At Inspirit Retreat we spend a lot of our time dispelling myths. Here’s one: “you’ll never lose weight if you eat carbs.”
At Inspirit Retreat we spend a lot of our time dispelling myths. Here’s one: “you’ll never lose weight if you eat carbs.”
Thanks to the internet, there are a lot of overnight experts on this kind of thing – and there’s a huge amount of misinformation, too. The fact is, it’s perfectly possible to eat carbs as part of a long-term nutrition and weight loss plan.
The key word there? “Long-term.” The anti-carb brigade tend to be the ones who want immediate results after years of poor diet and stress – the ones who can’t wait to do the next cleanse, who believe they’ll find that magic supplement to make all the fat disappear, who want it all done yesterday so they never have to worry about it again.
Often, they’ll go to extremes, removing carbs and fats completely, and hardly eating any calories at all. This approach never works, and it can can sometimes do you quite a lot of harm. Apart from anything, it’s no fun at all – so why would you keep doing it?
The metabolism is incredibly complex. Thousands of chemical reactions and enzyme activities are occurring every single second. You can be storing fat in one part of the body, and burning it in another. With everything that’s going on, simply saying “drop carbs lose fat” is pretty meaningless.
Carbs are not the enemy, and they’re always on the menu at Inspirit Retreat’s base in Portugal. The important thing is that they should be part of an overall long-term diet and wellbeing strategy – and that’s exactly what we work on creating for each of our clients.
There’s no such thing as a free ride when it comes to carbs (or calories, for that matter), but you don’t have to go through purgatory either. Carbs, like every other food group, play an important part in a balanced, pleasant diet. An unbalanced, unpleasant diet is no use to anyone.
