Loved watching the fabulous Truth about carbs programme on BBC this Wednesday.
Top TIPS:-
1) Beige starchy Carbs breakdown to the equivalent sugars you would get from obvious sugary foods.
2) Need more wholegrain carbs as these contain more fibre and resistant starches that do not breakdown into sugars and so move through the small gut without being digested, which improves our health overall.
3) Test:- If you eat a plain unsalted cracker and the taste changes (e.g. tastes sugary or different) within 30 secs you probably can cope with carbs more easily than if you don't taste any change or it changes after 30 secs.
4) Avoid refined, white (sugary foods) and beige (starchy foods) carbs and substitute it with healthy carbs such as fruits and vegetables. This will help you lose weight even when the same calories are the same. Plus it will reduce many other health risk factors, including preventing diabetes.
5) Instead of drinking sports drinks just use them to swill round your mouth and then spit them out.
Swilling these drinks round your mouth and spitting them out means the receptors in the mouth tell the brain you are about to consume carbs. The brain then overides the fatigue signal and allows us to run/exercise for further and longer and also increases our power around 80%... all with the added bonus of no extra calories being consumed. Hence able to lose weight rather than consume the same calories or more than we use up whilst exercising.
6) Choose better carbs rather than just a no carb diet to stay healthy and prevent diabetes. Eating well can be tasty and never need to feel you are going without. If you need help with these choices let me know and I can help.
E.g. a) instead of potatoes use squash or celeriac
b) instead of rice choose bulgar wheat (high in resistant starch)
c) substitute lasagne pasta with aubergine slices in a lasagne
d) instead of white bread choose wholegrain or sour dough.
7) Reheating or freezing carbs converts some of the starchy carbs to the healthy resistant starch. So put some wholegrain bread in the freezer and then take it out frozen when you want to toast it and put it straight in the toaster to convert more starch into resistant starch.
8) Reduce risk of bowel cancer by making our bowels healthy eating the right foods high in fibre (30g per day will reduce risk of bowel cancer by 30%) and high in resistant starch.
9) Eating the poor carbs in our diet reduces our fertility. And the wrong carbs can alter your babies genes! Dad's diets are equally important to mum's before conceiving our babies, for the health outcomes of our children in later life.
So what changes are you going to make?
I know I'm going to start freezing my bread for toast!
Love to hear your changes.
If you need help to get into the right mindset or make the right choices get in touch to make these changes more easily and feel great.