Why The Low-Carb Diet Works

Why The Low-Carb Diet Works

Eating carbohydrates will help our body release insulin into our blood stream. The insulin tells your cells what to do. It tells most cells to absorb the sugar out of the blood and tells your fat cells not to release any fat to be burned, since there are carbs already on the blood to burn.

One of the insulin’s jobs is to take sugar out of the blood, as soon as possible, because sugar in our blood damages our body. This is why diabetics have such bad health problems – blindness, circulation problems, etc. Those are the effects of the damage done by sugar when the person can’t make enough insulin.

When you eat something high with sugar, our body will seem to panic and usually overdo it. Too much insulin released can mop up the sugar. It takes all the sugar out of your blood. Then your blood sugar will become low, so you crave more sweets. So basically, insulin keeps that sugar from damaging our body, however, in the process, it makes our body store fat and prevents us from burning it.

A low-carb diet, like the Atkins or South Beach Diet all vary in how much to limit carbs, but the rough average is thirty carbs a day. At that level, you don’t put very much insulin to our body system, and our body burns any fat we eat as fuel, and if you need more, your fat cells freely release fat towards your blood stream so to burn it as fuel.

When you eat foods rich in carbs – a hundred grams, two hundred grams, or more – the body releases many insulin, making it almost impossible to burn fat. On the other hand, it makes it really easy to gain weight, too. This is why people lose weight so easily and quickly when they cut on carbs. In a nutshell, carbs increase insulin, which leads to storing fat and preventing it from being burned.

Two other ways of dealing with this problem are to eat less and exercise more. Weight Watchers and other groups are built around limiting calories. Another way is to eat very low fat. Then when insulin are released, there isn’t much fat around to store, and if you eat little enough, your fat cells have to release fat so you can survive.

People obviously can lose weight this way. But it is difficult. It requires discipline. As anyone knows who has tried simply limiting calories or eating very little fat, it is very difficult to sustain it. You can do it for a while, but then you can’t stand it any more and you eat a lot.

You lose weight only temporarily because you can’t keep it up for any length of time without a lot of support or self-discipline. It’s too hard to sustain. And whatever you do to lose weight should be sustainable or you’ll just gain it right back.