The Glycemic Index Diet for Dummies (83 page)

Discuss challenges and obstacles:
Are you having difficulty bringing a low-glycemic lunch to work? Are you finding it rather rough to follow a low-glycemic diet on the road? Others may have some great solutions that worked for them in similar situations.

Give support to others:
Just being there for others can help renew your own motivation.

Get recipes:
Message boards and forums are a fabulous recipe resource when you're running out of ideas for meals or when you have specific ingredients in your house and need some ideas for what to do with them.

Never use message boards or forums for the following reasons:

To obtain professional advice:
I've seen some very inaccurate and just plain bad advice given out on message boards. Depending on your personal situation, this advice may even be harmful to you. When you need advice, skip the group forums and message boards and turn to a professional. Save the boards for support.

To vent about your life:
Although discussing your challenges in the hopes of finding motivation and support is okay, venting about your life in general isn't a good idea. Message boards work best when everyone comes to the table in a positive way to help one another.

If you decide to explore group forums and message boards, be prepared to encounter extremely negative and downright angry people from time to time. The Internet provides a shield, so those individuals who have a lot of pent-up anger let it out frequently because no one can see them or figure out who they are.

I'll never forget my experience participating as a professional on a weight-loss message board. One of the other participants was a woman who was fixated on low-carb dieting even though that wasn't the topic of the board. The whole thing turned ugly as she critiqued everyone who was following different paths toward weight loss than her. The moderator warned her but never kicked her off, making the whole experience a dreadful one for everyone else trying to participate.

When you run into nasty people on message boards, e-mail the moderator to request that he or she ban the offending user or reinforce the posting guidelines. If nothing changes, find a new online support forum. Dealing with people's anger-management issues is far from worth it when you're just looking for a little support!

Approaching the Web with caution

The Internet
is a great tool for finding articles and getting support. However, it's also filled with an abundance of not-so-good information. You really need to pay attention to the source of a Web site to ensure the information on it is accurate. If you aren't sure whether information you find online is true, ask a professional.

If you have a health condition such as diabetes or high cholesterol and are taking medications for it, the wrong dietary information can be harmful. I've seen people end up in the hospital from bad information. I even saw a woman in her 30s fight for her life in a diabetic coma due to inaccurate advice. So even though most of the time nutrition information you find online doesn't necessarily cause any major problems, it can cause you serious issues in some circumstances.

Sites that sell information products or provide information from individuals who've lost weight following a low-glycemic diet can be good for support, but unless the site operators have the proper education or know how to interpret research studies, the information they provide should be taken with a ton of salt.

People aren't out to give you bad advice; they just may not know enough to give good advice. When in doubt about the accuracy of information in a pticular article, check the author's credentials. Is this person in the healthcare field? Has she been trained in this topic? What type of education program did she go through? These questions will help assure you that the information you're getting is accurate. You can also look for sites with professional articles that have been peer-reviewed by other doctors and registered dieticians. WebMD is one such site, which is why it's one of the best places to find quality health articles online.

Attending Glycemic Index Programs

Pro
grams related to the glycemic index, such as classes and conferences, are win-win scenarios: You receive information you can trust, and you build a new support group with fellow participants. Finding glycemic index classes and conferences isn't always easy, so I offer some suggestions for doing so in the following sections.

Group classes

Group classes occur either as ser
ies or one-time affairs. Either way, you can often find these classes at your local hospital. Start by checking out the hospital's Web site to see what types of health classes it offers. If you don't find any, you can call the nutrition department and ask whether it ever offers any classes on the low-glycemic diet or weight management in general.