New Year Diet Trends?

New Year Diet Trends? by Dave Patrick

The majority of us commence a diet, they go into it with the belief that they must keep fat intake down to a minimum, we have been led to believe fat equals extra weight, well yes but only partly.

We have been told to fill up on plenty of complexed carbs, choosing low fat high carbohydrate foods. There are certain setbacks with this type of diet, one of these would be the fact that your body can and will convert carbohydrates into fat .

Carbohydrate Metabolism

When you ingest carbohydrates, you body goes to work breaking them down, converting them into glucose, glucose is a sugar molecule that is converted into energy within your body's cells with the hormone insulin. The trouble here is that after a meal based largely around carbs, you will have a a lot of unused glucose in your blood stream. This can be extremely damaging over time so your body takes measures to correct this moving the glucose out of the blood stream and into the cells for energy, the excess glucose that doesnt get used or infact isnt needed then goes through the process of being converted.

The main thing with glucose is you only need a minimal glucose present in the blood at any one time. You already have your own back up reserves of glucose which your body is continually manufacturing and replenishing which it stores in the muscles, brain and liver, its called glycogen.

So what happens with the excess glucose? It is converted into fat and stored for use at a later date and with our modern lifestyle food is everywhere, it never gets used. We eat another high carb meal and so more of it gets converted.

Fat metabolism.

In order to use up this excess fat reserve, we need to cut back on the carbs quite considerably and allow our body to use its fat stores, it does this with a system know as fat metabolism, in order for this to happen there must firstly be a negation of carbohydrate. If you think this sounds crazy stop and think back to a time in mans existence when pastas, pastrys and breads didnt exist, our main food intake was protein with maybe a few fruits berries or nuts if they were available. So you see, our bodies can and do work quite adequately without the presence of carbs.

About the Author

Diets are the fads of our generation, forever shifting in opinion and belief. The best we can hope for is to give ourselves an overall view and make our own minds up.

Already into february, what new year diet are you going to choose?