When I Relearned Carbs, My Training and Brain Got Steadier

When I Relearned Carbs, My Training and Brain Got Steadier

I should admit something a little off-script: I was never a carb brain.

I'm Asian, but I didn't grow up eating much rice. I joke that I may never become real friends with Italians, because I don't love pizza and I don't love pasta. So when I first went deep on low-carb, there was almost no withdrawal — none of that food was on my wanting-list to begin with. Which fooled me, early on, into thinking low-carb cost me nothing.

That was about eight years ago. A friend influenced me, and I did keto seriously, for a long stretch.

I have to be honest about who I was then: the short-term return was extremely direct. Paired with training, the fat came off fast, everything looked "tight." I can say it plainly now — back then I was doing it almost purely for beauty. The feedback was quick, clear, and a little addictive; the body was changing, the mirror was cooperating, and that kind of immediate positive loop is hard not to fall into.

But let me stop here and be clear: I don't want to tell this as a story anyone should envy. Fat loss is not the hero of this piece.

Because what I came to realize is more important: losing fat is not the same as the system getting better.

Those two things used to be an equals sign in my head. Fat off = progress. The body doesn't read it that way. When energy runs low for long enough, what gets pulled down is never just fat — lean mass, recovery, menstruation, energy can all get tugged at once. You think you're optimizing one variable; you're quietly moving the whole system.

I did go a long stretch without a period.

And here I want to be especially careful, because this is so easy to tell as a single clean cause — and single clean causes are usually wrong. I won't pin it on any one thing. Menstrual disruption can involve hormones, stress, energy availability, training load, body fat, and conditions like PCOS that are simply present — all of them can play a part. I don't know how much each weighed, in me, back then.

So what the experience taught me isn't a diagnosis. It's a kind of respect: I began to genuinely honor how sensitive the female body is to whether there's enough energy to go around.

There's a concept I only truly understood later — low energy availability, and its fuller frame, RED-S (Relative Energy Deficiency in Sport). The idea is this: when the energy you take in, minus what training burns, leaves too little to run the body's basic operations, and this persists, the body starts making trade-offs. It doesn't touch just one place — it's linked to menstrual function, bone, metabolic, cardiovascular, GI, and performance effects. And for female athletes, low carbohydrate availability is flagged as its own concern. When energy is uncertain, the body triages toward survival and turns down some "non-essential" functions — reproduction among them — first. That isn't the body betraying you. It's the body protecting you.

Once I understood that, my whole stance on carbs changed.

I stopped treating them as an enemy to be suppressed. But I want to be honest: the shift wasn't automatic. Even now I sometimes have to actively encourage myself to eat good carbs — because the long-trained default is to read carbs as "something to be careful with." Undoing that reflex takes awareness.

By carbs I've never meant cake, never meant pizza. I mean cooled potato, purple sweet potato, legumes, oats, berries — real carbs that arrive wrapped in a whole fiber matrix.

There's a mechanism in here I love. When potato or rice is cooked and then cooled, some of the starch recrystallizes into resistant starch — it's no longer digested fast and spiking glucose like ordinary starch, but behaves more like fiber, traveling deep into the gut and feeding the microbes that produce short-chain fatty acids. Legumes work on the same logic: the starch is held inside an intact fiber structure, so the glucose curve comes out flatter and longer. This isn't "eat less sugar." It's a different structure of carbohydrate — one that arrives slower, stays longer, and feeds the gut on the way.

And for training, carbs aren't optional at all. They're glycogen, the fuel I actually draw on across those sets under the bar, the reserve that decides whether the next session holds. When I started fueling properly, the most direct thing I felt wasn't anything dramatic. It was steadiness. Steadier strength in training, a steadier head in the afternoon, steadier mood. That faint brittleness and dullness that comes from running low for too long slowly receded.

So the real direction of this piece is the opposite of what people assume. It doesn't move toward more extreme restriction. It moves back — toward supply, energy, training, and respect for the body.

Carbs aren't the enemy. They're speed, structure, and timing.

It took me years to truly read that sentence. Young, I thought being good to the body meant subtraction, taking away. Now I believe the advanced thing is knowing what to give, and when. I don't want to beat my body anymore. I want to work with it. I'm going to be using this body for a long time, and I'd like it to have fuel when I need it.

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Sources / 科学依据: - Low energy availability & RED-S: chronic low energy availability is linked to menstrual dysfunction, impaired bone health, and metabolic, cardiovascular, GI, and performance effects; framed as multifactorial, not single-cause (Mountjoy et al., IOC consensus statement on RED-S, Br J Sports Med, 2014/2018/2023; Loucks, "Energy availability and the female athlete triad"). - Multifactorial menstrual dysfunction: menstrual disruption can involve energy availability, stress, training load, body composition, and underlying conditions such as PCOS — causation should not be attributed to a single variable (reviews on functional hypothalamic amenorrhea and the female athlete triad). - Low carbohydrate availability in female athletes: low carbohydrate availability is a flagged concern for training adaptation and performance, particularly in women (sports-nutrition reviews on carbohydrate availability and RED-S). - Resistant starch & fiber matrix: cook-and-cool of potato/rice increases resistant starch, which resists rapid digestion, feeds SCFA-producing gut microbes, and flattens the postprandial glucose curve; legumes' fiber matrix produces a steadier glucose response (resistant-starch and legume glycemic-response literature). - Glycogen for training: dietary carbohydrate replenishes muscle glycogen, the primary fuel for resistance and higher-intensity training (exercise-metabolism reviews on glycogen and performance).