Carbs, Glycemic Index, Insulin Sensitivity, and Performance— A Delicate Balance Made Simple

In this empowering solo episode, I dive deep into the science of carbohydrates and their profound impact on mental and physical performance. As your host, Andres Preschel, I share actionable insights on how to harness the power of carbohydrates by considering factors like glycemic index, timing, and exercise intensity. This episode is designed to help you understand the crucial role of carbs in fueling your body and mind while dispelling myths around carb phobia.

I break down the art of tailoring your carbohydrate intake to your activity levels, explaining how to maintain steady energy, optimize exercise performance, and avoid the pitfalls of hyper- or hypoglycemia. Through relatable analogies and real-life strategies, I guide you on how to adapt your nutrition to match your daily demands, ensuring both stability and peak performance throughout your day.

Whether you’re seeking to elevate your workouts, sustain mental clarity, or refine your nutritional habits for longevity, this episode is a practical roadmap to using carbohydrates as a powerful tool for health optimization. Tune in to learn how to make carbs work for you and achieve your highest potential in all aspects of life!

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Links Mentioned in Today’s Episode:
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Key Points From This Episode:

Carbohydrates as efficient fuel source. [00:01:10] 

Carbohydrate glycemic index explained. [00:05:17] 

Meal timing and carbohydrate intake. [00:09:10] 

Andrés Preschel

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Official Website:

• knowyourphysio.org

Personal Website:

• andrespreschel.com

Chapters

• 0:00 Intro
• 1:10 Carbohydrates as efficient fuel source
• 5:17 Carbohydrate glycemic index explained
• 9:10 Meal timing and carbohydrate intake

