Simple Carbs — Simple Choice
First Wave Energy Reduction
Once people move beyond their growing years, which varies for each of us, somewhere between 18 and 25 years of age — our bodies need less food because we aren’t growing any more.
Even though we may have been the sort of person that kept using a lot of energy after that point — for sport or just being on the go, full of life and energy: talking, laughing, doing, dancing, rushing about — the fact we stopped growing created an indisputable reduction in our need for food.
If an adjustment was not made at that point, increased weight is the result, often accompanied by misconceptions about the cause of that increase, including myths about metabolism dysfunction, hereditary propensity to gain weight, thyroid issues, and others.
Not recognizing the underlying cause lays the groundwork for all sorts of misunderstandings and errors.
Second Wave Energy Reduction
This second occurrence of the body changing its need for energy can occur anytime after 40 years of age. Many people view it as a linked to ‘aging’ or retirement. It is generally understood to be the result of age-related changes in the body, a reduced need for energy, like the reduced need for sleep in some older people.
With this second reduction in energy use, there is often a resulting weight gain. Perhaps slow and subtle, but reported by many as relentless, inexorable, and, for some, conceded in the end, to be beyond their control.
This is can be an unhappy placed to be: stuck, frustrated, powerless.
All sorts of remedies have been tried, to shift the weight, to stop the mysterious weight gain and in reaching the point where they give up, again, many reasons and myths are put forward as to the cause: metabolism dysfunction, hereditary propensity to gain weight, thyroid issues, aging and others.
For many the obvious solution of reducing food/calorie/kilojoule intake doesn’t work either because:
· they don’t feel able to accept what seems like such a huge reduction in the quality of food they would have to settle for at meals and on a daily basis
· they happen to genuinely be one of the few people with a significant health issue affecting their weight
· they have not looked at the other component of the quantity and quality of the food they are eating.
Food Quality
Reducing food intake by reducing the quantity of food being eating is an obvious thing to do for weight maintenance, weight reduction and to improve health — unless you are one of the few people at the lower end of your ideal weight category.
Reducing foods of higher calorie/kilojoule content is another smart way to aid weight control. Obviously, if trying to control or reduce weight typical sugar foods are to be avoided: candy, sweets, lollies, chocolate bars, sweet biscuits, desserts of all types.
But when other methods have been tried and proven to be insufficient, it’s time to look at simple carbohydrates of all sorts: not just traditional sugar foods.
Simple carbohydrates include all refined carbohydrates: foods made with refined flour. This means all breads, doughs, cakes, pastries, pasta, gnocchi, ravioli, dumplings, flat breads, the pastry casings for dim sims, rolls, lasagne veg/sausage rolls— you get the point.
Because these foods are made from refined carbohydrate products, they have already been broken down into simpler carbohydrate form and when we eat them, they enter the body, the bloodstream essentially as the simplest form — sugars.
As sugars, these hit the body and act in the body just like you were eating sugar:
· your glycogen level rises, giving you an energy high and then in response to insulin deployment, an energy low,
· rather than getting sustained and ‘calm’ energy
· once you have the insulin-induced low, your appetite gage is undermined and you get that driving hunger — mostly mistake for ‘real’ or a natural hunger indicator –
· this driving hunger is largely impossible to resist and so more eating occurs
· and so over-eating is established.
Depending on how much of the simple carb foods a person eats will determine how much extra food they eat each day and so how much extra weight they gain and carry.
The solution to the food quality issue, is to markedly reduce simple carbohydrates in your daily meals and snacks.
There are two parts to improving the quality of your food intake:
· base each meal and snack on your three main options: proteins, vegetables/fruit, carbohydrates.
· Increase the protein and vegetable/fruit portions of your meals and snacks
· Decrease the carbohydrate portion of your meals and snacks, especially and significantly the simple carbohydrate portion.
As an individual you will need to experiment with the portion sizes.
You will need to read the carbohydrate levels on the size of some products, to figure out if you are counting them as protein or carbs: for example, lentils.
But most significantly, if you can switch your food intake from being high on the carbs to low on the carbs, replacing that with the other foods options (you don’t want to starve yourself or that will throw you into a high/low glycogen cycle blowing out your appetite control) then you will straight off experience that stabilizing, calming effect on your appetite gage and hunger.
If you don’t, look for hidden simple carbs and sugar in what you are eating AND drinking.
So, happy eating and here’s to a calm and stable appetite that give you the capacity to ease of the quantity of it all.
