If you want to lose weight, the first place to start is to look at your diet, more specifically, your carbohydrate intake. Your carbohydrate intake can make or break your weight loss results. Carbohydrates can be divided into 2 basic types: simple and complex. You’ve probably heard these terms before, but many people don’t know what they mean.
Carbohydrates are a good source of fuel for your body, we need them for exercise. Lack of fuel from our body can lead to low energy, illness, and low mood. Excess fuel, on the other hand, can lead to increased body fat and health problems!
Carbohydrates fall on the GI scale, a scale of 1 to 100 that is a measure of how quickly your body digests carbohydrates. Complex carbohydrates have a low GI number, simple carbohydrates have a high GI number.
Examples of low GI carbohydrates:
-Oatmeal
– apples
– Integral rice
Examples of High GI Carbohydrates
– White bread
– Cookies, Cake
– White rice
The lower the GI of your food, the less your blood sugar will be affected, and the higher the GI, the more your blood sugar will be affected.
If you eat low GI foods, your body will feed slowly and over time. If you eat high GI foods, your body has to deal with a LOT of fuel at once and if your fuel system (metabolism) can’t handle it, you’ll overload on fuel very easily. Therefore, excess fuel will be stored as grease for later use. The problem is that we never need this spare supply as there is food available!
Getting the right amount of fuel is essential to keeping your metabolism at its highest and a high metabolism = more calories burned at rest!
I encourage you to do some research on the GI of the foods you eat regularly and try to lower the GI of your carbs and ultimately reduce the amount of carbs you eat, particularly if you are overweight!
Any ideas:
– Try to replace white products (white bread, cereals, white rice, etc.) with whole grain products
– Reduce the total amount of carbohydrates you are eating, replacing them with protein or fat.
– Cut back on the amount of carbs you eat after 5pm, unless you’re training hard at night, chances are you won’t use up the fuel!
