Good Carbs: 7 Healthy Carbs to Add To Your Diet

all right I'm going to come right out and say it you can eat carbs and still lose weight and be healthy right now the whole internet is chalk full of extreme diet ideas many people are saying that you should only eat meat or only eat this and never eat carbs and in my experience they are flat out wrong over the past 10 years of running the fit father project and fit mother project I've helped over 60,000 men and women in their 40s 50s 60s and 70s lose weight and actually sustain it over the Long Haul and all these people you see right here they are eating carbs on a daily basis in fact many of these people are eating bread on a daily basis so what I want to show you in this video is seven of my personal favorite healthy carbs these are carbs that I incorporate for myself and my family they're healthy they're nourishing we have them at dinner we just use the right kinds in the right portions that's what you're going to get in this video and I hope ultimately that this video is a little freeing for you that you can realize that you can eat healthy food you can eat lower carbs but have the right amount that gives you a balanced sustainable nutrition plan the actually enjoy sticking to that gives you health and energy so let's get into today's video we'll cover those seven healthy carbs and if you want an exact program to follow the nutrition plan the exercise how to incorporate fasting the right supplements then scroll below into the description in the pin comments we have amazing programs for dads and moms over the age of 40 you can check those out let's get into the carbs in today's video I want to say a couple things before we get into this video number one it's very important that you pick the right kinds of carbs in your diet right now we see a trend where there's a lot a lot of people moving to low carb diets whether it's a pure ketogenic diet or just cutting out the carbs and I believe that's a very good thing because we look at the kind of foods that are causing disease and illness in today's culture it is sugar it is process refined greens lots of white stuff a lot of inflammatory foods and we want to move away from those and we want to get to a more natural less processed diet and often times it means we're lowering our carb intake but I think there's also a point here to say is a lot of people have almost villainized carbohydrates as this like a bad thing that you don't want carbs and I personally don't believe that's true I believe that carbohydrates the specific right kinds of foods can actually enhance your health tremendously and I think I'm going to prove that to you from some of the research and I also incorporate these seven foods into my diet to increase my energy and my performance and I also eat a lower carbohydrate diet but it certainly does contain carbohydrates just the right kinds at the right times we're going to get into that in today's video now these seven foods I'm about to share with you are not like the only seven healthy carbohydrates they're just my personal preference so there may be a food that doesn't make this list that I made that might be incredibly healthy and a carbohydrate containing food so just know that if you have questions you want to talk about some more of the stuff you can also go in the comments drop a comment for me and my team we'll get back to you so let's get into this list of my favorite carbohydrate containing foods first on this list are some good organic berries now most people know that berries are very healthy for you and and they're absolutely phenomenal for so many reasons one of the reasons is that that berries give you this combination of vitamins minerals energy in the form of sugar but also a lot of fiber at the same time so let's look at like a raspberry for example this guy is amazing so you get like a one cup of raspberries and it's going to have like 15 grams of carbs and half of those carbs are fiber but you're also getting a lot of these antioxidant nutrients like in nature anything that is a bright vibrant color like the red of the The Raspberries the blue of the blueberries is coming from these specific compounds that make the food that color so like carrots are orange they have something called beta carotene that makes them orange and beta carotene is a precursor to vitamin A gives us lots of health benefits blueberries are blue because they have these things called proanthocyanidins in them and they just give us a ton of health benefits good for immune system good for your vision good for anti-cancer properties raspberries have these too so berries are colorful they're just jam-packed with nutrients yes they do have some sugar but if you look at the overall glycemic impact like how how your blood sugar spikes or doesn't based on berries it gives you a very gradual Spike it's not like eating a piece of white bread or or really refined carbohydrate you get a huge Spike and a huge crash berries give you level clean energy which I love also fruit itself as a category is very good because it helps feed your gut bacteria the fiber you find in fruits your gut bacteria love it and when you have healthy gut bacteria you typically have a much healthier body right it's easier to lose weight your immune system's stronger you just feel better in general so I love love that and they're also very easy to digest a good time to have fruit is before your first meal of the day whether you're breaking a fast sometime around 11: or you're having breakfast in the morning having a little bit of fruit can be great because it's so easy for your body to digest wakes your GI traed up provides some Fiber for healthy digestive tract and a ton of nutrients and I think some people look at fruit and they're like concerned about the sugar so I want to read a couple things um this is a controlled study in obes people um who were eating 1.5 ounces of freeze-dried blueberries for 8 weeks they noticed a 20 8% reduction in their oxidized LDL levels so LDL is a particular kind of cholesterol that people call bad cholesterol turns out it's only really bad if it's a small dense type or if it