Is it time for you to curb the carbs? Yes and no. Don’t ditch them altogether, just eat the right ones.
Remember, carbohydrates are energy foods. Without them, you’ll get fuzzy headed, cranky, and very tired, and no one will want to be around you. 🙁
Low carb diets say that all carbs are evil and fattening. So everyone stops eating certain fruits and grains and loads up on protein. The problem is, you can only eat so much protein and fat before you start to get nauseated by it. Ugh…
Not all carbs are the same.
There are bad ones—foods made mostly of sugar or overrefined carbs like white bread, white rice, and white pasta. Sugar and sweets are the worst.
Consider this: We are eating over twelve times the amount of sugar our great-grandparents consumed. That’s nearly 150 pounds of sugar down the hatch of each person in the United States each year – what?!
Depending on which cycle you are in on the 17 Day Diet, you get to eat good carbs: fruit, vegetables, whole grains—anything that hasn’t been stripped of its nutrition.
The amount of carbs you eat is also important.
You can go overboard on carbs, even the good kind, and this can be devastating to your natural metabolic processes. That’s why the 17 Day Diet is low to moderate in carbohydrates.
Another thing to be aware of is carbohydrate sensitive. When you are carbohydrate sensitive, your body can no longer burn fat effectively, and a good deal of the carbohydrates you eat are packed away as fat.
Are you carb sensitive?
You may be if…
- You habitually eat too much sugar and refined carbohydrates (crackers, cookies, bagels, white pasta, white bread, sugary cereals and desserts, white rice and white bread). Unfortunately, this sensitivity increases with age.
- You suffer from chronic stress. Our bodies react to stress chemically. They jack up cortisol, a hormone secreted from our adrenal glands, which prepares us to handle the stress. However, if we stay under stress, cortisol hangs around, and it floods our bloodstream with too much glucose and insulin. To your physiology, being under chronic stress is the same as if you ate cake all day long.
- You’re a woman. While men burn carbohydrates for energy, women tend to store them as fat. This is especially true as women age. Menopausal women are more susceptible. Chalk it up to female biology.
This is why you’ll curb the carbs on the 17 Day Diet. You’ll eat natural and unprocessed carbs found in the vegetables and fruits. Don’t worry though, by Cycle 3, you’ll get to introduce other carbs into your diet, including brown rice, oatmeal, whole grains, yams, potatoes, and other natural, high-fiber carbs.
So, think about whether you are carb sensitive, and work on getting more of the natural carbs and less of the unhealthy sugar-laden ones.
