One Can’t Lose Weight Without Carbs? O RILLY?

At present, my blogging has been very thin because I’ve got a lot of other things going on. Sadly, these things are not paid work, but the primary distraction from keeping up my blog has been studying for a personal trainer certification.

I already have a Level-1 CrossFit certification, but liability insurance companies do not recognize that as a mainstream certification and thus charge more for insurance. If I get a mainstream certification, I get an annual insurance discount that covers the certification in the first year. Seems like a no-brainer here, but there’s 310 pages of material that I need to absorb.

A lot of it has been interesting – I had forgotten a fair amount of biology (big shock, I last studied that in high school – all my college science was physics), and the biomechanics chapters were interesting on their own.

Of course there are 30 pages on nutrition. Of course it’s all conventional wisdom. On the second page, I encountered this:

For athletes and physically active adults, each meal should consist of 60-65% of the calories from carbohydrates, specifically complex carbohydrates, 15% from lean protein and 10% from fat. Carbohydrates, which are converted to the forms glucose and glycogen, are the body’s primary source of instant energy and longer term energy storage, respectively. Additionally, carbohydrates are required to burn fat; without a sufficient quantity of carbohydrates, a person will not effectively lose body fat. Protein is required to build and repair body tissues and structures. It is also used in the process of synthesizing hormones and is also used in the process of synthesizing hormones and hemoglobin, and is the body’s alternative source of energy if there is an insufficient source of carbohydrates.

That ought to come as a shock to anyone who has lost weight on Atkins Induction.

While protein can be turned into glucose, that process does not require carbohydrates. Furthermore, they seem to have not considered ketones that are created out of your own fat, and your brain can certainly run on ketones.