How Do Carbs Make You Gain Weight?

Carbs are the main reason for increasing the body weight and not fats. The source of carbs doesn’t matter, whether it is sugar, fruit, bread, or vegetable. Carbs get digested quickly and are converted into blood glucose in no time. Just after you have a carb-rich meal, there is a shoot in the sugar level in the blood, and your pancreas start producing insulin in large amounts to take care of the excess sugar in the blood.

Consuming fat doesn’t lead to an increase in the blood glucose and thus, the insulin levels are also maintained. The insulin hormone is responsible for fat storage in the body and so it is important that its level is maintained in the body. As fats do not trigger insulin production, they are not accumulated as body fat.

Insulin flushes the excess glucose out of the blood stream. It is first converted into starch which is called glycogen. Glycogen is stored in the muscles and in the liver. But there is a limitation to the amount of glycogen that can be stored in the body and so the excess amount is stored in the form of fat. This is how the body weight increases.

When the glucose level in the blood comes down to normal after around 90 minutes, the level of insulin is still the maximum. As the insulin is still present in the bloodstream, it continues its process of converting glucose into fat. As a result of this, the glucose level in the blood falls below normal, making you feel hungry again. So, when you eat a snack rich in carbohydrates, the whole process makes you even hungrier. Thus, irony of the situation is that although you are eating and getting fat, you are still hungry and want more. It is a vicious cycle of gaining weight and getting hungry. It is very difficult to come out of this cycle and avoid overeating.

Cutting Carbs for Losing Weight:

So, you have loaded extra fat onto your body and now its time to pull it off. Here you face difficulties, since a carbohydrate rich diet does not allow you to lose the excess weight.

Now, it’s time to use the stored fat as a fuel. The body will use this fat as energy only when you cut off the supply of fuel, i.e. the blood glucose.

There are two diet plans available to cut off the glucose supply. A low-fat diet is about starving and having a very low-calorie food. The other plan is to reduce the intake of starch and sugar from which the glucose is made, and to fill the void with another fuel, i.e. fat.

The latter plan has an upper hand on the traditional diet plan as it has two advantages. The first is that you don’t have to starve and the second is that by feeding on fats, the body will not search for glucose and start to use its own stored fat.

Eating carbohydrates limits your capacity of using fat. When you are on a diet, you increase your blood glucose, which in turn, stimulates the release of insulin. Even low concentration of insulin inhibits the process of breaking up fat by activating fat synthesis. In other words, when you resort to a low-fat diet which is based on carbohydrates, your body is forced into the fat-building mode and not the fat-burning mode.