Confused about the role of carbs in weight loss? I don’t blame ya!
What if I could clear that up for you in 5 minutes in the clearest way possible and make it an enjoyable read?
Curious?
Give me 5 minutes and see if I live up to the promise.
Carbs & Weight Loss
There are a lot of people who just don’t have any carb-sensitivity. That’s why you’ll always know that person who can eat a lot of carbohydrate and remain lean.
However, some people just aren’t that lucky.
We need to look at what regulates our fat tissue. This is primarily the role of insulin. And what is determining the levels of insulin in the body? Predominantly it’s the carbohydrate in our diets.
If you have higher insulin levels than normal, it has the following 2 undesirable consequences:
(1) It stores MORE of your incoming calories AS FAT instead of supplying energy to your body’s cells
(2) It doesn’t let that fat back out again very easily i.e. it’s more likely to STAY stored.
Remember that our fat cells are like balloons. As they ‘inflate’ you get fatter. You aren’t actually creating new fat cells, just making your existing ones bigger.
If carb-sensitive person A and non-carb-sensitive person B both eat 2500 calories, person A will get fatter than person B because more of that energy went to storage. Also, person A won’t have as much energy as person B because person B’s cells had access to all of that energy, whereas person A didn’t.
I was trying to think of a way to explain this in a diagram to make it as easy as possible to understand. I thought of the analogy of a water butt that people use for irrigation in their garden. Check it out…
The above non-carb-sensitive person’s weight remains roughly the same over time as calories in = calories out. Now let’s look at the other side of the coin…
More of what is coming in is going into storage for this person. If this storage tank could expand, as our fat cells can, then slowly over time it would get bigger and bigger.
In humans, however, it’s worse – we get hungry! Since all the energy taken in isn’t reaching our cells to be metabolized (it’s shunted into storage) the body perceives less food and a hunger signal is sent out earlier than it would be for a regular, non carb-sensitive person.
There’s only so long a person can feel hungry before they have to eat again. Such a person can have a positive energy balance (calories in > calories out) even when they’re eating what is supposedly maintenance calories. But such a person is also more likely to overconsume to compensate for their higher hunger levels. It becomes a vicious cycle.
If you’ve ever wondered, “How can that big person be so hungry all the time?” – now you know. You can also see why they tend to yo-yo diet with low-calorie, high carb plans like weight watchers. These type of plans are doomed to failure for this type of person.
So it matters very much what HAPPENS to the calories we eat, not just the AMOUNT of calories we eat. The metabolic pathway our calories actually takes depends on where those calories come from. Each macronutrient has different effects on the body. The caloric or energy value itself doesn’t tell you much. Protein and carbohydrate both have 4 Calories per gram, but have different effects on the body. Alcohol has 7 Calories per gram, but we wouldn’t say it’s healthier than fat because fat contains 9 Calories per gram.
This is all summed up quite nicely in the FatHead movie. Here’s a clip…
“The end user of the food that we eat is our individual cells. It doesn’t matter if it goes in our mouth. If it doesn’t get to those cells, we starve at the cellular level.”
So what happens? You get hungry again sooner than a regular person would. You then eat more, and more often.
So what does this mean for weight loss? Such people do extremely well on lower-carb diets. The first thing that happens is that their hunger normalizes – they just don’t get hungry as often as they used to because the food they eat reaches the intended target.
As appetite normalizes, fat from the fat cells is also more free to come out to be used for energy. Remember that this is a food source too; an additional source of calories for the body. The need therefore for food intake reduces accordingly. The cells of the body are getting all the energy they need from the combined sources of food and stored body fat.
This produces the result of weight loss that actually feels quite effortless. For the first time they are losing weight with less hunger and have more energy. This might seem miraculous, but there’s really no magic involved here. Just biology.
If you are naturally thin – good. But just note that this might not always be the case. An overconsumption of carbohydrate may produce an environment where the cells become insulin resistant. My personal opinion is that sugar is specifically the main culprit here. For naturally thin people, starches and grains are probably going to be fine. But do watch your sugar consumption.
So…how did I do?
Did I live up to the promise? Does this explain the role of carbohydrate in weight loss and weight gain? Was it easy to understand? I hope so. Let me know below….
Your bud,
Mark McManus
Yes you did 🙂
Yes, but it took me 10 minutes lol
This is a fantastic read! Thanks
Great Article, I try explaining this to people all the time and they look at me like im crazy. I’ll direct them to this link for a more in depth explanation. Thanks Mark
Mark — this article was right on time. Today marks Day 1 of a fully committed attempt at TSPA. I will let you know how it goes. Thanks.
I was fortunate enough to be one of those people who could eat whatever they wanted and never gained weight. Not as much as an adult but still pretty good. My son, unfortunately, isn’t and seems to pack on weight while not eating excessively. Does this concept work the same for children? If so can you recommend some good low carb, high protein snacks he may like.
Thanks for all the great advice and simple explanations.
