If you’re reading this – you might be wondering if it’s the right decision to remove carbs from your diet.
I’m not telling you how to live your life, I just want you to know what a wonderful, lean, life you could be living if you learned to coexist with carbs.
For those just joining the meeting, we’re talking about potatoes, rice, beans, fruit, plantains, oatmeal, buckwheat, bread, pasta, tortillas, and everything in between.
Exercise Performance
Energy balance is a delicate dance.
We need enough energy to work hard in our workouts, but not enough energy to maintain our body weight (when the goal is fat loss).
We know that being active is a huge driver of success when it comes to weight management.
Carbohydrates are the 99 octane of food, when it comes to fuelling workouts.
There has never been, and will never be anything that will help you work (and recover) harder than carbohydrates. (1)
When you’re feeling like you’ve achieved god-mode during your workouts, it’s only going to help you push further and ensure additional progress.
Muscle Retention
If your goal is to lose “weight” to look good, you’re doing it wrong.
Most likely, your preference is actually to lose body fat while keeping as much muscle as possible.
Aside from letting you work harder in your workouts, carbohydrates actually have some very anti-catabolic properties, meaning they prevent muscle protein breakdown.(2)
In layman’s terms, eating carbohydrates regularly can keep you looking like Rocky Balboa instead of Jack Skellington.
Adherence
I’m going to let you be the expert here for a moment.
What do you think you could sustain for longer?
An eating style with no carbohydrates (no more fruit), where your sleep, your workouts, your energy levels, and your relationship with food are all being burned in a dumpster fire.
OR
An eating style that contains healthy carbohydrates at every single meal, where you’re a freight train during your workouts, you sleep like a baby, and you get to eat things you enjoy.
Your call.
So, How Much?
Well, the reality is that you still need to be consuming less total energy than you’re burning in order to lose weight and body fat to any significant degree
See this image to understand more.
Many factors influence your weight.
How much energy you consume, and how much you expend, is what determines your body weight.
Heres a good place to start:
If you’re a male doing roughly 30 minutes of activity per day looking to lose some body fat…
4 – 5 cupped hand -sized portions of whole food carbohydrates per day.
If you’re a female in the same boat, let’s start with 3-4 cupped hand-sized portions of whole food carbohydrates per day and go from there.
How big is a cupped hand?
Cup your hand.
Look down at it.
Fill that with blueberries.
For Joe, that might look like:
Breakfast – 1 Potato in an Egg Scramble
Lunch – 1 Handful Berries in a Smoothie
Dinner – Double Serving of Brown Rice with Steak and Veggies
