The Glycemic Index Diet for Dummies (13 page)
Reviewing common low-glycemic/high-fiber foods
Meeting your fiber quota while incorporating low-glycemic food choices into your weekly meal plans is easier than you may expect. Table 2-2 shows you several popular low-glycemic/high-fiber foods.
Incorporating low-glycemic/high-fiber foods into each meal
Incorporating low-glycemic/high-fiber foods into your diet is as simple as focusing on eating a wide variety of plant-based foods. If you can manage that, you'll be on your way to a healthy fiber intake for the day. Following is a sample menu that uses some of the food choices presented in Table 2-2.
Pointers for fiber newbies
If you aren't used to eating a high-fiber diet, or if you plan on increasing your fiber intake, you should keep a few key things in mind:
Drink eight to ten glasses of water a day.
Fiber holds onto water like a sponge as it "sweeps" your intestinal track, so keeping up with your daily water intake helps fiber work more efficiently. An added bonus: Drinking enough water helps you avoid feeling gassy or bloated.
If you're only eating an average of about 10 grams of fiber a day, you'll feel gassy and bloated if you suddenly increase your fiber intake to 35 grams. Gradually start eating more fiber over the course of a week and see how you feel.
children up quickly.
Although fiber is an important part of a child's diet, you should make sure she doesn't end up eating too few calories because she feels full from too much fiber. A high-fiber diet is good for adults who want to lose weight, but it may affect growing children differently.
In either case, increasing your fiber intake may have undesirable consequences for you, so talk to your doctor before pumping up your fiber servings.
To create similar meal plans on youwn, cross-reference your fruit and veggie choices with a glycemic index chart to make sure the foods you're picking are low-glycemic as well as high in fiber. Then think of a way to add a serving of legumes into your day (perhaps by tossing a cup of beans into your lunchtime salad). Finally, as you're choosing your whole grains, remember this rule of thumb: the higher the fiber (generally) the better.
Not really sure how to incorporate more low-glycemic foods into your diet? Check out Chapter 7 for some ideas. Also take a look at Chapter 15, which provides some simple recipe makeovers to illustrate how high-glycemic meals can become lower-glycemic ones with a few basic swaps.
Chapter 3
:
Why and How a Low-Glycemic Diet Works for Weight Loss
In This Chapter
Understanding how a low-glycemic diet moderates insulin and blood sugar levels
Discovering how a low-glycemic diet acts as a natural appetite suppressant
Staying aware of your calorie intake while enjoying low-glycemic foods
Making the best food choices for optimum health and weight loss
A
quick search for "low-glycemic diet" on the Internet tells you that this diet is being used for weight loss in everything from fad diets to hospital-based programs. Conflicting information can leave you wondering whether a low-glycemic diet is just another fad or a legitimate, evidence-based piece of the weight-loss puzzle. This chapter highlights several reasons why and how a low-glycemic diet works for weight loss as part of a complete dietary plan — one that includes calorie control, lots of fruits and veggies, and an appropriate intake of healthy fat and lean protein as well.
Regulating Insulin and Blood Glucose
A low-glycemic diet helps regulate insulin and blood glucose levels that become unstable due to either a health condition or consumption of an excess amount of carbohydrate calories. Anytime you eat foods containing carbohydrates, your body naturally breaks those carbs down into
blood glucose
(blood sugar), releasing insulin in the process. Insulin acts like a key that unlocks your cells' doors to allow blood glucose to enter in and provide your cells with energy (see Figure 3-1).
Even though insulin transports blood glucose to your cells, your body doesn't turn all of that blood glucose into energy at once. When blood glucose levels rise above normal, insulin signals your liver, muscles, and other cells to store the extra. Some of this excess blood glucose gets stored in your muscles and liver as glycogen, and some of it gets converted to body fat.
Regardless of whether blood glucose is being spent or stored, the influx of blood glucose in your blood can create spikes and crashes depending on what you eat. This process leads to food cravings, moodiness, and fatigue — all of which can make weight loss difficult to accomplish.
In the next sections, I explain how following a low-glycemic diet can reduce the excess fat your body may be storing and positively affect your food cravings.
Figure 3-1:
Insulin lets blood glucose enter the body's cells.
Keeping blood glucose levels down
Low-glycemic foods play an important role in keeping blood glucose levels down. Your body coverts these foods into blood glucose more slowly and over a longer period of time. That means your body needs less insulin to get the energy into your cells, so your pancreas is spared from being overworked. It also means there's less excess insulin just hanging around as fat storage. That's a plus for weight loss if I ever heard one!
High-glycemic foods, on the other hand, get converted to blood glucose very quickly, causing a rush of blood glucose into the body in large amounts. The result? You feel satisfied and revived for about 30 minutes following a high-glycemic snack, but after those 30 minutes are up, you start to feel fatigued and hungry all over again. Eating more low-glycemic foods helps reduce fatigue and hunger and prevent chronic high blood sugars.
Counteracting insulin resistance
Extra
blood glucose
(blood sugar) typically gets converted to body fat when you've eaten too many calories. Although this process happens to everyone, it may be more challenging for individuals with
insulin resistance,
a condition in which a person has a diminished ability for his blood glucose to respond to the action of insulin, causing the pancreas to secrete even more insulin to compensate (see the following figure). Many individuals, particularly those with prediabetes, diabetes, metabolic syndrome, or Polycystic Ovary Syndrome, have some varying degree of insulin resistance, which causes their bodies to store more calories as fat when their insulin levels are consistently high.Warning:
If you're overweight, you may have a small amount of insulin resistance without even knowing it. Individuals who are overweight, especially those who carry a lot of belly weight around the middle, are at a higher risk for being insulin resistant, a fact that explains why weight loss can be a little more challenging for these folks.Researchers are currently studying the effects of a low-glycemic diet to see whether it enhances weight loss by helping individuals have better control over their blood gucose levels. Although many studies show promise, the official verdict is still out. No study has consistently shown that a low-glycemic diet helps healthy people lose more weight than your average calorie-restricted diet. This fact just means more research is needed, especially among people who have known insulin resistance.
What's wrong with chronically elevated blood sugars? Over time, too much sugar in the blood for too long can damage the blood vessels and nerves, leading to kidney disease, blindness, nerve damage, heart disease, and foot problems.