Why Low Carb is Not a Long-term Solution

Low carb is not a long-term solution to weight loss or blood sugar. In this episode Brianna dive's into the "why" behind this. 

**Disclaimer** We are not your dietitian. This info is for education only. If you would like to receive personalized nutrition guidance please speak with a dietitian personally. 

If you have questions, or topics that you want to hear about, head over to our Instagrams https://www.instagram.com/bayleethedietitian/ or https://www.instagram.com/brianna.dietitian/ and send us a DM! You can also follow the podcast https://www.instagram.com/mocktailminutes/

Featured Mocktails: 

Liquid Death 

Click play, sip back, and be empowered.

Transcript

Brianna: 0:22

Hello everyone and welcome back to this week's episode of Mocktail Minutes. This is Brianna coming to you guys solo this week. Bailey is sick, um, with whatever terrible flu is going around, which is so bad right now. Um, so I'll be just hanging out with you guys this week. I am doing a liquid death, but I'm doing one of the sparkling energy drinks. I didn't know that they had an energy. Like drink option, but it's the orange horror. It's pretty good. Um, it's relatively low in caffeine in terms of like energy drinks, so it's like a mild one, but it has some athe in it, some vitamins. I like it. Um, I don't really love energy drinks, but for some reason I seem to be doing a lot of these, these ones lately. But this one's pretty good. So this week I'm gonna be talking to you guys about why low carb diets are not a long-term solution for blood sugar. So this is really common. You are diagnosed with either pre-diabetes or insulin resistance or diabetes, or you're like, I'm trying to lose weight. I'm, I wanna manage my blood sugar. The first thing that you're going to do is you're going to cut carbs. Carbs are always the enemy, and everybody's in every person's mind of like, why your blood sugar's outta whack, why you can't lose weight. All the things. And here's the thing, it's not that that. Isn't correct. Right? Because it is true that we do overeat carbs, especially like simple carbs, especially in the form of like added sugar. So while you may need to cut out certain types of carbs, eating a low carb diet is not a long-term solution for blood sugar management because you're not really treating the issue. Okay. So. In order to have long-term blood sugar balance, you need to improve how well your body handles carbs. So how insulin sensitive it is, how much muscle glucose uptake there is your liver regulation. All these things, and avoiding carbs may work in the short term, you may see, my labs got better right away. You know, I felt better, all this stuff, but long-term it is really hard for people to adhere to it. That's just the reality. So you're going to be restricting something that is served at most meals. You're going to be restricting something that is served largely at events and holidays and vacations and all the things, and you're gonna probably have that all or nothing thinking that increases, like that rebound eating or like that last supper mentality of like, oh, I don't eat carbs, but today I am. And you just. Kind of go off the wall. And the issue with that is you can hurt your carb tolerance or you can make yourself more carb intolerant. So our bodies are like Goldilocks. We like things consistently. And if you're going from eating extremely low carb and then you have a meal that's like 150 grams of carbs. Your body isn't gonna do a very good job at utilizing those carbs and regulating your blood sugar. It's gonna have a much harder time with it. This is why we see people who maybe are initially in the pre-diabetic range, they'll go on keto and they'll get blood work done, and it's like, woo, you're great, like gold star from your doctor. We love it. And you kind of go back to eating a little bit more lenient, and then you come back and your A1C is higher than it was when you first did keto. And it's like, what the heck happened? What the heck happened is you jumped back into carbs too quickly and your body did not know how to tolerate them. So. You want to be really working on how well my body is utilizing carbs. And for some people doing low carb, short term might be the right thing for them, but it's definitely not long term. One of the main reasons, aside from making your carb tolerance worse, is losing out on high fiber foods. There is fiber in like nuts and seeds and stuff like that, but it is in carb containing foods, and this is very helpful long-term for health. So this is where your vitamins and your minerals and your fiber is. We know. Fiber improves insulin sensitivity. We also know people are not getting enough fiber, so cutting that out is probably going to do more harm than good. In fact, it is gonna do more harm than good, especially because you're missing out on micronutrients now, like potassium, magnesium, things that aid in insulin signaling. So. If you're eating very low carb and I would say very low carb, there's lots of different definitions for like, what is low carb? Very low carb, all this. Typically, when I'm thinking very low carb, I'm thinking 25 to 50 grams of carbs a day. Very typical, like keto diet, that sort of thing. Carnivore is even lower that you'll see. One banana is gonna be your max amount of carbs for the day, right? So you're not eating a ton of fruit. You're probably not eating any, you're not eating beans, you're not eating whole grains, you're not eating all the things that is going to help your gut health help your insulin signaling. You're just taking it away because you're looking at the short term of, oh, carbs are bad. It raises my blood sugar. If I take it out, I will be well. The other thing that it does is it can increase stress. And I know this is talked about a lot and a lot of people are like, okay, you don't need to be, be as scared of cortisol as it's been made to seem. And yeah, true. But chronic restriction does increase stress on the body and it can worsen sleep. It's gonna worsen your glucose control. Okay? So we don't want our bodies being overly stressed. We know that this happens with like too much calorie restriction and definitely too low of carb intake. So. What I recommend instead is really looking at your carb amount per meal, right? Am I eating a balanced meal, still having carbs that has enough carbs, are not overdoing it? Am I eating a meal that has a hundred grams of carbs in it and 20 grams of protein? Not very balanced. I'd say we can work on that and a lot of times just tweaking what you're having at a meal. Greatly improve, improves your blood sugar. Like there's no reason to completely cut these carbs out.

