Weight Loss: Including Carbs in Your Diet

Low carb diets, like the keto diet are very popular lately. They focus on reducing your carbohydrate intake in an attempt to help you achieve effective weight gain. The idea is that carbohydrates provide lots of calories which are easily stored as fat if not immediately consumed for energy. But everything you eat has calories and can result in weight gain. Protein and dietary fiber are harder to store as fat though and are normally flushed out of your system.

A low carb diet can definitely help you lose weight, but some people mistake a “low carb” diet with a “no carb” diet, and attempt to remove carbs from their diet entirely. This is a mistake as carbohydrates are needed for your body’s nutrition. As a matter of fact, the biggest critique of low carb diets is that they restrict healthy food choices. There are some important vitamins and minerals that are found most abundantly in carbs, like the antioxidant content of fruits or the B vitamins found in whole wheat grains.

How to Include Carbs In Your Diet

While you shouldn’t completely restrict your carb intake, you shouldn’t blindly consume carbs either. Like most aspects of nutrition, how effective and healthy eating carbohydrates are for you depends on your ability to maintain a balance. If you don’t overeat carbohydrates, and don’t eat the wrong carbohydrates, you won’t have to worry about them making you gain weight.

Bad carbohydrates are those made using refined processes. The refining process removes all of the nutritional value from the carbohydrates. This is the process that makes white breads and products produced from white flour.

Good carbohydrates are those produced from whole grains and whole foods. So long as they aren’t processed, they maintain their nutritional value and will help you lose weight.