Low Carb Lower Stress?

Hunger Stress – Food Addiction

In talking about stress, we simply can’t deny that food and diet are part of that stress. You walk out of a long business meeting. Your cranky, your tired, your irritable, and your Hungry. Not that little bit of hunger that cues you that it may be time to eat. We are talking about the kind of hunger that you can literally feel your body going through turmoil and chaos trying to tell you to eat now, or an eruption may transpire.

This is a specific type of hunger…. One that only comes from the metabolism as a “Sugar Burner” (or one that primarily burns sugar for fuel). I know because I used to be one of these individuals. It doesn’t have to be pizza and beer, or burgers and fries. It could simply be someone who enjoys a lot of fruit, or yogurt, or granola, or oats, or all of the above. So from most standards people would say this person eats really healthy. However, this type of eating could be creating a spring board for hormone disregulation, mostly that of one called Cortisol. Food Stress
I see all the time…. Someone will start a training or coaching program with me, and when I ask them what do they eat they list off one that is similar to that I just listed above. They have this pride about them as if they really don’t need much nutritional advice, and they only haven’t met there body composition goals because they haven’t learned how to workout properly. But as I listen to them list off the foods they eat, I can’t help but start doing some simple mathematics. “50, 70, 100, 150, wow they eat 250g of carbohydrate a day”, I’m only left doing some division thinking “ok, 250g divided by 4 equals, holy cow, they eat 60 teaspoons of glucose a day”. Explaining that to most people, they look at you as if your making that up, and that their is no way that a paleo diet can produce that much sugar.

Problems of being Carb Fueled

The Process of fat adaptation has numerous benefits. I experienced these benefits after reading Mark Sisson’s “Primal Blueprint”, which got me to remove the processed grains and dairy, and focus on some healthier fats. This quickly sold me on a low carb lifestyle, and looking back I realized how stressed I used to be. Not just about life occurrences, but about food and nutrition in general. As a Bodybuilder I was taught that you have to tons of carbs to fuel your workouts, and tons of protein to build your muscles. Shockingly, no one ever (including the magazines)mentioned how important healthy fats are. Combined with the mainstream bro science knowledge that you have to eat every 3 hours to keep from breaking down your own muscle tissue. But this premise is actually false in the sense that you don’t have to eat constantly to build or maintain muscle mass. In fact you can actually Fast and build muscle. No I didn’t stutter. I am living proof of this.

Fat Adapted Muscle
2 Years in doing a Ketogenic Diet. More Muscle MAss (with 2 meals a day) than I ever had doing 6 meals a day!

If you would compare my body (fat adapted with fasting) now with my former body doing the body building, eat every 3 hours diet, I have more muscle mass, I”m am stronger, and best of all I have lower body fat.

It’s simply logical that if you don’t rely on sugar for fuel than your body won’t need to convert muscle tissue into sugar (via Gluconeogenesis), therefore preserving your muscle mass and going after the stored body fat that you are biologically designed to burn for energy in times of need.

LCHF (low carb high fat) Nutrition Stress Reduction

    As I became more of a low carb ketogenic enthusiast, it didn’t take me long to realize that my constant emotional stability came from the fact that I was no longer tied to my next meal, and I had no more fear that muscle was going to disappear if I only ate one or two meals a day. See, the reason comes down to this: WHEN YOUR FAT A
DAPTED you stop having the huge cortisol spikes that come with being a Carb Fueled. Back to our business meeting analogy, that tired, irritable, shaky, hangry self felt that way from the hormones surging in the body from lack of blood glucose in the blood. Combined with being a poor fat metabolizer, cortisol spikes which catabolizes muscle tissue in a process called gluconeogenesis. This way you get a surge of glucose to keep you fueled until you eat. Not tot mention the spike of adrenaline and epinephrine that surge leaving you wired but tired.

lower carb lower stress

       So my theory is that the emotional stability that comes with low carb, is more physical than it is mental. Regulation of blood glucose allows the body to simply do what it was designed to do in that situation- Burn Fat. So no need to stress is your board meeting runs late, or you get stuck in traffic for 2 hours, or your traveling all day. Just drink some water and burn some fat. Or as the “2 keto dudes” saying goes “keep calm and keto on”. The other major benefit is that by adapting to this new natural fuel source, your body doesn’t have to tap into its muscle in times of fasting. It simply does it’s job and goes after fat, not throwing away that valuable muscle you have built working hard in the gym. Dr. Jason Fung puts it best when he says that burning our muscle for fuel is like chopping up our sofa for the fire place when we have stored up all that wood on the deck.
   I would not say that Ketogenic diets are for everyone, however I do think a measure of low carb real food diets can help just about everyone. Why not use this metabolic machinery that eats up that ugly stubborn belly fat, while at the same time making your life a lot easier by not consantly necessitating fast energy from glucose. Logically, this makes sense, just 100 years ago humans didn’t have stocked refrigerators, freezers, and non perishable items. They missed some meals now and then! Because of that they stayed with a measure of fat adaptation which kept them from losing their minds while working physically harder than most of us will ever know.

Time for Fat adaptation in your life?

Ask yourself:
-Can I miss a meal and still function normally?
-Do I get irritable, moody, or Hangry when I haven’t eaten in a few hours?
-Do i feel physically ill, shaky, or nauseous when I know that I should have an hour ago?
If you answered yes to any of these questions you might take look at how much Carbohydrates you have in your diet. If you experience that removing a large portion of them and replacing them with healthy fats dramatically reduces these symptoms, than you just lowered your overall stress, preserved more of your lean muscle, and lowered your risk of mortality from things like obesity, diabetes, and heart disease. Winner, Winner Chicken Low Carb dinner!
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