No Carbs... Someone Please Help Educate Me

Ok so after reading around a bunch on this forum and other websites, as well as watching Fat Head (viewtopic.php?f=8&t=7188), I'm trying to eliminate carbs (except vegetables) as much as possible from my diet.

Here's my understanding:

Starchy or grainy carbohydrates have a very high Glycemic Index and essentially turn into sugar when they get into your blood stream. This is bad because:

1) Your body will produce insulin to help regulate your blood sugar levels. In extreme cases this can produce insulin resistance or diabetes.

2) Your body has a very limit amount of space to store carbs. As such, most of the sugar/carbs are turned into and stored as fat.

3) Carbs can lead to inflamed arteries which leads to heart disease.

I'm not actually fat whatsoever and don't particularly want to lose any weight. I do however want to give my body what it needs and have it working as it should. Also, I do sometimes get "hunger shakes", which have me feeling like I'm borderline diabetic sometimes, which I believe could be due to blood sugar levels. And this is without even eating tons of carbs.

So my thinking is, why not replace all the extra carbs with fat/protein since fat can be used as energy and is also essential for many different bodily organs/functions.

So I've essentially decided to go pseudo-paleo, however have kept milk and yogurt (whole fat) in my diet, as well as nuts. I'm also using fatty meats as opposed to opting for lean meat, and have been eating a lot of beef. So far I feel about the same, although energy may be a bit up, and I haven't had any hunger shakes.

So a couple questions:

1) What do those doing paleo or similar diets eat every day? Do you just eat massive amounts of meat to offset the energy you're missing from the carbs?

2) Why are tubers ok? Are they not essentially carbs? Are they just carbs with lower GI's?

3) I found a list of tubers which includes potatoes, however I thought potatoes were bad due to being too starchy? Which tubers are ok to eat?

4) Is rice ok? From what I've read both brown and white rice have relatively low GI's. I feel like I need some sort of extra energy to have with some meals, and rice is easy.

5) What's the deal with beans and chickpeas?

Also, Slizzardman recommended buckwheat groats as a good breakfast food when I asked a while ago. I'm comparing buckwheat to whole wheat bread now and I notice that it has a higher glycemic load, and it's also considered more inflammatory, and is also largely a carbohydrate. So just curious as to why (if you're reading) you recommended buckwheat groats in particular? Not being critical, honestly just curious.

Any corrections/advice/help is welcome .

I've actually been reading up on all this stuff myself lately, and I've seen many people take Paleo eating in slightly different directions. I'm still busy just reading up on all of them, so I'm not really in a good place to answer your questions. However, perhaps these links might be of use to you if you haven't come across these already:

http://www.gnolls.org/2365/functional-p ... manifesto/ (as well as various other useful posts on the gnolls.org site)

http://perfecthealthdiet.com/?page_id=8 This one permits white rice.

Carbs are not entirely bad in themselves. While a fat based diet is probably healthier you don't want to straight up remove carbs, especially since you're not overweight. As I am sure you know carbs raise insulin levels, and this is not as awful as it's made out to be because insulin is a anabolic hormone, it just becomes a problem when it is constantly being elevated. Unless you eat enough protein to raise insulin, with zero carbs you will have a predominance of glucagon, which while it is fat burning, it also has the potential to be catabolic.

I'm not saying you shouldn't eat mostly fat and protein, I do and love it, but you may not want to 100% cut out carbs.

I'll take a stab at some of your questions. My understanding is based primarily off of information I've gleaned from Mark's Daily Apple and Robb Wolf and a lot of self experimentation.

That said, my perspective will mostly be anecdotal and from a paleo perspective. I've had a lot of luck with it (both high carb and low carb).

mattk said:

So a couple questions:

1) What do those doing paleo or similar diets eat every day? Do you just eat massive amounts of meat to offset the energy you're missing from the carbs?

I eat a lot of omelettes, meats and vegetables. The crock pot is my best friend. I also eat cheese and full fat dairy as it doesn't seem to bother me. Mark Sisson has a good list of recipes to start

mattk said:

2) Why are tubers ok? Are they not essentially carbs? Are they just carbs with lower GI's?

3) I found a list of tubers which includes potatoes, however I thought potatoes were bad due to being too starchy? Which tubers are ok to eat?

4) Is rice ok? From what I've read both brown and white rice have relatively low GI's. I feel like I need some sort of extra energy to have with some meals, and rice is easy.

