Don't hate on carbs
Carbs are the energy your body and mind run on. They are also the one macro most people have demonized the most. Don't hate on carbs.
No food group has taken a beating like this one. Low carb, no carb, keto, cutting out bread, cutting out fruit, cutting out rice, cutting out potatoes because they are a “starch”. Every one of those diet types are rarely beneficial (except in the diabetic cases). Low or no carb diets for the average person are very difficult to maintain.
The biggest thing most people do not know is that CARBS are your greatest performance tool you have access to.
What Carbs Do
Carbs are the fuel for your training and your daily steps.
Working energy
Carbs get stored in your muscles and liver as glycogen. That store is what you pull from for steps, lifting, and everything physical you do in a day. Run it low and you weak and flat in training well before anything good shows up on the scale.
Brain fuel
Your brain runs primarily on glucose. The fog, the short temper, and the trouble focusing that people report in the first week of a low carb diet are not detox symptoms. That is your brain running low on the fuel it needs to function.
Protecting your protein
Your body burns carbs first. When carbs run too low for too long, it starts pulling energy from somewhere else to cover the gap, and muscle is one of the places it pulls from. This is called being catabolic. Keep carbs at a reasonable level and your body doesn't need to go there. That's the anti-catabolic effect, and it's a big part of why the protein you eat stays where you want it instead of getting burned for fuel.
Fiber Is a Huge Benefit During this Weightloss Phase
Fiber is filling, and the reason you need to reach for whole foods.
Two foods can carry the same carbs and the same calories and behave completely differently in your body, and that difference is mostly due to fiber.
Fiber is a carb your body cannot break down. It passes through mostly intact. That slows digestion, keeps your blood sugar steady instead of spiking and crashing, and keeps you full for hours instead of forty minutes.
| Food | Serving | Carbs | Fiber | Calories |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Black beans | 1 cup cooked | 41 g | 15 g | 227 |
| Raspberries | 1 cup | 15 g | 8 g | 64 |
| Oats | 1 cup cooked | 27 g | 4 g | 155 |
| Sweet potato | 1 medium with skin | 26 g | 4 g | 112 |
| Apple | 1 medium | 25 g | 4 g | 95 |
| White rice | 1 cup cooked | 45 g | 1 g | 205 |
| White bread | 2 slices | 26 g | 1 g | 145 |
| Regular soda | 12 oz | 39 g | 0 g | 150 |
Compare the soda and the apple. Nearly the same carbs. The apple keeps you full. The soda does not.
Aim for 25 to 35 grams of fiber a day. Most people are eating less than half that.
Move up to it gradually. Going from 10 grams to 35 overnight brings bloating, gas, and cramping, and you will blame the wrong thing. BUT DRINK YOUR WATER. Fiber without water makes the problem worse, not better. The biggest tool you have to combat bloating is water.
What to Eat
Build your carbs out of food that came with fiber already in it.
You do not need a special list and you do not need to shop anywhere different. These are the staples.
The base of most meals
- Potatoes and sweet potatoes
- Rice
- Oats
- Beans and lentils
- Pasta
- Whole grain bread and tortillas
- Corn, peas, and squash
Potatoes are the most filling carb on this list
If you are in a weight loss phase, potatoes and sweet potatoes should be doing more work than rice. Gram for gram a boiled potato is about two thirds the calories of cooked rice, and boiled potatoes rank at the top of the research on fullness per calorie. Rice is not a problem. It just does less for your hunger than a potato does.
Make potatoes and sweet potatoes your default starch and keep rice and pasta as the exception. Hunger is what ends most weight loss phases early before results are even seen or sustained.
Fruit, every day
Berries, apples, oranges, bananas, whatever actually gets eaten in your house. Whole fruit is fiber, water, and volume, and it is one of the most filling things you can eat for the calories. Raspberries carry 8 grams of fiber for 64 calories, which nothing else on this page comes close to.
Fruit is not sugar you have to earn. Nobody gets fat on fruit, unless their calories are going unchecked.
Vegetables, as much as you want
Broccoli, green beans, peppers, salad greens, cauliflower, zucchini. These barely register on your total calories for the day. They fill the plate, they carry fiber, and they make a smaller portion of everything else feel like a meal. I honestly do not track some vegetables like spinach.
Other good carb sources
- Air popped popcorn, about 90 calories for three cups (watch the butter!)
