Carbohydrates: Weight Loss Friend or Foe?

Carbohydrates are a group of nutrients made up of sugar and get a pretty bad rap when it comes to weight loss. But are they really the biggest culprit in sabotaging your journey to lose weight?

This post is part of Breakaway Limit’s Ultimate Weight Loss Guide.

Simple Carbohydrates: Enemy of Weight Loss

Simple carbohydrates might be the worst offender in terms of weight gain. This group of carbs consist of one-molecule sugars (monosaccharides) or two-molecule sugar (disaccharides).

Monosaccharides consist of sugars like glucose (the body’s primary source of energy) and fructose (sugar found in fruits).

They rapidly enter your bloodstream directly from your digestive tract, resulting in a low satiety index (ability to satisfy hunger), overeating and weight gain.

Disaccharides (such as sucrose, or white sugar) need to break down into monosaccharides before entering your bloodstream. A rapid chemical reaction called hydrolysis, only requires water to break down sucrose into glucose and fructose.

As far as you’re concerned, both monosaccharides and disaccharides end up in your bloodstream quickly and cause weight gain.

This is why experts claim you can lose 15 pounds in one year simply by avoiding sugary drinks.

How Excess Sugar Leads to Weight Gain

Sugar leads to weight gain due to how your body interacts with it, not because it’s higher in calories than fat or protein.

In general, simple carbohydrates break down and enter your bloodstream easily. As a result, your body expends little to no energy in order to turn it into fuel, resulting in a high net energy gain.

Remember that burning energy is the equivalent of losing weight in Weight Loss Basics.

Now, what happens in your body after the sugar enters your bloodstream?

A spike in your blood sugar levels tell your pancreas to release insulin, a hormone that tells your body to store sugar.

Sugar is primarily stored in the form of glycogen, an extensive network of glucose.

A higher blood sugar leads to higher insulin levels, increasing the rate at which your body stores sugar. Eventually this can lead to a crash, which increases your fatigue and hunger and possibly leading to additional weight gain.

However, the muscle and liver, which store glycogen, have a limited amount of space. As a result, any extra glucose converts into triglycerides, a form of fat!

Simple Carbohydrate Alternatives

Due to the negative effects of sugar, artificial/low-calorie sweeteners are being used as alternatives.

Normally, you’d think that your sugar-free soda or adding your artificial sweetener to a coffee may keep diabetes and weight gain at bay.

But in reality, sugar-free sweeteners can actually be WORSE for you than regular sugar.

Sugar itself is already highly addictive[1]. When you have a taste of something sweet, your brain releases the reward hormone, dopamine. It encourages you to consume more of it.

In addition, eating also releases dopamine [2] because your body is getting fed. It rewards eating because it’s a survival mechanism.

The problem with artificial sweeteners is that they are far more potent than sugar in terms of “sweetness” with the added “benefit” of no calories.

The higher potency of sweetness leads to sugar tolerance, which increases the threshold in order to activate the release of dopamine.

Meanwhile, consuming no calories also inhibits dopamine release, because your body doesn’t want you to eat things that don’t provide any nutritional value.

Unfortunately, this is actually a recipe for disaster!

Now, not only will you crave sweeter foods, you’ll also want more food after consuming artificial sweeteners. Studies have actually found that consuming artificial sweeteners increases hunger levels [3] .

In fact, additional studies linked artificial sweeteners to obesity [4] , the very problem they were trying to correct.

Carbohydrates’ Role in Weight Loss

Now you may be thinking “Wow, carbohydrates SUCK. Should I just give them up altogether and start a keto diet?”

This is a common conclusion that people come to, which leads them to fad diets. But not all carbohydrates are created equal.

So far we’ve only been dealing with simple carbohydrates, where there are one or two sugar molecules involved. They make it seem as if ALL carbs must be avoided at all costs, which simply isn’t true.

Let’s get into more beneficial carbs, the complex carbohydrates.

The more complex the carbohydrate, the longer it takes to break down and enter your bloodstream.

And since it sits in your stomach, it won’t be absorbed as fast as regular sugar, allowing you to feel full longer. This means it ranks high in satiety index and is therefore better for you.

In fact, there are even carbohydrates that can’t even be absorbed, but promote your gut health too.

The Best Carbohydrate for Weight Loss

What if I told you that there was a carb that would help you lose weight? You may have heard of it, but it usually doesn’t get as much attention as the fad diets going around.

Not only does it keep you full longer, but can help lower cholesterol (which is usually high in overweight individuals), improve gut health (which is usually poor in overweight individuals), and help regulate satiety (which is usually…never mind, you get the idea).

What’s even more amazing is that you can’t actually absorb or break it down, which means it contains ZERO calories. Wow, sounds like I’m pitching a magic pill product now, doesn’t it?

Well, rest assured, because chances are that you already get some of this from your normal diet.

So what’s this magical supercarb (yes, I made that word up just now) that’s going to help you lose weight? It’s fiber!

Fiber’s Benefits

Fiber is an essential part of the human diet and has numerous health benefits.

There are two forms of fiber: soluble and insoluble.

Soluble fiber is a oligosaccharide, a carbohydrate containing about 3-10 sugar molecules. Even though they contain sugars, our body doesn’t have the necessary enzymes to break it down.

At first, soluble fiber sounds pretty useless. It practically just sits in our gut, waiting to be passed along.

But the reality is that it binds to sugar and cholesterol, which slow and/or inhibit their absorption. This is why eating an apple won’t increase your blood sugar as much as drinking straight apple juice.

In addition, both soluble and insoluble fiber increase satiety (just by sitting there), which gives a feeling of fullness. Curbing hunger is extremely valuable in any weight loss strategy.

What’s more is that fiber is also responsible for feeding the bacteria in your gut (called the gut flora) that help you turn regular foods into vitamins and aid with digestion.

In fact, studies have shown obese individuals have an unhealthy gut flora linked to lower fiber intake. This makes fiber even more indispensable to a healthy weight loss routine.

Unless you want consume fecal pill from a healthy “donor” (yes, it’s as gross as it sounds and very real), start increasing your fiber intake to improve your gut health.

You can find fiber in many vegetables, beans, and fruits. To get the most out of your fiber, pair it with foods that contain probiotics that consume the fiber. Examples include yogurt, sauerkraut, miso, kimchi, kefir, and natto.