Carbs, the addiction to them

I have picked up several books over the years and one of them was a best seller about being addicted to carbohydrates. It seems when you have metabolic syndrome that your body probably has a tendency to crave carbs.

When you succumb to eating carbs, especially the kind that hit your bloodstream quickly, like corn syrup in cola drinks, orange juice, white bread, and mashed potatoes to name a few, (don't expect the exact details here) your body's cells take and make the insulin too quickly and you end up storing it more as fat, and seems at least for me to accumulate around my torso, I don't think I have fat legs but I do have a beer belly. But since I don't drink that much, it is from food more than anything else. It is much more complicated a process than I am explaining here, but then at the end of the day, your body craves MORE carbs, not less. The simple answer, focus on a lean source of protein to give you energy, maybe a little Olive Oil to add some good fats that help your body, instead of a saturated fat like animal fat, or a hydrogenated fat, or transfat like the stuff in most margarines.

Today I have been good, I ate a modified South Beach Diet meal. I did eat grapes, that definitely is not on the diet. I am doing good, until later in the day.

I walked about a 3/4 mile very leisurely this afternoon and then came home and ate too much ham and a piece of bread and cheese. I don't have my calorie counting down yet, but I think I stayed below 1700 calories today.

I promise you, I will not try to make this blog about what I eat, every day for the next year, but it is helping me think about what and when and why I am eating.

One help is that I use my small salad plates and I am trying to always plate my food before I eat it. Put it on a plate, sit down, have a drink, and slow down on the eating. It is allowing my brain to think "I have a very full plate of food" and not have 2000 calories on one huge plate.

Just a short side note. I was furnishing an office, and there was a small kitchen in it. So I went to wall mart to buy some cool plates to use. I brought them back and when I went to put them into a normal sized dishwasher... they barely fit! These were the standard sized plates. The next day, we made lunch at the office and filled it with spaghetti. Neither of us big guys could finish our plate full of food, and on the plate, it just didn't look like it was that much food since it was on these enormous plates.

The moral of the story, find some smaller plates, plate your food, slow down and your brain will start to allow you to eat less and not feel cheated.

Any comments on the Carbs? Please post a comment.