When the majority of us commence a diet, they go into it with the belief that they must keep fat to a minimum, we have been led to believe fat equals obesity, well yes but only to a certain extent.
We have been told to fill up on plenty of complexed carbs, choosing low fat high carbohydrate foods.
There are certain restrictions 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 eat carbs, you body goes to work breaking them down, changing them into glucose, glucose is a sugar molecule that is converted into energy within the cells of your body 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 system.
This can be harmful to you over time so your body remedys this problem by sweeping the glucose out of the blood stream and into the cells for energy, the excess glucose that doesn't get used or infact isn't 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 self sufficient store 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 changes 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 carbs.
If you think this sounds a little insane stop and think back to a time in mans existence when cakes, bread and pasta didnt exist, our main source of food was meat 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.