Should my Clients be Eating Carbs?

It's no surprise that people constantly ask questions about carbohydrate based foods, even qualified professionals who have studied nutrition are sometimes unsure about carbs.

This week's blog is going to focus on simple advice on carbs for clients wanting fat loss. Of course, any client of mine will be exercising so we need to make sure we give sensible advice to fuel exercise & not just try and starve our clients by cutting out every food that contains calories.

OK so first a disclaimer: I'm not a nutritionist and Personal Trainers should not be giving detailed dietary plans to clients. Send them to a dietician or nutritionist for that sort of support - I just want to help you give some common sense advice to clients, nothing more & nothing less.

Energy for Exercise: Before we jump into talking about foods, a quick lesson about how muscles primarily burn carbs for energy during exercise... When you eat carbs, it gets taken into the blood as glucose and then stored in the muscles as "muscle glycogen". Muscle glycogen is an essential fuel for exercise, whether the exercise is aerobic or anaerobic.
Your body can convert proteins to glycogen, but because your body relies on protein to rebuild muscle tissue after a workout you might then run short of what you need to rebuild the body. Converting protein to glycogen also stresses the kidneys because they have to work harder to eliminate some nasty by-products from the process.
So... It makes sense to eat at least some carbs (we can argue about how much another day) to keep glycogen stored in the muscles and fuel our workouts.

Good carbs, bad carbs... Evil carbs... I'm going to provide a list of carbs that I would personally recommend all clients avoid, as well as a list of carbs that I would strongly recommend to clients.
Essentially, anything that has been highly processed is on the banned list. I'll explain what this means and give you plenty of examples because I think this causes confusion sometimes - which foods are the processed ones?

Processed carbs will make you fat: Here is a pic of your typical grain. Once it gets mulched up by a big machine it loses most of it's bran & is turned into a fluffy breakfast cereal like 'Puffed Wheat' it has about 2g of fibre in one bowl. In an unprocessed breakfast cereal like 'Wheat Bran' we get over 26g of fibre -12 times more!
So why is Puffed Wheat evil? Well there are many reasons - firstly, fibre in has been proven to reduce the risk of digestive diseases and improve digestive health. Secondly, the unprocessed Wheat Bran actually requires you to chew. Chewing makes the meal take longer, slows down your eating and allows your body to recognise when it feels full sooner rather than just gulp down too much gluggy crap. So, you end up eating less. Thirdly (and probably most importantly) the highly processed Puffed Wheat gets digested & absorbed way faster than the unprocessed bran. It floods your blood with a massive glucose spike, which leads to a big glucose crash and you will be starving hungry within an hour or so. The glucose spike also causes a massive insulin spike & this increases your risk of type 2 diabetes but that's a topic for another blog.

Unprocessed carbs are pure joy for fat loss: In my previous blog I provided a link to a research paper citing 101 scientific studies indicating that eating whole grains helps prevent a whole range of potential diseases & ill health. It's pretty clear that Puffed Wheat doesn't contain a whole grain and this is where it gets difficult for clients to identify healthy carbs - it says "wheat" on the packet right? And the TV advertisement tells me I will be transformed into an Iron Man so I reckon it's gotta be good... Right?

Yeah, right. There are only two ways you can identify a good carb - well actually three because I'll link you to my own list of good carbs and evil carbs that you can use but it's not going to cover every food at the local supermarket so you will have to either:

1. Learn to read food labels and look for (primarily) fibre content. Compare labels and brands to learn which breads or cereals are lower, and which are higher. If it's higher in fibre it usually contains more whole grains - unless of course it's that fibre enriched white bread (avoid!).
2. Simply eyeball the foods. In breakfast cereals or breads, if it is whole grain you will see the grains. One example is Muesli - check out the whole grains in the bag! Of course you still need to read the label because some Muesli's are high in fat, so for calorie control you will want to choose a brand with less fat.

But what if I eat too many unprocessed carbs??? Let me be clear - overeating is bad for fat loss no matter what the food. However, if you eliminate processed carbs & adopt an "unprocessed only" approach, it is difficult to overeat.
This is because of the chewing factor (already mentioned), and also the fact that unprocessed carbs are usually very low on the GI (Wheat Bran is 30) compared to processed versions (Puffed Wheat is 80). Unprocessed foods take much longer (I'm talking hours) to digest so you aren't going to be hungry for quite some time after eating.
Healthy eating guidelines suggest at least three serves per day, so that's what I'm going to recommend. Just remember to choose good carbs, not no carbs.

So, check out my list of evil carbs which should be on the "avoid" list for anyone wanting fat loss, plus a bunch of replacement foods that you could recommend to clients. There are lots of carbs (good and evil) that are not on my list, you will need to make your own mind up about them.

Download the full list here

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