after I consume it?

Wait … is this a questionnaire about food, or about over spending?  Isn’t that the point?  There’s no real difference — when we actually take time to think about what we eat, or about what we buy, or even about what we say.  Perhaps fitness and health is more about us getting lazy not about the right stuff, but about thinking about it.  We just don’t take the time to think about what we’re doing long enough to evaluate the true value it brings into our life.

I’m starting to sound like a seminar speaker.  I’m jazzed that my weight sank down to 192.2 this morning.  I suspect you’ll find me closer to 195 by the time next week comes along — but here’s the kicker.  By Thursday last week, as the carbs had been depleted from the body stores I wasn’t able to keep the workouts at any level of sufficient intensity.  Sufficient for me.  Remember my goal is fitness, not so much light weight.  Friday dragged, even when I took some energy boosters — the muscles just didn’t have enough food available to carry out their job long enough.  Which is great if you’re going for weight-loss.  It was amazing to feel the change when my body detected carbs coming back in — it was instantaneous.  Just two days of normal diet with supplements and the muscles feel amazing.

I can take the shirt off and suck it in and actually look good .  That’s a big boost — no matter how much I sucked it in when I started I couldn’t make it look good without a distortion mirror — a big one.  So measurement-wise, almost 2 inches off the midsection.  The waist continues to baffle me — it holds steady at 37 inches, but all my pants are fitting loosely, and my belts are a notch or two from where I started.  Maybe the biggest problem was the gut pushing down onto the waist putting.

Thanks to Maria for pointing out that I wasn’t categorizing the posts –

C’ya next week.