Sweet Potatoes and their benefits while weight training or dieting
Carbs get a bad wrap. Perhaps it was all those female magazine covers telling you the only way to change your body is to go on a low carb diet, or the variety of girls who claim that eating no carbs is the best idea in the world, it’s all bogus. People, and women in particular, need to stop reading the covers of fitness magazines that claim you need to cut carbs completely. First of all your body NEEDS carbohydrates – especially if you are weight training or body building. Good carbs like sweet potatoes, brown rice, ezekiel bread and oatmeal, help to give your body the much needed energy required to get through hard training sessions without burning out. Have you ever noticed how your body feels when you don’t eat enough carbs? You feel tired, lathargic, dizzy and weak – it’s not a coincidence. Think of carbs as fuel for your engine in a car, if you are running on empty you aren’t going to get very far.
So why do so many people who work out, body build, meal prep seem to use sweet potatoes in their diets? First sweet potatoes are a good source of fiber. Fiber keeps you feeling full longer so it helps to curb appetite. It also is a low glycemic index food (Low GI) which means it doesn’t spike your blood sugar as quickly as say a white potato. The sweet potato will digest slower and raise blood sugar slower so you can have a longer, steadier stream of energy. This is why many people eat them before a heavy leg day workout or power workout.
Sweet potatoes are lower calorie than a white potato, so it’s good to always go for a sweet potato over a white potato any day. A sweet potato can be, on average, 60 calories less than a white one, and as mentioned above there is less of a blood sugar spike.
1 cup of sweet potato is about 115 calories. They are also fat free and around 27 grams of carbs.
How to make sweet potatoes:
1. rinse the potato with warm and pat dry with a paper towel
2. spray a baking pan or casserole dish with some coconut oil or olive oil
3. Pre heat oven to 375 degrees
4. Poke holes with a knife or fork into the skin, all around and make one slit down the side
5. bake in over for 45 minutes or until potato is soft when you cut into it
6. optional: spray with coconut oil and dash some ground cinnamon on them
Every week I make sure to get a few sweet potatoes when I go grocery shopping. I enjoy the taste of them since they are “sweet” like the name. I usually eat them with my lunch as I try to eat more of my carbs in the beginning half of the day when I work out and am more active. I aim to eat carbs closer to my workouts and less at night time, but I don’t follow a “no carbs after 6pm” rule or anything like that. My current macros include 40% protein, 40% carbs and 20% fats so if you factor those percentages in I need to eat around 180 grams of carbs per day. One cup of sweet potato is only 27 or so grams, so think about it…you CAN eat a good amount of carbs per day and stay on track. Hopefully this helps many readers start to work sweet potatoes into their diets and meal prepping.
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