Episode 63: Let's Stop with the War on Carbs

Transcript

can we stop with the war on carbs please carbohydrates first of all before i go in
any of this if you're someone with a medical condition where you have a hard time processing
carbohydrates i'm not talking about you like you gotta do what's right for you know your health
and your medical status like i this is not about that this is about sort of just this general
consensus and what's often pointed to is that this is very paralleled to how there was sort of a war
on fat in the 80s and 90s there's this general sort of societal thing it seems where people just
believe that carbohydrates are just inherently bad in some way and should be cut out of diet
this is not good advice and ironically at least ironically in my point of view
a lot of the people who seem to push this you know people who want to do keto or whatever
again not from a medical perspective just from a you can handle carbs fine but choose not to
and think that they're bad in some way it's ironic because a lot of the people pushing this message
forward seem to be people who care about their nutrition often have some sort of athletic
activity in their life and those are the types of people who probably would benefit from carbohydrates
the most so let me back up and talk for a second about macronutrients so if you're unfamiliar
macronutrients there there are three main ones and a fourth the three main ones are what you would
see in the back of a nutrition label you have fats carbs and protein the fourth is alcohol which
we'll talk about in a second but let's just talk about the the main three of those three two of them
are considered required or are required i shouldn't say are considered required two of them are necessity
you need proteins and fats carbohydrates are more optional i suppose if you don't have carbs if you had
you know very few or zero carbs um throughout the course of a day week month but you were getting
plenty of protein and fat your body wouldn't shut down whereas if you go for too prolonged of a period
of time without fats or protein at some point you will die so it's a it's a non-essential
mac and macronutrient but it is still a macronutrient i think and i think well first of all and that's
where sort of like a keto diet can function right because if you tried to do keto but instead of
cutting carbs out you cut out like protein or something that wouldn't work so in theory you can
have or not even in theory in practice you can have a diet that cuts out carbs and it's fine that doesn't
mean it's better for you and if your body is fine at processing carbohydrates there are a lot of
benefits to making sure that they are a staple in your diet and in your nutrition plan i'll talk
about my experience for a second first here so for years now i've been doing sort of bulking and
cutting cycles when i first went to kind of correct my nutrition years ago and put it on a better path
there were certain things that i started to reduce and really pay attention to if they were on the back
of a nutrition label i i would look for things that were as high in protein as possible with as little
in particular added sugar as possible and with low fats in proportion to protein so that meant that a
lot of what i was eating was lean meats um and it cuts certain things out of my diet like i didn't
you know eat a lot of cereals and stuff because there tends to be a lot of added sugar there and sort of
in that process not entirely intentionally just by doing that by cutting you know down on sugar and
fats what happened to me was that i really did end up in a fairly low carb diet not keto low right but
just lower than i could be having right and what i found eventually after tracking some nutrition
stuff was that i was definitely way over on protein most of the time like i was having
way more protein than necessary and my carbs were really the thing that were pretty low on any given day
so you can talk about this from a few different perspectives right i'll talk about sort of weight
lifting bodybuilding sort of stuff there is some there is some wisdom i think particularly toward the end
of a hard cut if you're trying to cut weight where reducing carbs makes sense and increasing your
protein to like kind of crazy high degrees protein is the hardest macronutrient for your body to convert
into fat cells fat is the easiest and carbs are somewhere in the middle so when you're cutting weight
it makes sense to kind of cut back on the the non-essential macronutrient and really ramp up the one
that will be very difficult for your body to turn into fat protein um and that's where you end up
with these crazy diets that are like you know whatever eight ounces of chicken and broccoli and that's it
right with a little bit of olive oil so you're getting kind of your essential fats and it's almost all
protein and then your body in those cases is forced to kind of use that extra protein for energy as
opposed to using you know carbohydrates or whatever else so there's some wisdom in that um however if
you are in sort of a maintenance phase or and i would argue a bulking phase the thing to really ramp up
so let's talk about bulking for a second if you're going to add a bunch of weight the best the the way
you're going to get the best results in the gym is by adding a bunch of carbs into your diet because
there's a couple reasons one piece is that adding any additional protein past a certain point
your body's not going to do much with that in a surplus having 300 grams of protein compared to
200 grams of protein while you're on a bulk isn't really going to do much for you what will do a lot
for you is if you have the energy in the gym to push yourself as hard as physically and mentally
possible and what's going to help give you that kind of explosive athletic energy is gonna be some
carbs some extra carbs in your diet carbohydrates are an excellent source of sort of of expendable
energy so having those in your body is a really good idea if you're trying to bulk efficiently
because you can burn that for energy you it will spare your body from trying to convert a bunch of