Transcript

Andres Preschel:
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Andres Preschel: Welcome to the first official Know Your Physio solo podcast episode, hosted by yours truly, Andres Preschel. Today, we're going to talk about carbohydrate and how to consider the amount, glycemic index, and timing of carbs for optimal mental and physical performance, as well as longevity. So something you should know is that I love carbs and I love carbs almost as much as I hate carb phobia. I hate fear mongering around a carbohydrate. Because carbs, AKA glucose, what carbs eventually break up into. Carbs are the most efficient fuel source in the human body for mental and physical performance. They are the most efficient. They're the most readily converted into ATP. And in order to get carbs working for you other than against you, you want to match your carb intake and the glycemic index of those respective carbs to the intensity and proximity to exercise respectively. So that means you obviously want to eat more carbohydrate and you can technically afford to eat more of it the more active you are. and you can afford a higher glycemic index. So that's the blood glucose response to the carbs that you're consuming and how quickly the blood glucose increases in response to the carbs that you consume. You want to match that to the proximity to exercise. So basically the closer you are to exercise, Meaning right before, during and after, for example, you can have and afford high glycemic index carbs, take advantage of that rising glucose to use that energy immediately as a fuel source. Or, you know, after exercise, taking advantage of high insulin sensitivity, after all that muscle contraction, to take up carbohydrate and help replenish cells, replenish glycogen. And then during activity, obviously, you know, this can be useful as a performance aid to keep glycogen stores topped off. Glycogen, by the way, is stored carbohydrate in the muscle and the liver that you use for fuel. You can use it during activity to keep carbohydrate stores topped off. You can also, believe it or not, swish around carbohydrate in your mouth. and it activates chemoreceptors that can boost your energy and reduce the perception of fatigue that has something to do with, well, your body's under the impression that it's about to receive carbohydrate and it can essentially kind of give you a boost that it believes it can afford to give you when you're under some kind of you know, intense high performance bout. So just swishing around the carbs in your mouth, believe it or not, can give you a boost in energy. Anyway, moving forward here, I want to, I want to share a, a, a good analogy to help you make sense of everything I just said, because odds are, it may have gone over your head. And I don't say that to insult you. I say that because I tend to, um, underestimate how much people know about carbohydrate, how much they actually know, how much they know about the physiology. And I tend to overestimate my ability as an expert to make things simple. So here's a good analogy to help you make sense of all this. So for optimal performance and to make our insulin sensitivity and to maintain our insulin sensitivity over time, we can think about carb intake at varying intensities, like the gears on a bike shifting to maintain our cadence. So according to Cycling Weekly Magazine, gears on a bike are there to enable us to maintain a comfortable pedaling speed, or cadence, regardless of the gradient or terrain that we're on. Something that no one single gear is capable of. So, like gears on a bike, there's no single amount or type of carbohydrate for optimal performance. The idea is to adjust our carb intake and glycemic index according to physical demand so we can keep our blood glucose levels steady for x unit of time. Think about blood glucose like cadence. So as intensity increases, the demand for carbohydrate increases, and we need to shift up in our gears more carbs more quickly. aka higher glycemic index, to maintain the most efficient cadence. So this is for high performance. Interestingly, the most efficient cadence on a road bike is about 80 to 100 rotations per minute and the ideal blood glucose levels for optimal health are stable around 80 to 100 milligrams per deciliter. If we consume too many carbs with too high a glycemic index, when the relative demand for carbohydrate is low, all of a sudden our feet are spinning quickly on this hypothetical bike. Our cadence is super high, but we're not going anywhere. And this is hyperglycemia. Your glucose levels are too high and you start feeling like crap. If we don't consume enough carbs and or consume carbs with a very low glycemic index when demand is high, our cadence plummets and now it's really difficult to get those wheels turning. This is hypoglycemia. Low blood glucose and you also feel like crap. Either way, you won't be feeling your pest or covering much distance in either scenario. So this is obviously just a small introduction, but hopefully it keeps you from fearing carbs and understanding the essential role that varying carbohydrate sources at varying glycemic indexes can and will do for you. Helpful tools that you can look into on your own time include a carbohydrate glycemic index chart so you can understand generally what are low carbs, what are moderate glycemic index carbs, what are high glycemic index carbs. Just as a reference, to give you guys a good example, pure sugar has a glycemic index of 100. It just dissolves immediately in water and our body is mostly water so obviously the glycemic response is going to be extremely high, as high as it can get basically. Whereas something like beans and lentils, which contain carbohydrate, but you know that carbohydrate comes attached to fiber and that needs to break up in the body, right? So that's going to have a lower postprandial glucose response. So the blood glucose response to eating that food is going to be lower and slower since it needs to, you know, take its time to break down. And then there's moderate glycemic index carbs. You can think about those like, you know, potatoes, for example, banana, depending on the ripeness, you know, obviously the riper the banana, the higher, and the sweeter, the higher the glycemic index. I typically like to eat slightly green bananas. I'm just snacking on a banana, slightly green because that has resistant starches. So it breaks up a little more slowly, lower postprandial glucose response. If I'm about to go work out or I'm in a workout or just after exercise, I'll have a sweet banana. I'll even have honey, you know, and I can afford to consume that. And in fact, it supports my performance. And yeah, throughout the day, if I'm just kind of, you know, working on my computer and having meetings and kind of sitting around, so, you know, physically I'm sedentary, I will go very low in carbohydrate. And if I want some carbs, I'll go very low on the glycemic index. So I do less carbs, lower glycemic index, and now I have more stable blood glucose levels. Mentally, I feel clearer because I don't have, you know, this roller coaster of glycemia God. you know, just leading to further impulsive and bad behaviors and cravings throughout the day. You know, I'm not on this glucose roller coaster and I have everything I need to be stable, to be mentally clear, energized, um, et cetera. Uh, me personally, since I like to exercise in the early morning, typically around 8 to 9 AM, I like to go and exercise, fasted. Um, just what works for me and what I like. I will take advantage of that high-intensity activity that I have in the morning, since I was obviously fasting overnight, and the exercise, and I'll go and I'll have a large meal post-exercise, taking advantage of this high-intensity activity, and I'll include a moderate amount of carbohydrates, since I like to go right into work mode afterwards. And then the middle of the day, I'm pretty sedentary. I mean, I'm walking a bunch and all that, but relatively more sedentary and I like to get a lot of work done mentally. So I'll do very, very low amount of carbs. Luckily, if you make it next, typically a lunch for me is something like jovial cannellini beans. Those are… Um, you know, beans that come in a glass jar, BPA free Italian pre-soaked pressure cooked. So they're easy to digest. Um, they have tons of protein, tons of fibers, like 20 something grams of protein and like 14 grams of fiber. And I don't know, 30 to 40 grams of carbs. I could be wrong, but either way, very low glycemic index. And now I feel satiated, I feel good, energized, and I can go throughout the day feeling awesome. And then for dinner, I'll go heavier on carbs. That's typically when I have the most carbs because now I'm getting ready to go to sleep. Obviously to me, but maybe not obvious to you guys, the food order on your plate matters too for postprandial glucose response. So I always eat a protein and fiber first of my meal, carbohydrate last, regardless of the glycemic index. So for dinner, I'll go heavier on the carbs, I'll eat those last on the plate, and I'll just have as much of that as my body wants. And I'll allow that glycogen, typically it's starchier carbs, and I'll allow that starch, which readily converts to glycogen, I'll allow that glycogen to replenish while I sleep. So when I wake up the next morning, fasted for exercise, my muscle has everything that it needs to perform optimally for that exercise session. So I like to do, you know, in the morning, typically it's like fruit, you know, honey, so simpler carbohydrate, easy to digest. In the middle of the day, I'll go with my jovial cannellini beans that I love, super versatile, ready to eat, amazing. I love that stuff. I'll add some extra virgin olive oil, some vinegar, maybe a little bit of lemon, some salt, black pepper. Sometimes I add nutritional yeast, maybe some hot sauce. And then in the evening I'll do any kind of potato, sweet potato, purple Japanese potato. I'll pop it in the air fryer or on the grill. I'll have plantains maybe, yucca, very very starchy stuff that's great for replenishing carbohydrate. If I'm traveling or like I'm in an airport or I'm just very sedentary or I don't know, I'm injured, then I go very, very, very low in my carbohydrate intake, almost ketogenic, or I'll just stick with low glycemic index carbs. If I'm training really, really, really hard, doing multiple sessions of training a day, then I'll have generally more carbohydrate and slightly higher glycemic index. The closer I am to activity, the higher the glycemic index. The further away I am from it, the lower the glycemic index. And that helps me feel incredible while I'm training and when I'm not, when I'm busy working. So anyway, that's all for today. Hope that you guys enjoyed. And be sure to let me know if you have any questions. Always an honor and pleasure to help.

Andres Preschel: So that's all for today's show. Thank you so much for tuning in today. For all of the show notes, including clickable links to anything and everything that we discussed today, everything from discount codes to videos, to research articles, books, tips, tricks, techniques, and of course, to learn more about the guest on today's episode, all you have to do is head to my website, AndresPreschel.com, and go to podcasts. You can also leave your feedback, questions, and suggestions for future episodes, future guests, so on and so forth. Thanks again for tuning in and I'll see you on the next one. Have a lovely rest of your day.