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Medical Video: Everything You Need to Know About the Keto Diet
A low carbohydrate diet is one of the most popular types of diets used to lose weight. But now, a study found that a low-carbohydrate diet is not only beneficial for regulating body weight, but also increases the body's metabolism - especially for women. What is the article?
Why eating low carbohydrate foods increases a woman's body metabolism?
A small study from the University of Michigan's School of Kinesiology found that eating low-carbohydrate foods can improve women's metabolic performance in ways that do not occur when consuming high-carbohydrate foods.
This study reported, when a person eats three servings of low-carbohydrate foods (only 30 percent in 24 hours), his blood sugar levels and insulin resistance are reduced by 30 percent. Conversely, when eating three servings of food containing 60 percent carbohydrates within 24 hours, no reduction was found at all in both blood sugar levels and insulin resistance. The study involved 32 healthy postmenopausal women, aged 50 to 65 years, and had no signs of diabetes or prediabetes. Then why is this important?
Insulin is the main hormone that helps the body break down and process carbohydrates into energy for the body and brain. One of the functions of insulin is to order fat cells to produce fat and store it, and also to maintain the fat they have brought before.
When the carbohydrate intake is low, insulin production also decreases. As a result, fat deposits are no longer locked in fat cells and become easily accessible to the body for use as energy. In short, high insulin in the body contributes to fat storage, while low insulin levels facilitate fat burning. This is the main reason for the effectiveness of a low carbohydrate diet.
But the study also found that exercise time might play a role in how a low-carbohydrate diet can benefit your metabolism.
Exercise after eating low carbohydrate foods burns more fat
During exercise, you need energy, which will trigger the production of insulin to encourage the release of blood sugar from the liver. If you eat before exercising, the newly digested food will be processed into blood sugar immediately by the body, and discarded in the form of energy - instead of exerting energy from the previously stored fat reserves.
On the other hand, low carbohydrate intake from your low carbo diet makes the body not have enough blood sugar to be processed into energy. The lack of supply of blood sugar in the body does not meet the energy capacity needed by the muscles, causing the body to shift the focus of energy production from existing fat storage reserves.
Another reason is, by undergoing a low carbohydrate diet, people tend to replace the energy intake from blood sugar calories with high protein foods, such as meat, fish, or chicken / eggs. A number of studies have shown that protein can reduce appetite, increase metabolism, and help increase muscle mass, which is also metabolically active to burn the body's calories.
Based on these findings, the research team recommends that you want to lose weight with a low carbohydrate diet to balance your healthy diet with exercise, which is done at least 40 minutes after eating for the most optimal performance of body fat burning.
