Just like the Famous Spice Girls (English pop girls), carbohydrates were also popular during the mid-1990s. When people started aspiring “fat-free” physique & turned to carbs instead. People soon learned that a diet with high quantity of carbohydrates wasn’t so healthy either. Today, if you ask any professional bodybuilder to explain protein’s role in muscle building you’ll get an in-depth answer about the way it builds the muscle, hypotrophy, anabolic rates and more! But what if you asked the same bodybuilder about the carbohydrate’s role in building muscle? I bet, you will not get a very lengthy response.
When one plans to build muscle, he/she will simply ignore to add Carbohydrates in their muscle diet. This is because of the lack of knowledge in people about carbohydrates and the role they play in muscle building. The thing to know is what type of carbohydrates you eat, when you eat them. Consuming good carbs can have a great effect on the muscle building process.
If you want to ameliorate your present diet for muscle gain and fat loss you must know how to unified carbohydrates with your diet.
So what’s new found in carbohydrate research these days? Let us know what is going on the minds of today’s top nutrition scientists around the world? There’s only one experience food expert to call: Dr. Lonnie Lowery.
1. Amazing thing happens on Heating or Freezing Carbs
Dr Lowery says, freezing or toasting a piece of white bread can change the GI i.e. Glycemic Index. This is what most people don’t know.
The Glycemic index (also known as GI) is a ranking system which was invented by Dr. David J. Jenkins and his colleagues at the University of Toronto in 1981 that measures the effects of the carbohydrates on blood glucose levels.
In 2008, researchers fed test by Freezing white bread (then thaw it of course) they found that, it has a 31% lower glycemic index. It means, the carbs are slower acting. Basically, freezing starches really change things.
Dr. Lowery says, but the result found after toasting white bread was better as it had 25% lower glycemic index as compared to plain white bread.
And if you freeze white bread then toasts it; you will get bread with a 39% lower glycemic index.
Most Important Time to get high insulin is during hard workout which will get your physique in shape quickly. Taking high insulin at wrong time will influence your physique in wrong way.
2. Beans Are Good Sources of Carbs
Beans contain complex carbs and are low glycemic. The GI index measures how rapidly a carbohydrate food increases your blood sugar. Low-glycemic foods, such as beans, etc passed through the digestive system slowly. This can cause a gradual increase in blood sugar resulting in, providing sustained energy, as opposed to foods with high-glycemic, which cause a sudden increase followed by a quick fall in blood sugar. Due to this, beans are always a good option for those who need to keep their blood sugar stable.
Dr. Lowery said that he noted beans a food which he can get full on when he competed in bodybuilding, without changing his routine contest prep.
3. Monster Carb Loading vs. Monster Muscles
Many Professional Bodybuilders have used many different carbohydrate loading regimens in addition with resistance exercise prior to the competition in the conviction that this would result in a magical increase in their muscle size. To investigate this, muscle girth measurements were taken from nine weight-trained people, who were participating in carb-loading study, before and after a control (standard iso-caloric diet) and an experimental trial (carbohydrate loading). The latter regimen had 3 days of intense weight-lifting while the subjects ingested a diet of 10% carbs (CHO), 57% fat (F), and 33% protein (P), followed by 3 days of light weight-lifting than before and a day of rest while ingesting a diet of 80% CHO, 5% F, and 15% P. The control trial included an identical weight-lifting regimen while subjects ingested an iso-caloric (45 kcal/kg BW/day) diet. Body weight and girths (forearm, upper arm, chest, thigh, waist, and calf) were taken before and after each trial in a relaxed and flexed state. The study concludes that an exercise/carbohydrate loading regimen had no considerable effect on muscle girth as compared to the control trial. It is concluded that Carbohydrates loading has no adscititious benefit to develop muscle girth in the bodybuilders over weight-lifting alone. After carb loading, you may feel like you’re bigger than before, But the reality is that there’s no exceedingly measurable difference in your muscle girth at rest, says Dr. Lowery.
4. Carbs Helps in Reducing Stress
All carbohydrates expedite the brain to produce more serotonin. For a fixed supply of feel-good chemical, it’s best to consume complex carbohydrates, which take longer to digest. Best choices include whole-grain breads, breakfast cereals and pastas including old-fashioned oatmeal. Complex carbohydrates can also make you feel balanced by stabilizing your blood sugar levels.
Lowery says, Taking simple carbohydrates during exercise reliably reduce stress markers like interleukin 6 which is a catabolic (muscle-wasting), inflammatory cytokine, and something like this you would want to reduce instantly.
5. Excess Carb Calories = Fatness
Glycogen is one of the main reasons why we don’t need to eat after every hour, and carbs are converted to glycogen stores easily, then broken down & burned easily when your body required energy. If you consume high number of calories & most of these calories are from carbohydrates, then the extra carbs are converted into killer fat, or adipose tissue, for longer term storage.
To prove this, Dr. Lowery will often wheel in a metabolic cart when he’s teaching class. Students will come in fasted, get hooked up to the cart, and be able to see how they’re burning 60 to 90% of all their calories from body fat. He’ll then give them a sugary drink (no doubt with an accompanying maniacal laugh, perhaps punctuated with lightening crashes).
Within 20 minutes the students will have halted fat breakdown and started using carbs both for fuel and for lipogenesis or body fat creation. Lowery says “It completely stops the fat-burning process and starts the fat creation process!”.
6. The Anti-Grain/Allergen Trend: “Overstated!”
In the last few years Grains have become especially buzz worthy due to an increase in the food sensitivities as well as an increase in consumers’ desire to look more trendy and healthy. The current surge is for moving from unhealthy Junk food to basics – going back to our ancestor’s foods, foods that are versatile, clean, and as close to their natural & purest form as possible. But recently there’s has been a movement by the lobbyists against all grains; even old fashioned oatmeal was on their target. There was a strong argument about grains of being allergenic to many people and being the food that humans are not evolved to eat. But Dr. Lowery agrees that the main reason behind the America’s obesity problem is a grain based diet. He says, grains based foods are the only sustainable way to feed millions of human being & because of this we are pushed to eat grains based foods, with no option left.
7. The Whole Grain Sham?
It is well known fact that Grains have some advantageous phytochemicals and some extra fiber, besides this, it is on the list of the lobbyists and is influenced by them to make grains seem really healthy and great.
A research concludes that people who feed more on whole grains are having less fat in their body, but who is compared to? Is yet to find, says Lowery.
Lowery says, bodybuilders & athletes make a very small contribution in world’s population & it’s essential for them to be more careful about these claims. It may effects the physique-conscious crowd in the wrong way.
Final Words
Dr. Lowery is a nutrition expert and a former weightlifter. He can amaze you by his ideas on muscle diet.
He says, bodybuilders are not dumb muscle-heads as people thinks about them. In fact we are above all when it comes to nutritional knowledge.
“Nutrition isn’t that complex in theory, but it is in practice” With those words, our wonderful conversation with Dr. Lowery came to an end.
Author Bio:
Hi! I’m Mike Kneuer(CPT, CES, FAS, FNS, GFS), a personal trainer, health coach, nutrition specialist, and professional physique athlete in Boca Raton, Florida. You can train with me at Life Time Athletic. If you’re a guy who is struggling to lose those last 15-20lbs keeping you from a shredded 6 pack check out my program Project Shredded. It is the same program I used to go from never doing a physique competition and deciding to jump in one to winning my Pro Card in just under 4 months. www.ProjectShredded.com