This will be 1 of 2 blogs. One explaining the details of carbohydrates and how they work. The other will talk about tips on how you can enjoy more of them without storing fat.
Your Two Fuel Types
In essence, your body has two fuel sources... Carbohydrates and Fats.
Carbohydrates are the primary fuel source during weight training. Dietary fat and/or stored fat is what fuels everything else.
Think of carbohydrate as the rocket fuel for your workouts that allows you to train hard and with high intensity. When you fail to get enough carbohydrates in your diet you’re lacking the class A fuel required to stimulate and grow as much muscle as possible.
Dietary Carbohydrates and proteins are similar in that the more muscle you carry, the more you require.
This is why people with more muscle can eat more junk carbs without getting fat. When consumed, carbohydrates are broken down into sugar (glucose) and release a hormone called insulin.
Insulin has two vital roles in building muscle...
Insulin drives excess carbohydrates into the muscles to be stored as muscle glycogen until your body needs to useit.
Insulin also drives amino acids into the muscle so more muscle can be made from weight training.
If you eat the right amount of protein but not enough carbohydrates, amino acids from protein are burned as fuel instead of being used to repair or build muscle tissue.
The right amount of carbohydrates does the following...
Produces enough insulin to promote muscle glycogen storage.
Produces ideal amino acid uptake in the muscles.
Inhibits fat storage (that's why low-carb works but not NO-carb).
Gives you powerful and intense workouts.
Maximum muscle growth.
Prevents muscle breakdown for fuel.
The Bad Side of Insulin
Now, let’s get into the unfortunate side of insulin...
As you may have guessed, the hormone insulin is a double-edged sword.
While it’s imperative that you consume enough carbohydrates, consuming excess amounts (including clean carbs) can accumulate fat storage or adipose tissue.
When you have consistently high insulin levels, the body increases the uptake of dietary fatty acids by fat cells which leads to an increase in body fat and can make your fat cells stubborn in “giving up“ fatty acids to be used as fuel.
You gotta find that healthy median between anabolic muscle building and fat accumulation.
The Liver, The Muscles and The Fat Cells
Let's say you have just done a 24-hour fast and your body is completely deprived of carbohydrates. The next meal you eat that contains carbohydrates, those carbs are first going to go to the liver to be stored as liver glycogen (emergency sugar stores if you will). Depending on the person, the liver can hold anywhere from 30-60 grams of carbs.
Once the liver gets full of all the glycogen it can hold, whatever carbohydrate consumed after that will go to that persons muscles.
Here's why weight training is so important. The more muscle someone has or the more often they use thier muscles, the better. I'll explain why shortly.
And finally, when the muscles are fully taped the only place the body has to store carbohydrates is the person's fats cells. Resulting in whats called "fat spill-over".
Going back to what I said earlier...
You might not have any control over how many carbs your liver can hold. But you do have control over how much muscle mass you can have.
The more muscle you have, the more capacity your body has to store carbohydrates. And if you can store more, you can consume more without going into fat spillover.
