Low carb diets – the lowdown
Getting the flab off the body is the main priority, nothing else matters. This seems to be the mantra of the current generation. Beware; you are in for trouble-Major pitfalls ahead! With the craze for weight loss and looking slim to be sexy, becoming the new age goal, the weight loss market has been flooded with all sorts of fad diets. The low carb diet belongs to this group of fad diets. You might have heard 2 things about the low carb diet: it helps in extreme weight loss and it is dangerous. How true is this?
Okay let us go through the nitty-gritty of the low carb diet, and get it sorted once and for all. What is meant by a low carb diet? As the term is self explanatory, it indicates that this particular diet suggests intake of carbohydrates in amounts that are lesser than in the normal diet.
To understand why the low carb diet harps on keeping the carbohydrate levels low, we need to understand how the digestion and conversion of calories work.
The human body basically can be understood as a super machine that works on carbohydrate as fuel. But nature has designed it in such a way, that in case of the main fuel being unavailable, it can always switch to the fat mode.
So that means, when the body cannot find enough carbohydrate to fuel the energy needs, it switches to burning or using up fat as the backup mode. This fat burning back-up mode is termed as Ketosis in medical terminology.
Is Ketosis a bad/ good thing?
Well, Ketosis is definitely not in the good books of the medical community. Ketosis has been implicated as the cause of major and sometimes fatal complications like Kidney damage and major internal organ shut down.
So what does the Low carb diet do?
The low carb diet aims at bringing in a state of Ketosis in the body, so as to help the body burn up its own reserve fat as fuel. Though the idea might seem very exciting, yet the long term effects on the body have already been listed above.
Due to the state of ketosis, the fat stored up in the body in all unwanted and (unsightly) places, starts getting burnt to fuel the energy needs of the body, resulting in effective weight loss.
The Atkins diet, Zone diet, South Beach diet etc are all examples of a low carb diet.
Category: Diet Plans
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