Don’t Get Killed By Carbs!

Don’t Get Killed By Carbs! – The best nutritional advice you’ll ever hear
As I write this article, it is 5am on a Saturday morning and I’m eating one of my favourite healthy high carbohydrate meals – a tip I stole off legendary Ronnie Coleman! – porridge cooked with egg whites and a bit of cheese. It tastes so good! But why am I up so early, and on a Saturday of all days?! Well I guess that’s just the way my body clock works now unfortunately, with me having to get up so early throughout the week to train and go to work.

The main topic of this article was inspired by an unfortunate experience that actually happened to me a few weeks ago. At that point in time in dieting, I was eating a single carbohydrate meal a week (that’s right, no carbs at all during the week except for the one meal!), so I wanted to make every effort to make that meal as amazing as possible to fully savour and enjoy it! I decided I wanted Pizza Hut. I was very strategic in that rather than phone up and order my pizza, I opted to go to an actual Pizza Hut restaurant to place my order. I knew it would take 15 to 20 minutes for them to get me the order which was perfect, as I then proceeded to down 2 and a half huge bowls from their Ice Cream Factory.

Feeling quite happy with myself, the guy brings me my pizza, which just so you know was a large stuffed-crust, half Margareta with BBQ sauce and half vegetable supreme. I take the pizza home and then continue to scoff that down too – oh yeah, I eat the whole thing! This is where it gets bad.

I didn’t eat the pizza particularly quickly to be honest, in fact it probably took me close to an hour as I had to take rests in between. I put this down to my stomach being so small from only ever eating very small meal portions compared to this monster of a dish! And this I’m sure was a contributing factor to why I felt so bloated afterwards. However, after finishing that sucker off, I began to feel dizzy, my heart rate and pulse were racing, my hands started to shake, and next thing I know I’m using the toilet seat as a pillow as the whole of my 10 quid or whatever came right back up!

So what the hell happened? One answer is that eating carbohydrates, especially high GI (Glycaemic Index) carbs like pizza, release feel good hormones, endorphins, in the brain. This meant that I was on a sugar high, was feeling great, and even though my body had had enough I didn’t want to come away from this feeling! Like some kind of junkie, I wanted more and more and more! But the more technical answer is that ‘hyperglycaemia’ happened, which is when there is too much sugar in your blood than your body needs or can process at a single time. By being so prudent on my carbohydrate intake for a prolonged period of time, my body had become so insulin sensitive that I could no longer process large amounts of fast digesting (high GI) carbohydrates at one time, so my body had no other option but to reject it as quickly as possible.

A very sad experience, I know! But this brings me to the jist of the article – what about the average Joe? What about ‘normal’ people and their carbohydrate intake and insulin levels? Well listen carefully now, because what I’m going to tell you is possibly the most important nutritional advice you’ll ever hear.

I don’t know who you are reading this right now, but the chances are that you are taking in way more carbohydrates than your body needs, and that you are doing this daily. To put it this way, all carbohydrates you consume get transformed into sugar. The body only ever needs roughly a maximum of one teaspoon of sugar in the blood at any given time. Think about how much sugar you are bombarding your body with! And it’s not just through taking in sugar itself, e.g. drinking a can of Coke, but through eating refined and processed High Glycaemic carbohydrates that are also immediately transformed into sugar, e.g. white bread, French Baguette, white rice, cereals, or fruit. Yes, that’s correct, fruit is packed with sugar. People make the mistake of overloading on fruit because it’s ‘the healthier option’. A bit of fruit is good for you, but keep in mind that it is still unprocessed sugars you are putting into your body!

Attempting to answer the question of why you eat so much sugar? Quite simply, because it is in so many different types of food – just check the ingredients, so no wonder we’re all hooked on the stuff! In fact, it could be a conspiracy of some sort, because it is even in baby food and small things like Ketchup! By continuously ‘spiking’ our sugar levels throughout the duration of the day, we are getting that short-lived ‘high’ I described when eating my pizza, and then spend the rest of the day continuing to take in more sugary foods in an attempt to re-gain that feeling! We are all junkies to sugar!

So what are the repercussions of this overload of sugar in the body? Firstly, the carbohydrates that your body doesn’t need for energy (which for the majority of you is most of them!) get transferred and stored as body fat. Secondly, down the line there is a chance that you will suffer from cardiovascular disease and or Type II Diabetes. Ever find it odd that there is now a growing diabetes epidemic in the modern world to accompany the obesity issue? That’s the reason.

So with all of this doom and gloom about what not to eat (just so you know, the speaker at one of the nutritional lectures I attended was quoted as saying that the average slice of white bread has 6 teaspoons of sugar in it, and that there is in fact more nutritional goodness in the cardboard box Corn Flakes come in than the Corn Flakes themselves!), what on the other hand can you eat? I recommend that you monitor your carbohydrate intake cautiously, so that the carbohydrates you do eat are slower digesting low GI ones, and are therefore not so readily turned into sugar. This will prevent the possibility of you developing diabetes or cardiovascular disease, will keep you energised for longer throughout the day, and will keep you feeling fuller hunger-wise. Examples of these carbs are brown or multigrain/ wholegrain pasta, rice, bread, etc. Eat these types of carbohydrates in moderation. To keep yourself feeling full, increase your intake of fibrous vegetables, e.g. green beans.

Truth be told, it is not your fault that you eat too many carbohydrates, or too much of the wrong type of carbohydrates. There is a lot of ‘misinformation’ regarding the topic, and most people don’t know any better. I myself, when I played hockey, used to always eat loads of white pasta a few hours beforehand, but looking back now it would make more sense to eat the slower digesting carbohydrates mentioned above, as by the time it got to game time those carbohydrates would have been long digested and used (although it must be noted that there is the argument that in this case, the carbs would be temporarily stored in the muscles to then be used during the game).

Additionally, make sure you’re getting a sufficient amount of good fats in your diet. ‘Fats?’ you might ask. ‘But eating fat will make me fat, won’t it?’ Wrong! But fats in themselves are a whole other topic, and I could probably write a whole article just on that! In fact, maybe I will. Until next time.

Train hard and take care.

Dan Marashi
Personal Trainer & Nutritionist
JW Training Athlete