Hmmmm…. Are carbs really as evil as many people think they are?
When I first started my quest for fitness, I went on a calorie-restricted diet. I didn’t pay much attention to what the calories were — fat, carb, protein, I didn’t care. I only wanted to stay under a certain number of calories daily. I lost 50 pounds that way.
Of course, once I went off that diet — I don’t know about you, but I can’t keep that up forever — I regained a few pounds. 15, to be exact.
I was doing a whole lot of walking during that time, and I added in some pushups and crunches to try to get more into shape. My weight was staying pretty even, but I wanted to lose excess fat. Problem is, I didn’t really want to diet, because I know that I just can’t stay on diets of any kind. No diet? Lose weight? I figured more exercise is what I needed.
Enter P90X.
When I got my P90XÂ package, I read through all the literature that came with it, including the diet plan, along with a proclamation that reshaping my body was really mostly a matter of diet, not exercise. Exercise helps get a body more fit, adds muscle, and, yes, does burn calories, I read, but it just doesn’t burn as many calories as we think. We need to control our diets to lose fat.
This makes sense, I just had never thought about it that way. I can illustrate with a conversation I had with my neighbor just this morning.
I asked him this morning, when we were discussing his eating and exercise habits (after he complained about not being able to lose his gut), “How many miles do you need to go to run off a bowl of ice cream?” A cup and a half of regular vanilla ice cream is around 400 calories. Premium stuff like Ben & Jerry’s and Godiva raise that to about 700 calories.
You burn about 100 calories per mile, so you’ll need to run 4 miles to burn off that cheap ice cream or 7 miles to burn off the good stuff. And that’s just the ice cream. Wasn’t that a quarter-pounder with cheese, a large fries, and a large soft drink for dinner? That’s 1300 more calories.
1700 to 2000 calories. That is all the energy you need for a full day, and that was just one meal. Can you run 17 to 20 miles every day?
Why do we consume that many calories! That stuff tastes good! But why does it taste so good?
Sugar.
If you were to try to eat that ice cream without the sugar in it, how much do you think you’d eat? Have you tried drinking heavy cream straight? Not that tasty.
As for the meal before the ice cream, the large soda is the big offender, so good only because of the sugar. I drink sparkling water, and it’s not that easy to guzzle that stuff. But if you give me Coke? I can go through a few in no time.
There are carbs in the burger’s bun and potatoes the fries are made from, too, of course, but not so much sugar, so let’s focus on not the sugar itself.
Why can I drink so much soda? Sugar.
Why can I eat so much ice cream — and believe me, I never stopped at the 1.5 cups in the example above, unless that’s all I had on hand? Sugar.
Therein, I think, lies the key to controlling our diets. Lose the sugar. Sugar — in whatever form, whether it’s pure cane sugar, or high fructose corn syrup, or whatever — just tastes so good and therefore makes it too easy to consume too many calories.
Fats and proteins, on the other hand, make it much more difficult to overconsume.
When I started P90X, I dedicated myself to the provided diet plan, which required me to get 50% of my calories from protein, 30% from carbs, and 20% from fat. I had never eaten like that before! I’d been on low-carb diets, but not high-protein diets. And you know what? It was hard to get enough protein calories.
Do you know how much white fish I needed to consume to get half of my calories from protein each day? Almost 3 pounds (for 1000 protein calories of a 2000-calorie diet). That’s a lot of fish. Or about the same amount of boneless, skinless chicken breast. Or I could eat 7 turkey burgers (without the bun), although that would put me over my fat limit.
That’s when I started using protein shakes to supplement my meals, just to ensure I’d get enough protein.
Now, you could probably make the same argument about fat that I’m making about sugar. Yes, you can consume a lot of fat in one sitting. A fatty piece of meat usually tastes better than a lean one. Butter sure does make things taste better.
I don’t think it’s quite the same for me. I don’t tend to eat that much fat, anyway, so quitting sweets, removing everything from my diet that is created solely to provide sweetness — things like cakes, cookies, cinnamon rolls — seemed more sensible. You may be different.
Back to the original question: Are carbs evil? No. But for me, sugar may very well be. It just makes foods taste so good. So I avoid it.
How about you? Is sugar pushing your calorie count over the top?