My understanding is that from a paleo/primal angle is that grains (including rice) contain more anti-nutrients and wreak havoc on the digestive tract, causing/correlating with systemic inflammation. Tubers don't present this problem. As a general note paleo isn't necessarily low carb (or anti carb for that matter), though if you cut out grains it can easily become so. It's perfectly ok to consume starch and potatoes on a paleo diet, depending on your goals and energy needs.

mattk said:

5) What's the deal with beans and chickpeas?

Since they are legumes, they are technically not included in a paleo diet.

Beans contain a lot of lectins which can wreck havoc most places in the body. Also they contain a form of sugar that can feed the bad bacteria in your digestive tract.

You cannot be so simple as saying carbs are either good or bad. I know there has been a lot of fuzz about going low or no carb, but please stop taking it to the extremes. Your first assumtion about extreme intakes of carbs should lead to diabetes, should be of absolutely no concern for the somewhat "normal" living athlete or human. Unless you have diabetes you should start focusing more on the positive aspects of carbs than the negative. Carbs trigger insulin which stores energi in your muscles(very simply put). This energi is very much used to help rebuild your muscle tissue after a workout. If insulin is not triggered you consume more energi from fat or muscles. This means that if you do not consume any carbs around your training you can actually gradually decrease your performance since the body keeps itself in katabolic state and is never able to rebuild your muscle tissue. This is al very simplyfied but my word of advice would be to consume carbs around your strength sessions to help rebuild your muscles and make them stronger. If you need to drop weight you can take advantage of the visdom that if insulin is not triggered then fat is the primary fuel for your muscles and do cardio on either empty stomach or atleast on low-carb days.

To give you my aspect of things, i actually started to lean out when i reintroduced carbs to my diet, around the training window, further more my muscles were not as flat and depleted as before, and performance increased.

Please do care about the type and amount of carbs you consume, but to describe carbs in general as bad is simply wrong!

Beans contain a lot of lectins which can wreck havoc most places in the body. Also they contain a form of sugar that can feed the bad bacteria in your digestive tract.

And which also have been found to correlate with better health in most epidemiological studies.

Epidemiological studies...don't like them.

Most won't when the data is against their wild "theory". I Wonder why...

I think there is typically a little more to consider in such studies than just "better health".

thanners said:

However, perhaps these links might be of use to you if you haven't come across these already:

http://www.gnolls.org/2365/functional-p ... manifesto/ (as well as various other useful posts on the gnolls.org site)

http://perfecthealthdiet.com/?page_id=8 This one permits white rice.

Cool thanks I'm gonna check them out .

Mbern said:

Carbs are not entirely bad in themselves. While a fat based diet is probably healthier you don't want to straight up remove carbs, especially since you're not overweight. As I am sure you know carbs raise insulin levels, and this is not as awful as it's made out to be because insulin is a anabolic hormone, it just becomes a problem when it is constantly being elevated. Unless you eat enough protein to raise insulin, with zero carbs you will have a predominance of glucagon, which while it is fat burning, it also has the potential to be catabolic.

I'm not saying you shouldn't eat mostly fat and protein, I do and love it, but you may not want to 100% cut out carbs.

Well I partly made this post to decide exactly what I'm gonna do. I probably went a bit overboard saying I'm cutting out all carbs completely, lol. I just wanted a bit more information to make a better decision about what diet to go with.

With respect to raising insulin though... is it correct that you want to keep your glycemic load under or around 100 per day? When I look at things like milk, meat and nuts and take into account how much I'd eat for the entire day, the glycemic load would probably reach 100 even without any carbs. So then are carbs really necessary to raise insulin levels?

nbrunskill said:

My understanding is that from a paleo/primal angle is that grains (including rice) contain more anti-nutrients and wreak havoc on the digestive tract, causing/correlating with systemic inflammation. Tubers don't present this problem. As a general note paleo isn't necessarily low carb (or anti carb for that matter), though if you cut out grains it can easily become so. It's perfectly ok to consume starch and potatoes on a paleo diet, depending on your goals and energy needs.

Hmm ok so most carbs aren't in the paleo diet because of anti-nutrients... not because of their effect on blood sugar or fat storage?

q-base said:

You cannot be so simple as saying carbs are either good or bad. I know there has been a lot of fuzz about going low or no carb, but please stop taking it to the extremes.

Yes you're right I took it a little to the extreme. It just kind of blew my mind when I saw that a bowl of corn flakes or grape nuts, which are supposedly healthy, is as bad or worse than drinking a can of coke with respect to raising blood sugar.

q-base said:

Carbs trigger insulin which stores energi in your muscles(very simply put). This energi is very much used to help rebuild your muscle tissue after a workout. If insulin is not triggered you consume more energi from fat or muscles. This means that if you do not consume any carbs around your training you can actually gradually decrease your performance since the body keeps itself in katabolic state and is never able to rebuild your muscle tissue.

