Why Cutting Carbs at Night Can Help You Build Muscle

Building your muscles gets harder and harder when you enter your 30s, as your levels of testosterone and growth hormone naturally start to decline. However, this problem gets even worse if you have a high amount of sugar in your diet. Manhattan endocrinologist Florence Comite, MD, author of Keep It Up: The Power of Precision Medicine to Conquer Low T and Revitalize Your Life, explains, ‘High blood sugar can compound that problem by hampering the production of both hormones and triggering fat storage. In fact, something as seemingly benign as having a cookie or a couple handfuls of chips late in the evening can undermine your efforts to build muscle.’

 

According to Comite, ‘Sleep is when your body does most self-restoration. Crucial to this process are human growth hormone (HGH) and insulin growth factor (IGF-1), which are typically produced at night. IGF-1 is triggered by the presence of HGH and is released by the liver and skeletal muscles to help build and repair tissues. Unfortunately, IGF-1 shares the same receptor sites as insulin, the peptide hormone that regulates carbohydrate and fat metabolism. When insulin is present because you’ve indulged in a high-carb snack before bed, IGF-1 is pushed aside. Eating carbohydrates at night hampers the muscle-repair process because insulin levels increase, preventing IGF-1 from binding to receptor sites.’

 

Therefore, if you avoid eating carbs after your evening meal and try consuming smaller meals low in high-glycemic carbs throughout the day, you may be able to get your muscle wellness back on track. However, if you really want to build muscle, you need a few more tricks up your sleeve:

 

1. Eat Plenty of Protein: ‘Protein provides the raw material needed to repair your daily tissue damage, not just your muscles after a workout,’ says Comite. ‘For example, your body replaces blood cells every 100 days or so. That’s a lot of cell turnover, and almost every system in your body is constantly renewing itself. You need to fuel that repair and renewal process by eating protein throughout the day. As a bonus, eating protein also helps you burn more calories because it takes more energy to metabolize protein than carbs (sugar) or fat.’

 

2. Eat it Early: Comite asserts, ‘I recommend this to almost every patient: Start each day with a protein-rich breakfast. It sets you up right. If you eat within 30 to 60 minutes of waking, you signal the body to start burning energy.’

 

3. Fill Up On Fibre: ‘Fibre, like protein and fat, helps you feel full, takes longer to digest, and slows the absorption of sugar into the bloodstream,’ notes Comite. ‘It also helps maintain digestive health and lower cholesterol. The daily recommendation is around 25 grams of fibre. Eating lots of vegetables will help you get there. Other high-fibre foods are apples, beans, and nuts. Grains like oatmeal (steel-cut is best) and quinoa are also good.’

 

4. Avoid Alcohol: Comite advises, ‘Cutting back or completely eliminating alcohol is one of the most effective ways to lose weight and improve your blood sugar levels. Think about it: Beer has one of the highest glycemic values of any beverage—a double shot of sugar from alcohol plus carbs. Wine, too, is very high in carbohydrates. Having one or two glasses of wine a couple of nights a week is generally not a problem.

 

5. Invest In Your Index: Your glycaemic index (GI) is ‘one of the best tools for combating diabetes (and losing weight),’ Comite points out. ‘This measure indicates how a typical serving of a certain food will raise your blood sugar.’

Categories: Blood Sugar, Build Muscle, comite, cutting carbs, eating protein, growth hormone, late night eating, muscle building, nbsp, Protein, receptor sites, Sugar

Rule Breakers: Dieting Findings That Will Blow Your Mind

By now, you’ve got this weight loss wellness thing down. Even if you don’t put the diet rules into practise, you know you should probably cut carbs, deny your naughty cravings and graze on healthy snacks all day, right? Wrong! Forget every weight loss trick you know, and prepare to have your mind blown by the new rules for dieting.

 

1. Don’t cut carbs: Reducing your carb intake is a staple diet technique, made popular by the Atkins craze. However, this is one classic weight loss rule you need to break, as this way of dieting simply isn’t sustainable, and you’re going to fall off the wagon and onto a massive pile of bread. In fact, a study published in the Annals of Internal Medicine showed that eating carbs in moderation helped dieters to lose about five pounds more than carb-avoiders. For your new rule, lead author of the study Dr. Marion Vetter, medical director at the Centre for Weight and Eating Disorders at the University Of Pennsylvania School Of Medicine, recommends eating five servings of grains daily, especially whole ones like oatmeal and brown rice. ‘Carbs provide great energy and fibre,’ she explains. ‘Avoiding them isn’t realistic.’

 

2. Don’t avoid egg yolks: Egg yolks get a bad rap in the world of health and wellbeing, but this disdain is misguided. At the University of Surrey, researchers found no difference in terms of weight loss and cholesterol reduction between dieters who ate two eggs daily for 12 weeks and those who didn’t. Bruce Griffin, lead author of the study and professor of nutritional metabolism, asserts, ‘The cholesterol in eggs is small compared with grams of saturated fat in processed meats.’ Do you know what else is in egg yolks? Plenty of protein, calcium, and iron. This means you can enjoy them as part of a balanced diet, and avoid the real cholesterol culprits like processed foods.

 

3. Don’t graze throughout the day: In the 90s, studies showed that snacking helps to curb your appetite. However, according to a new Canadian study, published in the British Journal of Nutrition, there was no weight loss difference between women who did and didn’t snack. Study author Eric Doucet, associate professor in the School of Human Kinetics at the University of Ottawa, says you should eat as many meals as you want – as long as you tally your calories. It’s ‘energy in versus energy out,’ Doucet notes, so speak to your GP about the amount of calories you need to consume to lose weight. Generally, this should be about 1,200 a day for women.

 

4. Eat midnight snacks: Eating late at night is often cited as a big dieting “no-no” but a recent study in the International Journal of Obesity has concluded that it’s what you eat, rather than when, that affects your waistline. Your metabolism will happily chug along regardless of what time you eat. Basically, eating a healthy dinner at 10pm means you won’t inhale Doritos in front of Strictly Come Dancing. As long as you don’t exceed your calorie count, eat as late as you like. Susan Roberts, study author and professor of nutrition and of psychiatry at Tufts University, argues that eating at a certain time isn’t important, and there’s no rule about how long to wait between meals, but as getting too hungry leads to overeating you need to ‘pace calories in a way that works for you.’

 

5. Cave in to cravings: Researchers at St. George’s University of London assert that abstaining from treats causes you to overindulge in the long-run, while University of Toronto researchers found that depriving people of specific foods led to binges. Author of the second study Janet Polivy, psychology professor at the University of Toronto, advises, ‘Eat small portions of the things you like. Decide how much you’ll eat — say, two chocolate squares.’ Put the rest back in the cupboard, and dig in.

Categories: carbs, cravings, eating, egg yolks, late night eating, lead author, study, study author, study published, university, weight, Weight Loss