Bri­an Chin Le­ung

You prob­a­bly know some peo­ple who work out every day in the gym, yet their physiques are a far cry from be­ing de­scribed as stun­ning. Most times the prob­lem lies not with their ex­er­cise rou­tine, but with their nu­tri­tion­al in­take. Eat­ing for health and fit­ness is such a de­bat­able top­ic among ex­perts that some views are in to­tal con­tra­dic­tion. As a re­sult, it some­times leaves the av­er­age per­son to­tal­ly con­fused with unan­swered ques­tions such as, "Do I eat meat or no meat? Do I eat carbs or no carbs?"

The veg­e­tar­i­an lifestyle

If you know what you are do­ing, then the veg­e­tar­i­an di­et would prob­a­bly be the per­fect di­et. How­ev­er, many veg­e­tar­i­ans don't re­al­ly have a clue as to prop­er food com­bi­na­tions. For ex­am­ple, if you ask the av­er­age ve­g­an how he sources his pro­tein, he will prob­a­bly tell you he eats nuts. Sad­ly, this would be con­sid­ered an in­com­plete pro­tein; this means that nuts (cashews, al­monds etc) by them­selves, do not con­tain the eight es­sen­tial amino acids. To get the eight es­sen­tial amino acids, you will have to com­bine e.g. legumes + nuts = com­plete pro­tein or green veg­eta­bles + grains = com­plete pro­tein. To ben­e­fit from a true veg­e­tar­i­an lifestyle, you must have full knowl­edge of var­i­ous food com­bi­na­tions that would give you the com­plete amino acid pro­file.

No carb di­ets or se­lec­tive carb di­ets?

Try­ing to elim­i­nate car­bo­hy­drates to­tal­ly from your di­et is not a good idea. Grant­ed, you do see dra­mat­ic weight loss from a no carb di­et, in my opin­ion this may have dam­ag­ing long term ef­fects and is an un­safe prac­tice. I be­lieve rather than go­ing for no-carb eat­ing, you should use an ap­proach of se­lec­tive car­bo­hy­drate in­take. Think about this head­line-Sug­ar Is The En­e­my. Ob­vi­ous­ly this would mean that you are go­ing to avoid all prod­ucts that may con­tain re­fined sug­ar, but it goes a bit fur­ther than that.

That head­line could al­so re­fer to ab­nor­mal vari­ances in blood sug­ar lev­els. If you eat the wrong type of foods, you could ex­pe­ri­ence a quick spike in your blood sug­ar lev­els. This in turn could trig­ger an in­sulin rush, which could en­cour­age body fat stor­age.

When a lot of in­sulin is cir­cu­lat­ing you can al­so ex­pe­ri­ence a pen­du­lum ef­fect where­by your blood sug­ar drops from be­ing too high to be­ing too low. In oth­er words you go from hy­per­glycemic to hy­po­glycemic, and this may in fact in­crease feel­ings of hunger. The so­lu­tion to the above prob­lem would be to avoid foods that quick­ly spike your blood sug­ar. Not all carbs cause that quick rise in blood sug­ar. There are what I re­fer to as "good carbs" which do not spike blood sug­ar lev­els and "bad carbs" which quick­ly spike blood sug­ar lev­els. As a gen­er­al rule, the more un­processed carbs car­ry a high­er fiber con­tent and take longer to be di­gest­ed, there­by avoid­ing blood sug­ar spikes. For ex­am­ple, brown rice is bet­ter for you from that per­spec­tive than white rice, which is more re­fined.

The Glycemic In­dex (GI) is a use­ful list that helps you to iden­ti­fy carbs that quick­ly spike blood sug­ar lev­els. These carbs would usu­al­ly have a high GI rat­ing. For ex­am­ple, white flour and white sug­ar both car­ry scary rat­ings of 100 and are at the top of the chart. The low­er the GI carb rat­ing the bet­ter it is for you (though it is not an ex­act sci­ence) eg sweet pota­to car­ries a much low­er rat­ing than white bread.

Keep Train­ing.