Knowing Why We Cut Carbs

There are a lot of good reasons to control your carbohydrate intake. Weight loss, managing diabetes, improving energy levels and mood rank high among reasons that we look to reduce the number of high carb foods we eat.

Here are five areas to start with to reduce carbohydrates in your diet:

1. Breads. Yes, sadly, most bread is high in carbs.
2. Pastas. Tragic isn’t it?
3. Sweets. This is a given. Anything high in sugar is high in carbs.
4. Fruits. Although natural sugars are always better than table sugar, they’re still high in carbs and have to be limited.
5. Starchy vegetables like potatoes and corn.

Will choosing whole grains be better for a low-carb lifestyle? Well, on the front of things, yes. The less fooled around with a grain is, the longer it takes for our body to digest it and that means it has less of an impact on the levels of sugar in our blood. If it is your goal to avoid spikes in blood sugar levels, you’ll want to choose specially made low carb bread with high fiber content.

Cutting carbs across the board will result in an unsatisfying and highly restrictive diet that most find difficult to adhere to. It’s more fruitful in the long term to learn more about how our bodies respond to different foods based on the ‘glycemic index’. This involves taking a look at how quickly our bodies can turn a food into sugar.

If a food is quickly digested and turned into sugar it has a higher glycemic index than another food that digests slowly, putting low steady amounts of sugar into the blood stream. Some foods are so hard to digest that they create little or no sugar for the body to deal with.

We used to think that it was as simple as separating the simple carbohydrates from the complex but now with the glycemic index, we can look deeper and make even smarter choices. There are many books on the subject available at your local library or you can do a web search on the term to learn more right now.

Healthy Eating