The Glycemic Index Diet for Dummies (42 page)

1. Take an inventory of your day.

Look at each hour and where you spend your time. I bet you'll notice you spend most of your time taking care of others' needs.

2. Find ways to either move your schedule around or simply make more time for your meals.

This step may mean creating a lighter schedule than you're used to, but mealtimes should be just as important as anything else on your schedule. After all, what's more important than your health? (Plus, eating regular meals will give you the energy you need to get through the rest of your list!)

Eating too few calories

Eating a very-low-calorie diet can be extremely harmful to your body's metabolism. If you dip too low in your calorie intake, your body simply compensates by decreasing your overall metabolic rate, which can ultimately hinder your weight-loss goals.

Many weight-loss programs prescribe very-low-calorie diets (1,000 calories or less) to help you lose excess pounds. Although your body decreases its metabolic rate (described earlier in this chapter) to compensate for this lower calorie level, something else happens at the same time. This low calorie level may create a situation where your body turns to lean body tissue, or muscle, for energy. This decrease in overall lean body mass lowers your metabolic rate even further.

Consider this example: Sally had recently gained weight and wanted to get the excess pounds off. Her metabolic rate was 2,500 calories per day, which means she was consuming around 2,500 calories each day to maintain her current weight. Sally turned to a popular diet program, which estimated her daily calories at 1,000 (without accounting for daily activity). The result? Sally lost 10 pounds in two weeks and was absolutely thrilled. She kept up with the diet for about a month, losing roughly 3 pounds of lean muscle mass (not good), along with body fat, and decreasing her metabolic rate in response to the lower calorie level (even worse!).

Sally's metabolic rate used to be 2,500 calories; now it has decreased to approximately 2,000 calories. When Sally goes back to her old eating habits, which were landing her on an average of 2,500 calories consumed per day, she'll gain her old weight back plus more.

To avoid falling into the trap of eating too few calories, remember this: You still have to eat in order to lose weight. Yes, this statement may go against all other dieting concepts you've encountered, but you're seeking a long-term weight-loss solution, not a short-term fad diet.

Maintaining a food journal (covered in Chapter 6) can be a great way of checking your food intake. It also gives you a record that you can share with a registered dietician or nutritional professional to make sure you're getting enough calories to support your weight-loss efforts.

Chapter 9
:
Presenting Foolproof Healthy-Eating Stra
tegies

In This Chapter

Making the best low-glycemic food choices

Balancing proteins, carbohydrates, and fats for successful weight loss

Defining moderation for long-term weight-loss success

K
nowing and feeling comfortable applying simple healthy-eating strategies can mean the difference between giving up and finding weight-loss success. Why? Because after you have a few rules down you can apply them to any situation and make them work in your lifestyle. You know the old saying "you can give someone a fish or teach him how to fish so he can have fish for life"? Eating a balanced, low-glycemic diet works just the same way. Sure, I could give you a book of menus to follow, but I'd prefer to give you some simple healthy-eating strategies so you can use them in any scenario you might experience.

This chapter delves into a few basic healthy-eating strategies that can help you benefit from low-glycemic foods, keep your calorie level in a good range, and get your food cravings under control — all without you having to count calories or solve awful math equations whenever you want to eat something. After you know these tricks of the trade by heart and start practicing them, they'll become second nature to you.

The purpose for simplifying healthy-eating strategies is twofold: so you can get the results you're looking for by decreasing your glycemic load and your calorie level and so you can make your new diet changes work easily in your life.

Tips for Choosing Low-Glycemic Foods

The goal of healthy eating on a low-glycemic diet is to balance your food choices every day, even when your days are hectic. Well, when life gets busy and you start depending on high-glycemic grab-and-go foods, you'll probably find yourself saying, "I'll get back on track tomorrow." But that behavior counteracts all of your weight-loss efforts. I'm not saying you should eat all low-glycemic carbs all the time. Instead, I want you to feel comfortable choosing them most of the time (meaning at least one low-glycemic food per meal) while balancing your intake of medium- to high-glycemic foods. This two-pronged approach can help you stay on track whether you're at home, on vacation, or out to lunch with friends. The following sections cover a few quick tips for making the best low-glycemic food choices.

Get acquainted with the glycemic index list

Take the time to become familiar with the glycemic index by reviewing one or more of the lists that are readily available (see Chapter 7 for one specific Web site you can seek out). The glycemic index list is your starting point because it can famiarize you with what foods have a low, medium, and high glycemic index. You'll need to focus at first to pick up on which foods are low-glycemic and which ones are medium- and high-glycemic, but soon you'll have memorized the glycemic nature of the foods you eat the most and you won't need to depend on the list as much.

When in doubt, always keep in mind that using low-glycemic foods in moderation gives you great benefits.

Pay attention to portion sizes

Following the low-glycemic list of foods is simply following a low-glycemic diet. Following a low-glycemic diet
for weight loss
requires closer attention to the all-important portion size. Even if you're regularly choosing low-glycemic foods and balancing them with medium- and high-glycemic foods, if you don't pay attention to your portion sizes, you may never lose weight. Here's why:

The glycemic load of a food typically increases when you eat larger amounts.

Your calorie level for the day is determined mostly by the portion sizes you eat.

The tricky thing is that the portion sizes used for glycemic index testing may be a little different than the typical recommended portion sizes for calorie control. Glycemic index testing uses very small amounts of food, so when you eat more, the glycemic load also increases. (I cover glycemic load and what makes it different from the glycemic index in Chapter 4.)

You can generally gauge that if a food's glycemic load is very low, it likely won't go up too much if you decide to eat more of that food. If the glycemic load is near medium or already in the medium category, then it'll go up from there.

Of course, you also need to retrain your brain to recognize appropriate portion sizes of different foods for calorie control. Portions in today's restaurants have increased so much that the new, larger sizes have become normal in most people's perceptions. But eating those jumbo-sized portions regularly is a surefire way to sabotage your weight-loss efforts and up the overall glycemic load of your meal. Use Table 9-1 as a general reference for scaling back your brain's mental image of the appropriate portion size.

A good exercise to help you get your portion sizes under control is to measure your food for one day so you can see what the actual portion sizes should look like on your plate. You don't have to be perfect and measure your food every day (that's no way to live your life). Measuring your food for just one day gives you enough of an idea of how much to put on your plate.