226-SYNCPodcast_Carbs

[00:00:00] Jenny Swisher: Welcome friends to this episode of the Sync Your Life podcast. Today, we’re diving into this topic of low carb diets and this whole idea of restricting our carbs for weight loss. This has been a phenomenon in diet culture for quite some time. The bunless burger in all its glory. But is it hormone healthy for us to cut back on carbs?

[00:01:18] Jenny Swisher: I know what you’re thinking. In many cases, you’re thinking, but my doctor even told me to cut back on my carbs and to do more HIIT training. Well, today, my friends, you’re going to hear differently. I pay attention to the research done on the woman most like me, and the woman most like me is active, she’s in her fertile years, although she is edging into perimenopause, and she’s quite busy in her day to day life.

[00:01:40] Jenny Swisher: I follow researchers and experts in the field like Dr. Stacey Sims, Dr. Jolene Brighton, Dr. Laura Bryden, Dr. Sarah Gottfried, and many more who have something to say about how diet and nutrition impacts our metabolic and reproductive health. So let’s start with this idea of metabolic health. Because it’s something that modern medicine doesn’t talk a lot about, but if you enter any form of naturopathic or integrative medicine, you’ve heard this phrase before.

[00:02:04] Jenny Swisher: Let’s talk about it, and let’s define it. What is metabolic health? Metabolic health is defined as having blood sugar, waist circumference, blood pressure, cholesterol, and triglycerides all within a healthy range, which is a benchmark that has been set by these scientists and doctors. It’s the opinion of many integrative doctors that metabolic health should be the benchmark for true health, as opposed to a number on a scale or your height, which is typically what most doctors will assess when you enter their office.

[00:02:33] Jenny Swisher: Someday, medicine will embrace metabolic health as the true marker of health and will ditch the scale. Hip to waist ratio will matter more, along with our internal health. It’s crazy to me that metabolic markers still go unchecked for many women. But that’s a topic for another day. Today, we’re talking about carbs.

[00:02:53] Jenny Swisher: Short for carbohydrates. Carbohydrates are one of the three macronutrients needed for human survival. The others, of course, are protein and fat. Carbohydrates get a bad rap, and they’re often associated with things like breads, pastas, cookies, and baked goods. Even my nutrition course that I took recently had bread on the cover of the book.

[00:03:13] Jenny Swisher: But carbohydrates are also found, most dominantly, in fruits and vegetables and healthy grains. So, you can see, one gram of carbohydrate of a donut is not nutritionally equivalent to one gram of carbohydrate from, let’s say, broccoli. And this matters quite a bit in this conversation. So why are doctors advising women, especially in perimenopause, to cut back on their carbs and in many cases, exercise harder?

[00:03:37] Jenny Swisher: My hope is that they simply aren’t explaining themselves and that they’re not differentiating between healthy and unhealthy carbs, and that they just don’t know what they don’t know as it pertains to how women should exercise. After all, most doctors don’t receive any more than one semester of nutrition classes and very little exercise science, if any.

[00:03:55] Jenny Swisher: It all comes down to diet culture. We have accepted as a society that we must have to eat less and exercise more when we actually couldn’t be further from the truth. Trust me, I have trained dozens of women in personal training and I’ve led hundreds of women online to this philosophy of reverse diet culture.

[00:04:12] Jenny Swisher: The results are blowing my mind. Many will say, I can’t believe how much I’m eating and my body’s actually changing. Yes, it’s possible, my friends, and I’m seeing it every day. It happens by ditching the restriction mentality. It really is a process of unlearning. So let’s talk about the detriments of the eat less carbs, work out harder mentality.

[00:04:33] Jenny Swisher: According to Dr. Stacy Sims, quote, In my own work, I’ve found about 55 percent of individuals who are training every day are in low energy availability.

[00:04:43] Jenny Swisher: And females are especially at risk. LEA is a problem I see every day, and if it isn’t caught in time, it can sometimes lead to irreversible damage to your health. Such as dangerously low bone mineral density, avoiding LEA starts with eating enough. In my own work, I’ve actually seen LEA affect women’s metabolisms in ways that they don’t want with their bellies holding onto the fat and their menstrual cycles often disrupted.

[00:05:09] Jenny Swisher: According to sims, women doing moderate training or even short intense days like CrossFit workouts or home workouts, still demand about three and a half to five grams of carbs per kilogram of body weight. Now, that’s each day. If you’re a 130 pound female like me, and you’re aiming for the 4 grams of carbs per kilo mark, that’s about 236 grams of carbs per day.

[00:05:32] Jenny Swisher: So why does this matter? Women in particular are especially sensitive to low nutrition. Sims goes on to say, quote, when we fall short, we have a marked reduction in the expression of cispeptin, a neuropeptide that’s responsible for sex hormones and endocrine and reproductive function, which also plays a significant role.

[00:05:50] Jenny Swisher: in maintaining healthy glucose levels, appetite regulation, and body composition. Reduced kispeptin expression can increase our appetite, decrease our energy expenditure, and reduce glucose stimulated insulin secretion. The consequences of falling into a prolonged state of LCA include decreased endurance performance, decreased coordination, decreased glycogen stores, depression, irritability, decreased concentration, decreased muscle strength.

[00:06:19] Jenny Swisher: Impaired judgment, decreased training response, and increased injury risk, end quote. Eating enough as women, gosh I sound like a broken record, I feel like I say this every podcast, but eating enough as women and avoiding LEA helps us to maintain a healthy immune response, a healthy stress response to exercise, it helps us moderate our cortisol, and it even helps us recover.

[00:06:42] Jenny Swisher: So how do we go about making sure that we’re getting enough carbohydrates in on a daily basis? I get this question often about protein. How do I get enough protein? But rarely do I get this question about carbs. According to Sims, eating some before a workout and making sure that you’re post fueling with them after your workout is key.

[00:06:59] Jenny Swisher: She also makes the recommendation that perimenopausal and menopausal women be sure to get their post workout fuel within the 30 to 40 minute exercise window. She also suggests 25 percent of your daily carb intake be taken at each meal along with those 30 to 40 grams of protein at each meal. Cutting back on our carbs is not the way, my friends.

[00:07:18] Jenny Swisher: It can lead to issues with brain fog, lack of results in our fitness, menstrual dysfunction, libido issues, and a disruption in our overall metabolic health. Those out there chasing low carb diets are doing it for the quick fix of losing some pounds, not for the long term benefit of true health and longevity.

[00:07:37] Jenny Swisher: We must get out of the diet culture mentality. We must unlearn the ways that our mothers dieted, and those infomercials and commercial health and fitness things, the things they’ve shown us, and instead embrace the idea that our bodies are living, breathing machines that require fuel. Fuel in the form of both macronutrients, protein, fats, and carbs, and micronutrients, which will be another topic for another day.

[00:08:01] Jenny Swisher: By eating the right kinds of carbohydrates, and eating enough, we can actually fuel our bodies to results and to long term energy. Okay, my friends, thank you so much for tuning into this episode. Share it out. Leave a review. I hope you’ve learned something today. Track your carbs, even if it’s just for a day or two.

[00:08:17] Jenny Swisher: I’m not telling you you need to go crazy with macro calculations or journaling every single day, but just track for a couple of days and make adjustments where needed. I know for me, when I took a look at how many carbs I was getting each day, I was nowhere near the 236 grams mark. So do some tracking, see where you are, make some adjustments and join the movement of women eating enough.

[00:08:38] Jenny Swisher: and exercising in alignment with our physiology because it is power. It’s powerful for our mindset and it’s powerful for our energy. All right, my friends, until next time, we’ll talk soon. Bye bye.