Cool thanks for all the info.

mattk said:

nbrunskill said:

My understanding is that from a paleo/primal angle is that grains (including rice) contain more anti-nutrients and wreak havoc on the digestive tract, causing/correlating with systemic inflammation. Tubers don't present this problem. As a general note paleo isn't necessarily low carb (or anti carb for that matter), though if you cut out grains it can easily become so. It's perfectly ok to consume starch and potatoes on a paleo diet, depending on your goals and energy needs.

Hmm ok so most carbs aren't in the paleo diet because of anti-nutrients... not because of their effect on blood sugar or fat storage?

That's right. I'd define "low carb" as a dietary strategy who's main focus is avoiding starchy carbohydrates of any sort because of their effect on blood sugar and fat storage. I'd say "paleo" is a dietary strategy who's main focus is on avoiding foods that came about after industrial agriculture and can be high carb or low carb.

Most up to date information on the topic:

http://www.archevore.com/panu-weblog/20 ... rches.html

Lol! Your body can't function without carbs. It literally can't do it, which is probably why gluconeogenesis(GNG) exists. Even if you don't eat carbs, your body will find a way to make at least 100g per day via GNG even in that case. Your body will tear up dietary protein and turn it into carbs. That's part of why you want carbs with your protein.

The best replicated studies have shown that our bodies are incapable of pulling more than 10% of metabolic energy requirements from bodily protein stores (muscle tissue, red blood cells, skin, etc) at any point in time, meaning no matter what (even in starvation + no carbs) we are running 90% on (GNG-based in this extreme scenario) carbs and mostly body fat, around 70% bodyfat and 20-30% carbs and 0-10% amino acids. Our bodies don't like using amino acids directly, which is why we start switching over to ketone acids/bodies in the absence of carbs (or if you're diabetic and can't metabolize carbs very well due to poorly controlled diabetes).

Basically, your body can't actually burn very much protein for energy directly. It WILL, however, turn it into carbs. That's why it is stupid to not take in at least 20-30% of your calories as carbs. You have to be smart enough to work with the baseline of your body, at the very least. The fat can be cut out almost completely if you want to lose bodyfat easily over short periods (1-3 months at a time, or every other day "dieting") and all you would need to consume is adequate protein and carbs based on your activity level. Do that through proper diet, which is essentially veggies and fruits for carbs (and some sweet potatoes around the workout) and you should be fine. Having more fruit (which is about 50/50 fructose and glucose) in the morning and immediately after an endurance-based exercise session with veggies (which are almost all glucose-based) all other times is a very good strategy for getting all the nutrients you need without excess calories. Your body fat will be substituted for dietary fat almost completely, which is why fat is not actually an essential nutrient. To be smart, however, you should have at least 5g when you take your multivitamin so that fat-soluble vitamins are properly absorbed.

There are tons of other ways to do this, but the successful ones are all variants of manipulating how our bodies actually work. You can't get around that, we are how we are.

Definitely read Bill's link, it is excellent.

That was an interesting link. As well as Slizzardman's post. I can tell you that I pretty much do the opposite (meat and all carbs coming only from fiberous veggies) and feel great. So try both and see which you like. People say all sorts of things about ketosis but I think it rocks personally. 8)

Hey Matt, and anyone else interested,

My friend Scott co-owns Crossfit Portland; he started the gym in 2005, and more than training hundreds of private clients, he's written dozens of articles for the Crossfit Journal and Performance Menu. This weekend he's down in San Diego presenting on mobility and recovery at OPT's "Big Dawg Bash."

Scott has tons of personal and client-based experience with Paleo, no-carb, lo-carb, and intermittent fasting.

(Basically, the guy has a lot of experience.)

He also writes articles for gym members.

The last has been a 3-part series called "Carbs, Curls, and Cardio" that re-examines a lot of the Crossfit community's sacred cows.

Not least because Scott has recently helped several long-time lo-carb Paleo pipe-hitting Crossfitters whose bloodwork showed they were absolutely and totally SMASHED from Crossfit/lo-carb.

I can't share with you the entire article on carbs, but I can present some of Scott's recent thoughts on the subject.

I hope in the future we can make more of Scott's writing available to all, though for now, you can dig up the article he wrote on this subject in the March 2011 Performance Menu.

Anyways, I hope this is of some use for those considering a lo-carb approach.

best,

jason

Over the next few weeks, we will re-examine a few sacred cows of the Crossfit/Paleo movement. We'll start with dietary carbohydrates.

Carbs were (and still are in some circles) considered the holy grail of performance nutrition... About 10-12 years ago, the low carb diet craze began to take hold and many went the opposite direction with good success... I was no different, being one of the early adopters of low carb paleo and intermittent fasting...