gets oxidized well these guys the antioxidants in berries protect those fats and the cholesterol in your body from getting oxidized so that's very good they did another six we study with obese people with insulin resistance so on the on the on the spectrum of becoming diabetic who drink a blueberry smoothie twice per day and experienced greater improvements in insulin sensitivity than those who consumed Berry free smoothies so look there's sugar in there but they're improving their insulin levels because the whole concert and the host of stuff in berries are just phenomenal there's animal and human s suggested berries may protect against cancer in the esophagus mouth breasting colon and another study of people with colon cancer eating 2 ounces of free freeze dries raspberries for weeks 1 through nine improve tumor markers so it's there's so much research we can get into the whole point is berries are great some of the best fruits now let not say I don't like other fruits in the summer when it's hot and maybe especially if you're an athlete and you're exercising a lot melons are great they give you a lot of uh water content you can eat a lot of them as well but berries I'd say are the the first food on this list now we're going to switch gears away from fruits we're going to talk about a different kind of carbohydrate and that is a complex carbohydrate in the form of Ezekiel bread I want to make the second on list for a very specific reason because I think a lot of people right now are afraid of eating bread and that's because we've heard so much about the problems with one gluten might be inflammatory for everyone in the GI tract right we also know that the kind of wheat that we have today has been hybridized genetically modified and sprayed with all sorts of pesticides like round up and crap like that that makes the wheat very toxic and we also know that the way we're actually producing these grains and processing them is different than how our ancient ancestors did so meet Ezekiel Bread which is an ancient whole grain organic sprouted bread so the process of actually what they've done is in EO bread they gathered wheat barley lentils soybean spell like a multihole grains they sprout them which means you soak these things in water to allow the actual the seeds of these things to sprout and when they sprout a lot of amazing stuff happens some of the anti-nutrients that are in some of these grains they get eaten up in the sprouting process it releases a lot more of their nutrition and Ezekiel bread is great because if you're someone out there who just loves the convenience of having a sandwich for lunch this is something we recommend inside our fit father and fit mother programs it's not to say you have to have Ezekiel bread and if bread doesn't make you feel good don't have it it but you can the low glycemic impact of this EO bread is amazing it hardly spikes your blood sugar at all I think the GI the glycemic index of of Ezekiel bread is 36 it's up to a scale of 100 is white bread 36 like that might be lower than a lot of this the Foods on this list it's not going to spike your blood sugar gives you good source of fiber there's tons of B vitamins in there and it's just overall awesome and in fact the sprouting aspect of this was what I think makes it special so whether you have access to Ezekiel bread or another kind of sprouted organic bread this can be something you have in your diet and the last thing I'll say about bread though in particular is it's a very individual thing there are certain people who can tolerate wheat and feel fine try the ezo bread see if that works for you if you can't tolerate wheat if you makes it feel bloated if it messes up your poops if you just feel worse after having it then maybe your body's not not good to have the wheat but for those that can tolerate it Ezekiel Bread's the kicker and it's very good to have because again you can make Ezekiel bread sandwiches can be Health promoting simple convenient that's great third on this list are sweet potatoes or yams or pretty much much any other kind of tuber so tubers are these root vegetables we've been figuring these out for you know thousands and thousands of years where humans have been digging up these roots and we've been cooking them and turns out they have a lot of great health benefits so sweet potatoes a bag of these guys right here these little sweet potatoes are orange what do you think makes them orange well it's the beta katene it's the vitamin A that makes them orange and research has shown that they're just phenomenal um for improving your immune strength for improving your vision uh and it just really great and I think a lot of people that they're good about these tubers and sweet potatoes a lot of people are not reactive to these these actually meet the criteria of being paleo because ancient ancestors would have dug up tubers and cook them and they're also delicious you can put a sweet potato on the side of any other kind of protein and you have a really good meal so imagine a a little a sweet potato maybe like it's like a love for the size of my fist with the side of some kind of green vegetable with a protein you have an amazingly healthy meal they're easy to make you can Cube them you can uh you can Cube them and make a hash you can slice them and bake them you can steam them there's so many ways to make sweet potatoes and overall very good one thing I like to do with my sweet potatoes to make sure they don't Spike blood sugar too much is I add a little healthy fat so a little bit of let's just say some olive oil or maybe some grass-fed butter or something on top with some salt and pepper is going to help give you some healthy fats in addition to the fiber and the vitamins you're getting from the sweet potato to give you nice smooth blood sugar you're not getting these massive spikes and crashes I think they're really great food and also if you look at some of the places where people live the longest like Japan Okinawa Japan they have sweet potatoes as a staple of their diet and I think it makes a lot of sense they're getting a lot of the fiber the vitamins minerals Etc um