Healthy Dieting

`Why, for so many years,’ I hear you ask, ‘have I been told that too much sugar and carbohydrates make you fat?’ This is a reasonable question, given the huge proliferation of fad diets over the last few decades.

There are two answers. First, in years gone by, foods were not considered interesting enough to warrant in-depth research, so many diets involved plain guess-work. Second, those responsibl_e for formulating traditional calorie-cutting diets noticed that people who ate a lot of carbohydrates got fatter. It was thus quite logical to assume that carbohydrates were the culprits.

Now we know that they are not. It’s the fats that are served alongside the innocent carbohydrates that are the real villains. Here are some common examples:

• Bread is eaten with butter, margarine, peanut butter or pate.
• Cereal is served with full-cream milk.

• Rice is served swimming in fatty sauces. Think of a curry sauce, which can contain lamb fat, ghee, coconut cream, butter and oil. To add insult to injury, we add a few deep-fried poppadoms!
• Pasta ‘just isn’t pasta’ without a coating of olive oil, pesto, cheeses, mince fried in oil, cream, smoked salmon or Italian sausage.
• Baked potatoes are smothered in sour cream or butter.
• Potato salad is served with lashings of mayonnaise.

• Roast potatoes are cooked in oil, or in fat dripping from the roast.

Cakes are crammed with butter, then topped with a butter cream icing or whipped cream.

It’s the accompanying fats that are to blame for fat gain, not the carbohydrates themselves!

Fat-free eating need not involve steaming things or grilling them with lemon juice. If you have a puritan palate, then by all means cook like this, but I would feel as though I were on a ‘diet‘. Remember, this is a lifestyle plan. The flavour of your food is very, very important!

Sugar builds muscle and revs metabolism

Let me introduce you now to another important perk of eating carbohydrates. When we eat large quantities of foods with a high glycaemic index (such as breads, cane sugar, honey, baked potatoes, and so on) there is a constant pushing of sugars into the muscles. The aerobics instructors (muscle fibres) burn off the energy by maintaining muscle tone, and they also produce heat.

After a while, however, the aerobics instructors get a little tired of having to shoulder this heavy workload on their own, so they hire more instructors. In other words, because there is so much sugar being pushed into the muscles by insulin, the muscle decides that it needs more fibres in order to cope with the workload. How do the muscles go about employing more staff? They reach into the blood, catch a few passing bits of protein from last night’s kingklip meal, and make more muscle so that there are more instructors (muscle fibres) to put to work.

It’s as simple as that. The more sugars you ingest, the greater the demand on your muscles to use it up, and the more urgent the need for your muscle to increase its mass.

Imagine that you have eaten a vast quantity of carbohydrates (without fat) for the past few weeks. Your muscles get denser, and they are kept busy day and night ‘twitching’ away in an effort to use up the extra sugars. What happens to your metabolism? It increases! Let me put it a different way: if you eat lots of carbohydrates (sugars), you will build muscle. The more muscle you have, the more energy per day your body will use maintaining muscle tone. The more energy you use, the faster your capacity for ‘burning’ nutrients will become.

In a nutshell, the simplest way to speed up your metabolism is to increase your muscle density, and the fastest way to do that is to eat more sugars.

This may seem like heresy at first, especially if you were reared on the notion that protein stimulates muscle building. Protein is certainly needed for building muscle, but it only becomes muscle tissue when it is ‘asked’ to do so — by the muscle itself! Why does the muscle ‘ask’? Because it has so much ‘work’ to do that it needs extra staff — in other words, extra muscle fibres.

You can stuff yourself with protein all day long, but this will not increase the density of your muscles unless they actually ‘ask’ for it. And they will only ‘ask’ for it for two reasons: if you are exercising frequently, and/or if there is an abundance of sugar that needs to be burned off.

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