Eating carbohydrates spikes your blood sugar and therefore insulin response, which has several problems: one, it makes you hungry again very quickly, and makes your energy levels spike and dip more than if you avoid them. Enough simple carbohydrates cause diabetes.
It is also very easy to eat a large number of calories via carbohydrate. Essentially, carbs make you fat.
I can personally observe in myself that if I eat a chocolate bar in the morning, I will be more hungry in an hour or two than if I had eaten nothing at all.
This is very black and white and borderline incorrect. There's nothing inherently bad about carbohydrates. Eating anything will make you more fat; simple carbs are just easy to eat.
Unrefined carbs like in potatoes and (whole)wheat and oatmeal etc. are not bad; those foods provide many good nutrients and do not cause the negative carb effects you mentioned.
It's the same as fruits containing sugar (which is a carbohydrate actually I think) but not causing the same ill effects as eating the same amount of sugar from Sour Patch Kids (candy which is ~80% sugar by weight).
But without fat it's pretty hard to eat a lot of potatoes; they're just too bland.
That's the thing that everyone in this discussion seems to be missing: taste. There are good reasons to believe that better-tasting food may have physiological effects beyond just being pleasurable to eat [1]. This is not controversial when it comes to other substances but with food it's a much tougher battle.
A steak spikes your insulin harder than a plate of whole wheat pasta. Complex carbs, particular when eaten along with vegetables, are perfectly healthy.
The problems start when you refine all the fiber away and load them up with oil.
If you do not consume any fats, you can handle the blood sugar spike easily. With fat in your blood you become less insulin sensitive. Thus it is the combination of fat+carbs that it the diabetes causer.
> I can personally observe in myself that if I eat a chocolate bar in the morning, I will be more hungry in an hour or two than if I had eaten nothing at all.
It is also very easy to eat a large number of calories via carbohydrate. Essentially, carbs make you fat.
I can personally observe in myself that if I eat a chocolate bar in the morning, I will be more hungry in an hour or two than if I had eaten nothing at all.