very good so another way you can do them as well is for a nice snack you can make sweet potato chips cut that thing really really thinly and either bake it or dehydrate it with some spices salt pepper on there very good nice snack and absolutely a food that a lot of people don't have an immune reaction to so that's why it makes my list next category of food is I actually don't have it in front of me here but it is squash particularly like butternut squash or maybe summer squash what's really interesting is we just don't have a lot of squash in our diets at least most of us don't but squash is amazing it is a lower glycemic carbohydrate Source meaning it's not going to give you a big spike in your blood sugar it's got a lot of the same vitamins and minerals and stuff that the sweet potatoes do because it has color to it the color is coming from those vitamins and minerals and it's absolutely delicious you can cut it you can bake it you can season it it's a really good carbohydrate and this will be a good time because I don't have too much more to say about squash because it shares a lot of the same features as sweet potatoes to say that when it comes to carbohydrates the amount matters so in our fit father and fit mother programs and we're giving you recipes and exactly what to eat and how much it's typically like a serving of carbohydrates for most people around dinner is around 50 grams so that's around let's just say a cup of rice or it's around 6 ounces or so of sweet potato so it's just a reasonable portion and when you combine that with proteins healthy fats and veggies you have a balanced meal not going to spike your blood sugar too crazy and you can still enjoy some carbohydrates in fact the last carbon this list white rice is something I also think is great at the right times and I'll explain that in a little bit so next carb on our list quinoa or Canoa as people call it quinoa is amazing um I really love it it's you can almost use it like a rice substitute and my family and I we make it in a rice cooker we just put the quinoa in the water maybe a little bit of broth cook it and it's cool so the reason I think quinoa is special is that it is one of the only plant protein sources that has all of the essential amino acids it's a complete protein so let's just look at a cup of cooked rice for example the rice will have around 40 to 50 grams of carbs which is comparable what a cook a cup of cook quinoa will have but quinoa also has eight grams of protein a ton of fiber B vitamins natural omega-3 fatty acids it's just very very good I I love it I think it's it's a food that a lot of people don't react to and if you want a substitute for rice maybe you want to mix it up quinoa can be really wonderful so I'm a big fan I make it in the rice cooker fiber protein slow burning carbohydrates quinoa is a big winner in my book the next on our list of my healthy carbohydrates that I absolutely love are pressure cooked beans or lentils so it's pretty clear from the research that legumes beans lentils they have fiber they have protein they have iron they have a ton of vitamins and minerals and they're good for our health yet in recent I'd say in the last 5 10 years in the nutrition landscape more and more people are talking about anti-nutrients lectins and some things that naturally occur in these foods that can make us sick and not make us feel good and certain beans and lentils and legumes have lectins in them so imagine this like we like to think of things all the time when it comes to nutrition as like how does it serve us but the beans and legumes they're their own organism and they create certain kinds of compounds like phytic acid for example um to help you know basically protect themselves and these antinutrients can really mess with our gut that's why a lot of people who consume beans the mix of the fiber and some of the antinutrients can really mess with your digestive system and there are certain people who go go as far to say is if you're consuming lectins from these Foods they're actually just totally damaging your GI tract and they're not good well it turns out if you pressure cook beans it basically eliminates the lectins so you soak the beans in lentils in water this is how humans usually traditionally prep beans and legumes you soak them in water so you put them in water you let them sit ideally overnight you pour out that water because that actually helps get some of those antinutrients out then you pressure cook that stuff my wife makes an amazing high protein vegetarian chili that has all different sorts of beans that has some tomatoes we have it on the side with quinoa it's a really good way to have a plant-based meal that's just packed with protein and vitamins I absolutely love it beans are also good cuz they have a particular kind of fiber in them that can lower your cholesterol they're very slow burning they help you control your appetite there's just a lot of benefits to them you just got to prepare them right so the pressure cooker and the soaking is what I recommend and we have the recipe for the high protein chili inside our fit father and fit mother programs so if you join our programs you have access to that inside the meal plan now the last carbohydrate I want to include on this list is some long grain white rice I like white rice I always have my entire life and what I've come to find is it's actually something that can be incorporated into an healthy meal plan I think there was this big dogma and stigma in nutrition where it was like anything that was white was bad so it was saying you should have brown rice you should have whole wheat bread instead of white bread and it turns out like most things in life it's just not that simple in fact I think there's enough evidence in today's day and age to say that long grain white rice is far healthier than brown rice so what's the difference well the brown rice has that whole layer still intact this brain layer around the rice has some vitamins and it has some Fiber but when it comes to looking at any given food we need to look at the big picture and it turns out there's a couple things wrong with brown rice