Yet more support for why I need to get my butt into gear and try to follow your diet plan as well as your gym routine!! I must admit, I am able to follow your workout routines pretty well, and am happy with the results on my muscles, but my fat levels are not changing all that much, and that is all on me, I do not have a good diet. Honestly it takes more effort to move my diet in the right direction than it does to get the exercise routine down. I guess I find it hard to know where to start, but I must try, and this article is yet more motivation to push me in the right direction. Thank you Mark, you are slowly getting me there, which is more than anyone else has been able to do!
It’s OK, but we have to remember that some carbs have different Glicemic Levels, with variable stimulation of the insuline peak.
Great article, Mark, keep ’em up. Your understanding of insulin and carbs is scientifically informed, in contrast to lots of other writers on this topic. No broscience here!
Thank u!I am a carb sensitive guy.Your article really makes sense.I’ve cut sugar from my diet.But can complex carbs be taken in moderation?
Great read hope this hammers it home, but like Ivan said Glycaemic level and load plays a role to, that why Glad diet is a great mass building diet to follow.
Can the body store fat… without eating fat? Meaning, I understand that the creation of triglycerides requires a glycerol molecule. But what if someone just at carbs & protein, but absolutely NO FAT… would their fat cells still get bigger?
I guess what I’m asking is, can the body create “fatty acids” to be bound together from carbs & protein?
Does that make sense?
Great article, dude! Thanks!
Great article. One question, how do you determine if you are carb sensitive?
Big fan of your work, Mark. Another very good read!
Yes you did! Way to go Mark!
Spot on Mark!! Low carbs/high fat/moderate protein. The shifting of carb metabolism to fat metabolism can take between 1 and 3 weeks so people during this time feel sluggish and irritable due to the addictive nature of sugar. So keep at it folks, it does get easier.
@Ken G. Yes, unless you develop insulin resistance later in life, then this is something some people are born with i.e. being genetically predisposed to getting fat. I don’t, however, give diet advice to children. I’m just not comfortable doing that. There are plenty of recipes on this site and elsewhere though. Hope that helps.
@vaishakh. It’s not so much about complex carbs but rather their glycemic load. In this article I have a great list of acceptable carbs…
https://musclehack.com/the-new-bodybuilding-diet-glad/
Apart from that, take little to no sugar. The occasional treat is ok, but moderate it.
@newyorkcitymale. Yes you can certainly get fat without consuming a single gram of fat. Excess carbohydrate gets converted and stored as body fat.
@dem374. You’ll know if you’re someone who adds fat easily in comparison to the amount of food you eat. If you eat a regular maintenance level diet and don’t add fat, you’re ok. You often hear women especially say that they get fat just looking at sweets and so on. If they are really getting fat and honestly not overconsuming, then this is likely the issue. Basically, if you’re already quite lean or average body fat and you don’t have to try hard to keep it there, you have no carb-sensitivity.
Explained perfectly. You nailed it. Thank You!
Hey Mark, it seems to me that the carbohydrate sensitive person in your example still got fat directly as a result of overeating. If both A and B used the 2500 calories in a given day, and they ate 2500 calories worth of carbs, and only carbs, wouldn’t maintain their fat, neither gain nor lose any fat? The only difference would be that A would feel a lot hungrier and a lot less energetic during the day, because his fat cells are hogging all the energy and his cells aren’t taking in the glucose. A would have a much harder time maintaining his weight, but assuming he could ignore his urges to eat over his daily expenditure of calories, would he still gain weight?
@Albert. Person A isn’t overeating in a caloric sense. They have an abnormality which means more of their energy is stored and therefore unavailable. If they switched to a diet that controlled their blood sugar (and therefore insulin), whether it be low-carb or low GL, they could eat the same 2500 without adding fat. Plus they would be more energetic and have lower hunger levels.
If they reduce their caloric intake but still ate a high-carb diet, yes they would probably start to lose weight, but the hunger levels would be so high it would be just unsustainsble.
Strictly speaking, if anyone with this problem could ignore their hunger and low energy levels, yes they can maintain their weight. But that’s a struggle every day for the rest of their lives. Why not have the same amount of food on one of the above diets and maintain it with relative ease? Plus there’s the issue of health. Such a person is a candidate for metabolic syndrome if they keep eating this way. So it would be the best choice for them to eat in a way that lowers blood sugar.
thank you so much bro 🙂
Hi Mark I’m confused. Research I have read states that insulin sensitivity is a good thing as it means lower levels of insulin are required as it is more efficient and glycogen will be better absorbed into muscles and used for energy rather than converted and stored as fat. It’s insulin resistance that leads to health problems? This is the other way round to how you have it?
@Matt. I’m using the term “carb-sensitive” to describe a situation where there is insulin resistance i.e. they’re producing too much insulin, this is bad. Don’t get this confused with the term “insulin sensitive”, which would be a good thing i.e. the cells haven’t become resistant to insulin.
Thank you,that was perfect and useful.