6:55

The other thing that ends up happening is when you cut carbs out, one of your other macros has to go up, and typically the macro. That goes up is fat because you're gonna be hungry, you're not gonna have a lot of energy, you're gonna need fat. And the problem with this is that can actually worsen insulin resistance. So healthy fats are totally fine. These aren't really what I'm talking about. It's more so your saturated fat intake, because these can block. Muscle and liver insulin signaling. So a lot of times we're increasing fat. It's usually saturated, saturated fat'cause you're hungry and this is blocking insulin signaling. It's also causing inflammation and metabolic stress and it stresses out your mitochondria. And essentially you start to do more damage than good. So this can overall worsen. Insulin resistance. It can also worsen liver fat, which again, we've had a couple of episodes on, you know, liver fat and how it just kind of revs up metabolic dysfunction. So yes, you're cutting out carbs and you need to feel hungry, and so you increase fat. And I'm like, let's be completely honest. Not all of it is from healthy fat. So. This is another reason why you can't just cut out a major portion of your intake and think it's gonna be all good because there's only so much protein you can eat. So then you're relying on fat.

Brianna: 8:35

The other thing that you have to think about is carbs are very. Helpful for our thyroid. So it helps the conversion of T four to T to T three and your body and your metabolism and how you, your body listens to nutrients and uses you nutrients and stores nutrients is very dependent on your thyroid health. So going to low carb is going to essentially make your metabolism worse over time. You are not doing yourself much good. I, I have all these like weird rabbit holes that I go down in my head. Right? And just because I see it doesn't mean that it's fact. But the majority of women that have been. Dieting for a very long time all have underactive thyroid. And then what I see is they have insulin resistance, and then ultimately they're struggling with blood sugar balance. And it's like, well, what do I do now? I I, I already don't eat carbs, so do I. How do I cut them out? I don't really eat them. It's this long term of not supporting your body in the way that it needs to, and eventually downstream it's gonna be a real big issue. So thinking I need carbs. Especially fiber rich carbs to fuel my thyroid to keep everything happy. So it's definitely a bigger picture than what's just happening right now. Your job is to improve your metabolism, improve your insulin sensitivity, and it is hard to do that. Without carbs, especially long term. So really the best for blood sugar goals is gonna be something like a moderate carb, high fiber, high protein balanced diet. And when I say moderate carb, again, they're, these ranges are very specific, technically right now, if you were to do like traditional macros or you just look at like what percentage of your calories needs to be coming from carbs, traditionally it is 45 to 65% of your overall daily cal calories. Should be coming from carbs. So that's a very large amount of carbs. I truly don't think people need that many. I mean, realistically, most of us are not elite athletes. Most of us are sedentary for work. Most of us have just a normal workout routine, maybe don't even have a workout routine. You do not need 45 to 60% of your overall daily calories coming from carbs. So moderate carb. Again, this is loose and it's a range, but it's about technically 130 grams of carbs to 225 grams of carbs, or 26 to 45% of your overall calories. I will say 26 is also low. You do need to increase it. A lot of women's sweet spot is 40 to 45%. Granted, this is such a blanket statement. You need to be working with someone that can help, really give you tailored advice based on all of your history and your current intake and your labs and, and what's going on. But moderate carb. Is usually more helpful. Very low carb. Again, no even low carb is more like 50 to 130 grams of carbs a day. It's still not enough. You are not fueling optimally and you're not giving your body what it needs to effectively work. And again, we are thinking long term here, so. Increasing your carbs strategically is very helpful. There are people that I work with that we need to slowly increase carbs. I would never work with someone knowing that they've been eating 50 grams of carbs a day and be like, okay, tomorrow we're eating one 50. I'm not, that's not strategic. I'm not gonna do that. So if you have been. Eating low carb or very low carb, or even on the lower end of moderate carb, and you're having issues with like thyroid and blood sugar and energy, and you're stuck not feeling good when you train, et cetera. This is your sign to, I think I need to increase carbs, which is scary. Again, 99% of the people I work with are undereating carbs. They are never overeating. Such a small percent is, and we are dealing with like very, very. Dramatic ends of the spectrum, right? Where it's like someone is, again, getting 60% of their calories is coming from carbs, and then 10% is coming from carbs. Working on not. Doing the short-sighted part of things and saying long-term right? Our body, so many parts are moving at the same time and they all talk to each other. The goal is to have a well-functioning thyroid. Your body is doing a great job at listening to insulin signaling, and you have overall balanced blood sugar while eating the. Most amount of calories and carbohydrates that you can. The goal is not to just be surviving on the lowest that you can and, and get by. The goal is to be utilizing the top amount of calories and carbohydrates that your body needs and utilizing them well. So if you have questions about that or you feel like you do need guidance, as always. You can reach out to Baylor and I, we both work with people like this every single day. So you can send us a DM over at mocktail minutes. You can DM us both separately. Whatever it is, we can help you out. So hopefully the, this was a short and sweet kind of direct. I feel like I get so off track when Bailey's not here to reign me in, but hopefully this was a short and sweet. Reasoning behind why very low carb and low carb diets are not your long-term solution for blood sugar. Alright, I hope you guys enjoyed this as always, we'll be back next week with a brand new episode. Bye.