Are carbs really that detrimental to your health?

...Do not fall into the trap of continuing to eat a low-carb paleo diet long-term...

...As an example, if you only consume green or leafy vegetables as your carbs, you are likely under 50g of net carbs daily. This would be considered low to very low carb...

...A low carbohydrate diet (paleo or not) can be very effective at reversing insulin resistance. However, it's effectiveness to this end varies greatly from individual to individual...

In addition, there are three big problems with staying low-carb long term:

1) Low-carb diets lower output of thyroid hormones and reduce metabolic rate...

2) Low-carb diets ramp up the production of stress hormones...

3) Low-carb diets are terrible for athletes, particularly if the glycotic pathway is involved in their sport...

Okay then … how many carbs should you eat? It depends...

Moderate ketosis is generally not a problem. You can maintain ketosis with plenty of vegetable matter and the micronutrients will help keep acidosis from developing. It is not necessary by any means to maintain ketosis long term, and in many ways it is undesirable (from a pure health and longevity perspective) but so long as you are preventing acidosis from setting in you should be fine.

Hardcore ketosis, where there are no carbs, is not acceptable as a long term solution. It does end up leading to premature organ failure, there's a good reason why quite a few diabetics have to be really careful about that... they end up dying of prolonged ketosis-induced acidosis or "diabetic ketoacidosis" as the proper medical name.

What Philip is doing is probably perfectly fine, because he is getting carbs from the veggies to at least supply what his brain absolutely can not function without and is probably getting enough minerals and other micronutrients that help maintain the body's buffer systems. As long as your buffer systems aren't compromised you should be 100% ok.

Nice info, Jason!

Guys, you have to remember that you simply can not fight how your body works. You CAN work in spite of yourself, but it will be an inherently self-limiting path. You'll be much better off using food sources that nature intended our bodies to use to fuel the activities we take part in. If you're burning sugar via glycolysis, replace it with glucose-based carbs. Figure out about how much work you're doing, then figure out the approximate % coming from glycolysis. Take the calories, multiply them by that % number, and you will know how many g of carbs you need that day (preferably right near the workout). It really IS that simple, and really DOES lead to the absolute best results. You will never be able to get around that... it would be like trying to keep iron from responding to a magnet... yea you CAN do it with enough shielding or exotic circuitry, but you're literally spending a ton of money and time fighting the very nature of what iron is. It's no different with nutrition.

A meal without vegetables actually makes me feel guilty. That is probably from my parents raising though. Also using a multi vitamin and mineral so nothing is left too far behind. And leaving ketosis once I am out of muscle glycogen (tends to feel like a really strange soreness in the legs)

I don't believe keto is great in in strictest sense (absolutely zero carb cults) but there have been cultures who don't tend to get anything but meat and fat like eskimos right? Do they have the same organ failure you write about? I am guessing they just don't live as optimally as they could.

PHILIP said:

A meal without vegetables actually makes me feel guilty. That is probably from my parents raising though. Also using a multi vitamin and mineral so nothing is left too far behind. And leaving ketosis once I am out of muscle glycogen (tends to feel like a really strange soreness in the legs)

I don't believe keto is great in in strictest sense (absolutely zero carb cults) but there have been cultures who don't tend to get anything but meat and fat like eskimos right? Do they have the same organ failure you write about? I am guessing they just don't live as optimally as they could.

Their biggest issue is actually strokes, the extremely high levels of omega 3 fatty acids seem to cause leaky arteries or veins over time, and a disproportionately high percentage die in upper middle age (mid 40's to 60) of related complications. It's kind of strange, at first, but it makes sense. The blood just becomes so thin that it starts leaking out of the vessels.

I don't know much about their mineral status, I'm not even sure if markers of acidosis were ever measured. That's a great question. Eskimos rarely live past their 60's apparently, at least on the traditional all fat and meat diet we are talking about. Their blood pressure is great the whole time though!

Go....figure....We have Western dieters dieting from too much inflammation and eskimos dying from basically a lack of it. I used to do the extreme too but veggies simply make you feel too good when you are getting enough of them. I just avoid fruit 6 out of 7 days of the week. (Too lazy to count fructose grams) I would wonder how alkaline or acidic they are though! They do have the blood pressure going well for them though! Thanks Slizzardman.

Phillip, Josh,

To approach Josh's comments from a different (paleoanthropological) perspective (rather than biological), my understanding of current literature is that anthropological and ethological evidence suggests that ketosis was not a consistent feature of human evolution.

