Five Benefits of a Low-Carb Lifestyle
It’s becoming increasingly more difficult to keep up with carbs. One minute they’re in, the next minute they’re out.
They were all the rage in the eighties as fat was pushed out of the limelight and demonized by many. Now, it’s quite the opposite. The quality of a lifestyle that’s high in carbohydrate is being questioned as we face a global epidemic of increasing rates of diabetes and cardiovascular diseases.
- Low-Carb Diets Quash Appetites
A diet that consists of a lot of carbohydrate means that your blood sugar is constanting peaking and troughing when the energy it gives you wears off. In retaliation to this, diets that are low in carbohydrate mean that the consumer is ingesting large amounts of proteins and fats to source their energy from. This guarantees satiation for the individual and generally decreases the overall amount of calories they ingest.
- Low-Carb = Faster Weight Loss
Studies have actually shown that those on a low carbohydrate diet lose considerably more weight in a much shorter period of time than those who performed a high carbohydrate diet.
Participants also did not feel as hungry as they’re high carbing counterparts. A low-carb diet has also indicated a much shorter period of weight loss, with most losing the bulk of their weight in the first six months of completion. However, it is important to consider low-carb as a lifestyle instead of a diet to maintain weight loss for longer periods of time.
It’s also thought that a lot of this fat loss comes from the damaging visceral kind that exists around organs. Think this is a great reason to go low-carb? Us too.
- Decreased Triglycerides
Triglycerides huh? Sounds like some sort of crazy space doo-dacky. Well, not quite. Triglycerides are fat molecules so they’re much less exciting.
They make for an excellent test when it comes to assessing your risk factor levels for cardiovascular health. To perform this assessment, one needs to test your triglyceride levels (found in your blood) after a period of fasting. So obviously, it is best done after sleep because no one really wants to starve themselves.
Those who live with low-carb diets generally have a much lower triglyceride count than those who don’t do low-carb.
- Increased Levels of HDL
Cholesterol gets a bad rap but there are two different kinds. There’s LDL and then there’s HDL. LDL is the “bad kind” and travels from your liver to the rest of your body whereas HDL is the “good kind” that carries cholesterol away from the body and to the liver where it can be either used or excreted.
The most effective way of reducing your chance of a heart attack is by having a lot of HDL in your body. The only way to induce HDL is to consume fat. We know, it sounds kind of backwards but it’s the only way to keep those ratios in check.
- Blood Pressure Decreases
The old hypertension, eh? Reducing carbohydrate is a great way to decrease one’s blood pressure, which, in turn decreases your chance of having a heart attack, stroke, kidney failure, and many other potentially life threatening diseases.
So, this is just a handful of all the great effects that committing to a low-carb lifestyle may have. It isn’t the easiest thing in the world, especially at the beginning when your body is craving carbohydrate like nothing else. But, we believe in you! You can do it!