Carbohydrate & Weight Loss
Introduction

Carbohydrate is often considered "non-essential" for dieters -- but that's not quite correct.

Carbohydrate is actually so vital to your health that your body will begin to make carbohydrate (glucose) out of muscle or organ protein if you don't eat enough.

But this often means you are losing muscle or organ tissue, which dieters do not want to do, because these are the main "fat-burning" tissues of the body. So the less of them you have the harder it is to lose weight.

Main Discussion:
Carbohydrate is the main dietary form of glucose, which your body must have to remain healthy.

Most people know that the brain and nervous system strongly "prefer" to use glucose for fuel whenever it is sufficiently available. But these organs can, in an emergency, use the "ketone bodies" from fat metabolism as fuel instead.

But this is not true for certain blood and other cells in your body. They must have glucose or die.

For this reason, when it doesn't get enough dietary carbohydrate, your body will make a minimum amount of glucose out of your muscle or organ tissue to keep these blood cells alive.

You lose muscle when muscle tissue is used to make glucose.

You do not want this to happen!

Muscles and organs "prefer" to use fat for fuel. The more muscle you have, the more fat is used -- 24/7. Losing weight becomes more difficult as you lose more muscle.

For this reason, Multi-Dieters want to eat enough carbohydrate to prevent muscle loss. The current "best estimate" of the minimum needed to do this is between 50 and 100 grams per day (which is 200-400 Calories).

However, too much carbohydrate also prevents weight loss, because when your body is busy burning  the Calories in the excess carbohydrate you just ate, it's not burning the excess Calories in your fat cells. And that's no way to lose weight.

There are several other carbohydrate- related issues you may want to know about. We discuss them in the next several parts of this section.

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