FEELING FRUMPY, FATIGUED, AND FORLORN?
Are You Carb Sensitive? by Kristin Grayce McGary
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re you carrying extra weight, especially around your middle? Do you crave carbohydrates and rarely feel satiated after you eat? Well, you’re not alone, and yet, I’d love for you to feel connected and juicy in a healthy and vibrant body again. I understand the struggles around food. I was a competitive bodybuilder, eating 600 calories a day, training for hours, and then rebounding and gaining 35 extra pounds during a serious illness. I began studying Western medicine and switched to Asian and Functional medicine because I intuitively understood that food was medicine, but it could also be like a poison. Western medicine never mentioned food while Asian medicine dove deeply into the micronutrients as well as the energetic qualities. I began to find ways to feed my body differently as well as my soul. Carbohydrates could be like a poison for you. Something called Carbohydrate Sensitivity can possibly explain why you have cravings for sugar, starches, 26 | Good Fat Life
chocolate, alcohol, cookies, and ice cream; as well as never really feeling full, even though your belly may be extending. Here’s how it works: Your body makes insulin in response to rising blood sugar levels due to the foods you’ve eaten. The more sugar and starches you eat, the more insulin is needed to shuttle the sugar from your blood into your cells. Sugar floating around in your blood is very toxic and causes organ and nerve damage so your body wants to usher it into your cells to be used as fuel. This fuel source isn’t very economical or efficient (more on this below). If you are sensitive to carbs, then you’re likely insulin resistant, which means your body isn’t able to move the sugar from your blood into your cells, so it begins to accumulate. And this accumulation causes more insulin to be released. The insulin isn’t able to do its important job and your body becomes tired. High levels of insulin lead to weight gain, fatigue, foggy thinking, liver issues, food cravings, inflammation, and unstable moods. It can make releasing excess
weight very difficult because most people don’t address the underlying cause: Carb Sensitivity aka Insulin resistance. At this point your likely thinking about what foods you may have to cut out, what you love to taste, what you reach for when you’re stressed, how will you be able to go out to eat with friends, what will your family say, and how impossible it all seems. I understand because I’ve been working with patients for the past 22 years who’ve struggled with stuffing their feelings with food, had body image issues, and became addicted to high sugar/starch foods in an attempt to soothe deeper pain. My dear mom is an emotional eater so I was raised watching her use food as medicine, but not in a healthy way. She used it for comfort because many other aspects of her life, especially her relationship with my father, caused her great pain. I love my dysfunctional family and I left home at age 17 to stabilize and grow beyond the patterns I was taught. I now teach others how to ask the tough questions, heighten
