The Carbohydrate Dilemma
If you have driven through Michigan in the past couple years, you undoubtably have seen the massive lots full of un-purchased, new vehicles sitting around like a flock of migratory birds all packed together. I remember the first time I saw them. I had just moved back to Flint during the Covid Crisis and I was headed to my Jiu Jitsu class which takes me past GM’s truck assembly plant. Driving down Van Slyke road, I saw rows and rows of brand new trucks sitting in a field. Spotlights cornered the area as a security truck circled the lot.
Later that week I drove north to meet up with a friend and I saw the same thing along I - 75 going north towards Saginaw. All over Michigan, tens of thousands of trucks sat in lots for months, waiting for someone to want to buy them. Who wants to spend $100,000 on a truck with no power windows, no heated seats, and no navigation capabilities? It has been almost 4 years since this problem started and the microchip dilemma has still not been completely resolved. While the micro chip shortage is a supply issue, the demand issue is a customer problem. There weren’t enough customers that wanted to take in a truck, so they began to spill over into parking lots and fields.
If you think about the customers being like your muscles and liver, the parking lot being like your excess body fat, and the trucks being like dietary carbohydrates then the comparison to your inner metabolism is perfect. When we consume more carbohydrates than our bodies can store in our muscles and liver, we are like GM producing more trucks than they had demand for. The customers quickly become saturated and the trucks started to stack up in the parking lot, overflowing lots, and being stored in places where they don’t belong.
When we consume dietary carbohydrates, our bodies naturally want to send them to the liver to be converted into glycogen and stored both in the muscles and liver. When carbs are stored there, we have immediate access to them and can utilize them quickly for energy to run up a flight of stairs, play tag , or participate in sports. However, if there is no room there due to overconsumption of dietary carbs or a sedentary lifestyle, they will be converted it into fat and stored somewhere else in the body. This could be in your belly, hips, around your heart, and even inside your liver. If you are sedentary or if you consistently over consume carbohydrates you may never be able to access your stored body fat because you haven’t created demand in the muscles and liver. You will constantly be adding trucks to the parking lot and this is how disease starts to set in. The only way to move trucks from the parking lot to the customer is to increase demand for them.
As GM began to finally acquire a stock of microchips, they were still faced with the problem of demand. This is because most of the trucks had sat for months in open fields and had to have hoses, tires, and belts replaced due to rot and mice infestations. So when the microchips finally arrived and were installed, there was still little demand for them because the customers knew where the trucks were being stored. GM had to give discounts, run ad campaigns, and wait for customer demand to increase before they could start moving trucks off of the lots. The same thing applies to our bodies. The only way to move excess body fat out of storage and into the muscles and liver to be metabolized is through exercise and caloric management. If you continuously over consume carbohydrates your muscles and liver will lose their thirst for carbs and they will increase their desire to store carbs as fat. Couple that with a sedentary lifestyle and you’re well on your way to developing metabolic syndrome and pre-diabetes.
Choose consistency over intensity. Eat more water than you drink, consume high protein meals, and add in carbs for exercise performance. Ok, Im done with the analogies for now.