There have been spikes, of course (i.e. glacial periods in Europe), but not consistent or long-term enough to evoke necessary adaptions.

The Inuit are considered outliers who occupy a late Paleolithic-era niche.

I can relate personally that I have seen at the gym (not members, but guys who've come in for consults with Scott, who is developing a rep as a guy who "fixes" hardcore Crossfitters) several multi-year Paleo low-carb Crossfitters present with abominable blood panel, shredded adrenals, cortisol derangement, low test., etc.

To be even-keeled, these results could be due to life, work & relational stress as well poor sleep quality; or even due to misrepresented food and exercise logs (i.e. they said they were low-carb Paleo but weren't; they reported just one workout a day but were really performing 2 or 3, etc).

I'm not sure what you'd experience following Coach Sommer's posted WODs, but they are very physically challenging and will tax your glycolytic pathways, which leads me to believe a low-carb approach is not the most optimal one for these workouts.

This is my perspective, I hope it helps give more shading to the nutrition decisions you might make.

best,

jason

Very interesting Debate.

How many gr. of carbs do we mean, when we say "low carb"?

From my personal experience, it makes a huge difference in performance etc., if you are taking in > 50 gr. or ca. 100 gr. of carbs. Both would be considered to be a "low carb" diet.

jasonmstein said:

Phillip, Josh

I can relate personally that I have seen at the gym (not members, but guys who've come in for consults with Scott, who is developing a rep as a guy who "fixes" hardcore Crossfitters) several multi-year Paleo low-carb Crossfitters present with abominable blood panel, shredded adrenals, cortisol derangement, low test., etc.

To be even-keeled, these results could be due to life, work & relational stress as well poor sleep quality; or even due to misrepresented food and exercise logs (i.e. they said they were low-carb Paleo but weren't; they reported just one workout a day but were really performing 2 or 3, etc).

I'm not sure what you'd experience following Coach Sommer's posted WODs, but they are very physically challenging and will tax your glycolytic pathways, which leads me to believe a low-carb approach is not the most optimal one for these workouts.

That is interesting! Thank you for bringing it up. Well I have never gotten my blood tested so I can't give clear results. But I have never felt better in my life. I think either they MAY be outliers because of their lifestyles or I may be one because of my extremely low stress lifestyle. They could just I would be interested to see exactly what they should be putting into their longs.

The last part is actually the only thing I will definitely disagree with. I do follow Coach's WOD. Then, later in the day, I also follow my own integrated training and prehab. Lastly, I train at a gymnastics gym, circus school, MMA academy and swimming along with floreio. It usually comes out to 6-8 hours of work a day. It is all done on low card. Like I said before though, I do refeed about once a week. I think a lot of work can be done in ketosis though and soon I am going to test sprinting since that is the one everyone disagrees with.

Rower said:

Very interesting Debate.

How many gr. of carbs do we mean, when we say "low carb"?

I don't actually count grams but I eat unlimited vegetables with each meal and don't eat any fruit except for one cheat day. I don't know how much that would be but it probably comes to around 50. I hope.

Phillip,

I'm glad your training and nutrition are complementing each other --- it sounds like you're thriving under quite a workload.

Just to refine the points from Scott's article; as Josh (slizzard) mentioned above, we are able to thrive on ketosis.

However, much current research as well as empirical evidence of ketosis plus Crossfit-style workouts (of which Coach's Sommer's are not) strongly suggest that it is not optimal in the long-term.

It seems that after between 3-5 years of this a constellation of symptoms appear, thyroid dysfunct., elev. cortisol, low test., adrenal dysfunction, sleep disturbance, body temp. disreg., metabolism issues, etc.

I suggest that one can definitely thrive under GB WODs + Paleo ketosis --- just that over the long term, however, this is less than optimal.

Nutrition is a spectrum/continuum that is never context-free.

So, for example, at age 22 one could thrive for a time on GB WODs plus a diet of wet sawdust. Or age 18 the GB WODs plus Poptarts and Pabst. That 'thrive' period might only be 2 workouts or it might be 4 months.

What I'm suggesting is that the evidence + research reveals that GB WOD+low-carb Paleo (or Crossfit+low-carb Paleo) will allow thrive/gains.

However, based on current evidence, this nutrition choice still rests on the less-than-optimal end of the continuum/spectrum, as over time it can lead to deeper problems.

For more info, you could track down that March 11 P-Menu article for an in-depth look at the issue with refs.

I wish you the best of luck in your training/recovery.

best,

jason

That was a very sensible post Jason, that has been my intuition about the ketosis question as well, but not being a nutritionist by a long shot usually just i follow the threads and hope to mitigate any damage.

Your post was noteworthy.