versus this white rice one the brand layer around that brown rice has some antinutrients that can impact your absorption of certain minerals so you don't want too many antinutrients and number two is rice sucks up arsenic from the soil arsenic is a heavy metal that if consumed can actually have damaging health effects it's linked to certain kinds of cancers immune dysfunction bad stuff well it turns out that brown rice sucks up a lot more arsenic than white rice does and also removing the hole of the white rice means you're not getting some arsenic exposure in that in that sense also the the length of the grain of the rice matters too short grain rice has a different carbohydrate composition that spikes your blood sugar a lot more than a long grain white rice in fact a long grain white rice has a 56 glycemic index so 100 is like white bread 56 is considered low glycemic index so imagine if you did have a little bit rice on the side of a salmon with some grilled asparagus this could be like a balanced plate of food if you will the healthy fats and the protein from the salmon paired with the the proper serving of white rice maybe around a cup with the fiber of the asparagus it's going to be a whole complete delicious meal that's not going to spike your blood sugar so the type of rice matters um I make it in a rice cooker I have it on occasion good times to have the rice would be maybe for dinner after after exercise if you want to load up on that and if you have young kids who need a lot of calories they're growing they're active they're playing sports white rice can be a good fuel source right you're giving him some carbohydrates carbohydrates can be used for energy it's like our main pathway is use carbohydrates so you can get this in the right amounts at the right times as you get older just make rice something that you have on occasion and make sure you get the the long grain white rice I think that's very very effective and helpful um and and you can also it's really convenient when you know rice is a good car but you can maybe go to some kind of quick meal at a place like Chipotle and you can get some kind of rice or salad bowl with some protein with some lettuce and guacamole and you have a delicious just healthy meal so rice can be in there as well so these are my top seven favorite healthy carbs things I have on a regular basis and to wrap and tie this up I'll tell you about what my daily routine might often look like I will get up and I will rehydrate I will go outside and I'll walk my body I'll get sun on my skin a little sun on my eyes for circadian rhythm and I'll start breathing through my nose to get my system activated before I have my first meal of the day I'll have a single serving or a serving of some kind of fruit so it might be berries might be that day it might be some kind of core fruit maybe it's apples or pears it might melon that day but I pick a fruit and berries are probably my number one because of all the health benefits and then I go throughout my day I might have a I might have a breakfast that has some eggs or maybe it's a protein shake or something with some healthy fats in there for lunch I'll have some greens um with healthy fats on top of there so like avocado extra virgin olive oil a protein on top of that it's a really good thing and for dinner I'll make what we like to call perfect plates which is half of the plate is filled with some kind of Veggie I love our family does a lot of baked asparagus as something we steam broccoli or common things we have a quarter of the plate is some kind of protein I love could be wild salmon could be turkey could be chicken could be tofu or Tempe if it's a plant-based meal and then a quarter of that plate is going to be some kind of healthy carbohydrates so you might find a yam on my plate you might find some white rice it might be some quinoa I mix it up but I'm rotating these kinds of things in there and of course for lunches occasionally Ezekiel Bread sandwich is one of the quickest easiest ways you can do to get good nutrition in and it's also delicious to have a sandwich once in a while so I'm a big believer of balancing both the science and the practicality because I think when you marry those two things together you have a routine that's actually sustainable and what's sustainable is what you can stick to and what you can stick to is what's going to give you results on an ongoing basis so throw out these super radical super restrictive Works only in the short-term plans and start thinking from sustainability and also clean non-processed foods and you can enjoy your carbohydrates in the right portions at the right time so they can promote your health so thank you my friend I hope you enjoyed this video we have another video on my top 10 favorite healthy fats so if you're interested in learning more about that you and check out our Channel hit subscribe as well because you get access to our entire video library over 500 videos at this point plus you get notified if you check the little notification Bell when we publish new videos so you'll get notified on your phone on your computer and that's super cool because we upload at least a couple videos per week a mix of these kinds of educ educational content videos but also podcasts where we're interviewing our members pulling out some of the stories of the art of transforming your health and gaining muscle and losing weight in your 40s 50s and 60s I hope you really love that so hit the Subscribe button give us a thumbs up if you found this valuable if you have questions you have comments something you want to interject in this conversation drop a comment below my team and I would love to hear from you continue this conversation thank you for Vi my friend hit the like button subscribe I'll see you on our channels and I'll talk to you very soon

Channel: The Fit Mother Project - Fitness For Busy Moms

Views: 57,727

Keywords: carbs that are healthy, what are healthy carbs, benefits of good carbs, list of healthy carbs, carbs that are good, good carbohydrates, healthy carbs

Id: OkyqvJczOhg

Length: 19min 40sec (1180 seconds)

Published: Sat Apr 20 2024