- Rice cakes
- Any fruit
- Rice based cereal
- Honey (amazing for pre-workout)
Where Carbs Belong in Your Day
Carbs fill most of what is left after protein and fat are set.
Around training
This is the one place timing does anything. Carbs in the few hours before you train give you better workouts, and carbs after help you refill what you used.
Before you train, you want carbs that digest fast and do not sit heavy. Low fiber, low fat, and not much volume. A banana, a rice cake with jam, a piece of white bread, or a small bowl of cereal all work. Save the beans and the broccoli for later in the day.
The whole purpose with carb timing is to help your workout and protect your muscles around your training window. Pre-workout carbs fill your muscles with glycogen, this allows for better output at the gym. The better your output is at the gym, the better your body will be at preserving muscle during a calorie deficit.
Everywhere else
There is no time of day that carbs turn into fat. Eating at night does not do anything on its own. If eating most of your carbs at dinner is what makes your day work, eat them at dinner. BUT try to avoid a lot of carbs before bed so it does not affect your sleep too much.
The Carb Drop Illusion
Cutting carbs drops the scale fast, and almost none of it is fat.
Within a day or two of reducing your carbs, the scale will drop. This is mostly water leaving your body.
Every gram of glycogen your body stores holds roughly three grams of water with it. Cut carbs hard and you burn through that glycogen in a few days, and water goes with it. Five to eight pounds is normal. It happens in under a week and it looks very encouraging to see the scale move.
It is water. Eat carbs again and it comes back in about the same amount of time. People read that as carbs making them fat. It is water going back where it was.
The shaded first eight days are water leaving with your glycogen. The dashed line is the fat loss actually happening underneath, and it never moves that fast.
How to Read a Label
Serving size, total carbohydrate, and fiber. Everything else on a carb label is decoration.
Serving size, then servings per container
Cereal, granola, chips, and crackers are the worst offenders on the shelf. A serving of cereal is often three quarters of a cup, and nobody has ever poured three quarters of a cup of cereal.
Total carbohydrate already includes the fiber and the sugars
Fiber and sugars are listed underneath total carbohydrate as a breakdown of it. Do not add them together. That is the most common mistake people make reading a panel.
Fiber is the number worth reading
On bread, cereal, crackers, or anything made from grain, 3 grams or more per serving is a reasonable bar. Under 1 gram tells you the fiber was processed out.
Added sugars versus total sugars
Total sugars includes what was already in the food, like the sugar in fruit or milk. Added sugars is what got put in during manufacturing. A plain yogurt with 12 grams of total sugar and 0 added is a different food than one with 12 grams of added sugar, even though the front of both containers looks about the same.
Net carbs is not a real number
It does not appear on the nutrition label and the FDA does not define it. Someone subtracted the fiber and the sugar alcohols and printed the result on the front of the box. We track total carbohydrate. Log what the nutrition label says for total carbs.
Whole grain claims live in the ingredient list
Made with whole grain can mean a trace of it. The ingredient list runs in order by weight, so check that a whole grain is the first thing on it. Multigrain, stone ground, and honey wheat mean nothing on their own. Think of the words you see on the front of the box as marketing. Read the nutrition label.
Liquid Carbs, Sauces, and Dressed-Up Coffee
The carbs you drink or pour over food are the easiest ones to lose track of.
Liquid carbs. Soda, juice, sweet tea, sports drinks, energy drinks. They add real calories and return nothing on fullness. A cup of orange juice is 110 calories and no fiber. One whole orange is about 60 calories with 3 grams of fiber, and it takes you five minutes to eat. Cutting liquid carbs is the fastest change you can make and the one you will notice least.
Sauces and dressings. Ketchup, barbecue sauce, teriyaki, honey mustard, sweet chili, most bottled salad dressings. These are mostly sugar and oil, and they get poured rather than measured. Two tablespoons of barbecue sauce runs close to 60 calories, and most people use more than two tablespoons without ever weighing it.
Sugared up coffee drinks. A flavored latte with whole milk, syrup, and whipped cream can run 400 to 600 calories before you have eaten anything. Milk and cream add up fast, syrup pumps are straight sugar, and whipped cream is a topping, not a garnish. Black coffee, or coffee with a splash of milk, is a different drink than the one on the menu board.
What to Do With This
Carbs are the fuel your training and your daily life run on, and they get the largest share of your calories for a reason.
Fill most of that share with food that came with fiber already in it. Keep the rest to a portion you chose on purpose, such as quick digesting carbs for a pre-workout meal.