The starch sorcery that helps you lose weight

December 10, 2016 Ashley 0 Comments

Anyone else turn to carbs for comfort in the winter months?

Even though we’re told to keep a handle on our starchy hankerings if we don’t want love handles?

(No worries; I can just keep hiding it under this granny sweater for at least another three months…)

Well, lucky for us both, there does exist a genre of starches that can help us lose – not gain – weight.

Enter: resistant starches.

The unique thing about resistant starch is that it’s not totally broken down ‘n taken up by your body when you eat it. What actually happens, is that it hits your intestines and your internal bacteria morph it into short-chain fatty acids. This is great, because it means that, unlike all those other, less-good-for-you starches, it won’t send your insulin into insanity mode, or drive your blood sugar up so that you store more fat.

So, how do you get it?

You might be surprised to know that it’s actually already in a lot of the foods we eat. We just need to know how to whip ’em up the right way. And there’re about four groups of resistant starches we’re looking at when we do that. Examples? The first type’s found in seeds, grains, and legumes in general. The second comprises the likes of raw potatoes and unripe bananas. (Take that, haters claiming that my beloved green bananas are somehow “bad” for me.) The third? Taking your taters to the microwave (or however you wanna cook them – or rice, for that matter), and letting ’em chill after. (’cause, by some sorcery called “retrogradation”, the cooling turns the digestible starch into the resistant kind.) And, finally, the fourth kind is the mand-made chemical kind (which I’m not sure whether I trust or not just yet).

Mmkay… so how’s this work exactly?

Magic?

Close. Essentially, it’s this two step process whereby both your friendly gut bugs (AKA the bacteria that dwell in your intestines and help keep you healthy) get fed – and then thank you by farting out this fatty acid called butyrate. The result? First, our belly bacteria are happy and thus functioning properly to keep on keeping us fit. Second, we end up with that butyrate byproduct – which our colon loves. Resistant starches simply sludge on through our small intestines, undigested, and head to the colon to feed the critters living in it. In a way, it’s really less us – and more the bugs – that’re eating our resistant starch. And, when you pair the decreased uptake of carby food with the fact that you’re keeping your intestinal stewards happy, that’s absolutely fabulous for weight loss.

’cause when your belly’s content on the inside, it’s less convex on the outside.