Is There a Good Carb Out There?

This is the email question of the day.   I started out writing this article thinking that if I explained the way the body used carbohydrates you would understand how America is being brainwashed by the ATKINS CRAZY LOW CARB MANIA. I thought I just helped people understand low fat doesn’t mean low calorie. I even called my son, who is working on his Masters at A&M in mechanical engineering, to help me find the right words to explain to you all about carbohydrates.  So here is the bottom line. It is not about carbohydrates, or fats or even Krispy Kreme Donuts.  If you take in more food than your body can use as fuel, then your body will store it as fat...period.  I don’t care if you ate butter all day, your body would first find a way to use it as energy, which by the way is not it’s natural choice, and if your body needed more energy than the butter supplied, it would turn to it’s reserves...your stored up fat. Hey, maybe I should start the Eat Butter and Krispy Krème Donuts Diet.  I would make a lot of money taking advantage of desperate and unhappy people, which is just what is happening today. There are a lot of “so called” experts, doctors, and etc. making a bunch of money taking advantage of you.  Educate yourselves about how the body works and if you have too much stored up fat, here is the simple math equation to lose it...

TOO MUCH FOOD AND NOT ENOUGH MOVEMENT = TOO FAT

 The body will use any type of food you put into it for fuel, but it works more efficiently with the right foods. This is how the Adkins diet works.  It forces the body chemically to start using protein and fat as it’s main fuel source and trust me the body doesn’t like it one bit.  Have you ever looked at a person who has been on the Atkins Diet, they have a gray pallor; complain of no energy and are very cranky.  That is because this way of eating is forcing the body chemically do something that it was not designed to do. The body was designed to use carbohydrates, as it’s main fuel source.  Proteins are the rebuilding blocks of our cells and we need fats to process certain important vitamins among other functions.  Every kind of food we eat has its purpose.  If we change the purpose of protein from rebuilding to fuel source, then what takes up the job up rebuilding our cells? When we start altering nature, people start becoming sick and developing diseases that would have normally not occurred. 

People do lose weight on these types of fad diets, but at the risk of serious side affects.  Surely you have heard in the news about the final medical records of Dr.Atkins.   He died with clogged arteries, a history of cardiovascular disease and was considered obese.  That is not surprising to me; it may have been because of all that saturated fat, ya think?

Trust me now, you can lose weight on any of these crazy fad diets if the calorie count is low enough (Atkins is a low calorie diet), but how long is your body going to hold up? Well, you can buy a new liver, heart, or kidney, if you do not die before you find a donor.  Organs are big business these days.  Why do you think that is?

Maybe because we are wearing out the bodies we have been given by not consuming the right foods for proper function.  Next Tuesday, I will again publish the “Stick to the Basics” eating plan.  This is not a fad, but a list of foods that simply work the best at keeping your body at a healthy weight, naturally.  More importantly, it is the foods that make you feel really good and energetic or like my clients little 3-year boy puts it... “Makes your body say YEA!”