protein into that energy be way more efficient you will feel way better and if you keep up with it day
after day after day your energy level will be much higher in general so if you are bulking or even
maintaining your body weight filling in some of that extra calorie a good chunk of those extra
calories compared to cutting with carbs is going to make you feel and perform better the other thing
that carbs are do and this is i think part of where they get a bad rap if you cut carbs out of your
diet you're going to lose a bunch of weight that's true but it's not fat it's because carbs
store a certain amount of water so if you've carbs floating around in your body they are storing a
certain amount of water which kind of indirectly helps you stay hydrated and helps keep some extra
water in things like your muscles for instance all of which again is great for training great for
weightlifting great for whatever other types of training you might be doing again if you're trying
to cut fat there is some argument to be made where if you reduce your carbs and you can still keep
your physical level of activity high you'll probably burn some fat more efficiently because your body will
need to use some of that stored you know stored energy essentially and from from fat in your body to fuel that
training but if you're not trying to cut weight and and you're just walking around you're going to feel
and perform again much better and be generally a bit more hydrated and yeah you might weigh a little
extra but that's not fat and when most people talk about weight loss what they really want is fat loss
and and quickly you know the reason i think some of these crash you know no carb diets seem so great
in the surface is because you follow it for a week or two it's like oh my god i just dropped you know
10-15 pounds yeah in water mostly and glycogen so again the main couple things i wanted to mention here
the things that i've bumped into and the things that i have been doing in in my training and my
workout and my nutrition is i have been intentionally sometimes because for years i you know if i was going
for that extra snack for the day i might go grab you know maybe i'm maybe i've already had 180 200 grams
of protein i might go i might you know in past years go and snack on more yogurt or chicken or like
something with that's high protein that then would push me up into like the 250 range but i would get
into some of my workouts and i just noticed over the years like man i'm bulking but my my energy level
is not where i feel it should be on a bulk and and after i you know experimenting a little bit more
and tracking some things and realizing that my carbs were just too low intentionally working more carbs
into my diet and again not just a bunch of sugar but like decent carbs energy level way better
performance way better day you know day-to-day hour-to-hour feeling way more energetic
and in terms of like leanness and physical appearance no issues just to close out here
i just did a the smallest little bit of research because the two big things that i had bumped into
along the way were a carbs hold water and therefore are sort of an indirect form of helping keep someone
hydrated and be um you know carbs obviously being a great source of expendable energy for training purposes and
athletic purposes stuff like that but i did a quick look just to see what other benefits of carbohydrates
really are around and i'm just going to rattle a couple of these off just to kind of reinforce the point
that there's some great stuff here and if you're just cutting carbs because like you think that's better
for weight loss or something or better in general i i would do a little more research and take a look at this
so here's just a couple things that i came across again for the athletes enhanced recovery carbs are great
for helping you recover especially like if you think about your weight lifting and breaking your body
down all the time increasing your carb intake will help you recover faster and better better brain
function the brain is fueled largely on things that come from carbs so better cognitive ability better
focus protein sparing now this is something that i mentioned a little bit in this episode but
if all you're doing is eating protein and fat your body needs to use those things for energy so it will
actually use some of the protein you're taking in to help build muscle and instead it will reroute that
to enter to using it for energy so if you're supposed to be taking in say 180 grams of protein
and you take in 180 grams of protein but you don't have enough carbs in your body for the energy it needs
that means that your body is going to use some of that 180 grams of protein for things that you're
not intending it to be used for by increasing your carbohydrates your body will use that for energy
instead and your protein can actually be used for what protein is good at which is helping to
synthesize you know muscle essentially
and finally again unless there are abnormalities carbs are very good for helping to balance hormones
across your body which again helps for things like training and focus and day-to-day feeling good
and so on and so forth and i believe there are many others those are just the ones that i kind of
stumbled upon kind of easily so if if this sounds at all familiar you know i would really suggest
taking a look at what your level of carbohydrates are do try to avoid a bunch of things that on the
label say added sugar but outside of that try to take in some more carbs if you're feeling a little
low on energy if you're feeling a little low on focus if in the gym you're not quite there and you
think you should be able to do more this war on carbs needs to stop it's very irrational and and
there are so many benefits to try to take in more just in my kind of somewhat short time of trying to
amp this up i've noticed tremendous improvements and you know i would challenge anyone to really
take the research and find truly compelling reasons that these that that carbs should be so low on the on
totem pole