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A few questions came up after yesterday's email worth chatting about
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Carbs if someone is metabolically unhealthy?
Hi Reader,
Yesterday's email on how I saw improvement in my metabolic markers after 90 days of more carbs & less fasting brought more replies than anything I've sent in months, and one question came in over and over:
"That's great for you, but what if I'm already metabolically unhealthy? Don't I have to keep carbs low?"
It's a fair question and it deserves some discussion - so I let's go into it today!
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Short answer: carbs can absolutely fit, and done right they may help you protect your metabolic rate and thyroid.
Here's what the research actually shows.
They tested this exact assumption, and it didn't hold up.
The DIETFITS trial put 609 adults with a BMI between 28 and 40 on either a healthy low-fat or a healthy low-carb diet for a full year. They specifically tested whether insulin secretion predicted who would do better on which diet, because everyone assumed it would.
Main Findings
- Weight Loss: Participants on the low-fat vs the low carb diet both lost weight and the difference between groups was not statistically meaningful.
- Genetics and Insulin: Neither a person's genotype pattern nor their baseline insulin secretion level predicted whether they would succeed more on a low-fat or low-carb plan
So "my metabolism is a mess, therefore carbs are off the table" is an assumption, not a statistical finding.
And there's a potential cost to cutting them completely.
This study is from 1976 and it still hasn't been beaten for clarity. Obese subjects were put on 800 calorie diets. On the version with no carbohydrate, T3 (your active thyroid hormone) dropped 47%. The same people, on the same calories, eating at least 50 grams of carbohydrate, had no significant change in T3 at all
Same deficit & same weight loss goal. Carbohydrate was the difference between a thyroid that kept working efficiently and one that downshifted.
Leptin (which is your body's energy accountant) responds to carbohydrate specifically.
In this study: Three days of carbohydrate overfeeding raised leptin by 28% and daily energy expenditure by 7%. Three days of fat overfeeding did neither . Small study with only ten women, but it points at something I see constantly: leptin, the hormone that tells your brain there's fuel around, is listening to carbohydrate in particular.
Which is exactly what I see in clients.
The women who come to me after years of restriction are running low thyroid output, low leptin, no energy and a metabolism that's turned itself down. Adding carbohydrate back, in the right amounts, at the right times, tends to bring those systems back online.
What I am not saying: There is also evidence that low carb diets can reduce insulin and blood sugar. That is true.
What I am saying is that "metabolically unhealthy means carbs are dangerous forever" isn't supported, and the cost of long term restriction is a thyroid and a leptin signal that keep sliding.
AND - "reduction" is different from "regulation".
This is precisely why I built the self-assessment tool.
Because the real answer depends on your numbers & your depletion status and sleep, not mine. The assessment scores your own answers, gives you a starting macro split, flags when you should NOT be in a deficit right away, and gives you a reintroduction ladder if you're coming off years of low carb.
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A few testimonials that came in this weekend:
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Warmly,
Sarah
Not medical advice. I'm a wellness educator, not your doctor. If you're managing diabetes or on medication, work these changes through with your provider.
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