Do Humans Need to Eat Carbohydrates Often for Optimal Health? Part 2

Hearing numerous fasting and low carb success stories is the best antidote to the message that these practices are harmful long-term. Many people have obtained the best health of their life fasting.

In last week’s post on Do Humand Need Some Carbohydrates for Optimal Health Part 1, I only said about half of what I wanted to say. But as the post was getting long, I cut it off. This week I’d like to add another layer to the foundation laid last week.

By way of reminder, I am not arguing that all people must cut all carbs and fast like a crazy person to be healthy. One of my stated goals in my coaching practice is to get people to the point where they can eat as widely as possible while still having great health, freedom from addiction, and freedom from excess weight. If someone can accomplish their goals while eating a wide variety of foods and fasting minimally, that’s great.

But we often have to use extreme or semi-extreme measures for a time to shake up whatever may be broken in the gut, in the hunger hormones, or to conquer that pesky thing called insulin resistance. Once healing is obtained, people can experiment with adding back in varying amounts of carbs and sugar and see how they respond.

I know a few people who have chosen to adopt a very low carb lifestyle long-term simply because that gives them freedom from food cravings, gives them more energy, and makes eating healthy extremely simple. One person I’m close with has found that whenever she returns to eating carbs, her weight begins to creep back up, and she falls back into bad eating habits. She enjoys living a very low carb lifestyle, and shows absolutely no signs of rising cortisol, stress to her body, or slow thyroid. She plans to continue very low carb for life.

So the goal of this series of posts (perhaps I’ll do more than two, we shall see) is to defend a low carb and fasting lifestyle as a legitimate, scientifically-backed, long-term, healthy option for many. My goal is not to insist that everyone must live that way long term if they don’t need to for health.

But unfortunately, the intermittent fasting lifestyle and/or low carb lifestyles are both under attack even as an option. If the conflicting message were stated along the lines of: “Not everyone needs to live a very low carb lifestyle; not everyone needs to fast…” then it would be easy to let them have their opinion and move on.

Instead, the opposition is stated in absolutist statements such as, “Low carb and IF lifestyles are always damaging long term, slow down the metabolism, slow down the thyroid, and make you more likely to regain weight in the long term.” This is never qualified as applying to some people but implied to include everyone.

Those are fighting words because they’re coming after all of us, and they’re using fear to do it. The fear tactic is stating that fasting and low carb will mess you up. Those are high stakes. And that claim is antithetical to everything I’ve witnessed in myself, in many others, and is discordant with the results of thousands. I continually read science pointing to how fasting and carb restriction set to right numerous disease pathways in the body that no medicine can touch.

So I can’t let that misleading message slide. This is confirmed by the fact that I get many questions about it. People are becoming confused and derailed.