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| No-Effort Weight Loss Through Hypnosis.
The glycemic index is simply a measure of the effect a carbohydrate-containing food has on blood sugar levels. The theory - emphasis on theory; this isn't proven -- is that foods with a higher glycemic index cause blood sugar levels to rise more than foods with a lower index, thereby increasing insulin secretion, which then causes blood sugar levels to drop. Theoretically, that leads to false hunger, causing us to eat more than our body really needs. Hence, struggles with weight and, for people with diabetes, blood sugar control. Tip! Don't skip meals. As you learned during the weight loss period, your body does better with 3-5 meals a day, versus just one meal a day.A number of studies have looked at various aspects of this promise. For people with diabetes, several studies do suggest that paying attention to the glycemic impact of foods may have a positive effect on A1C levels (a measure of blood sugar control). Studies of the effect of the glycemic index on weight gain are inconsistent; some show a potential effect; others don't. A recent study of 32 healthy 'overweight' adults with normal glucose tolerance, however, showed that those who had high levels of insulin secretion and ate a low glycemic load diet lost the most weight. Lillie's Souper Weight Loss Plan. Quickly Lose 11 - 45 lbs. No Dieting, No Hunger, No Pills, No Drugs.The Problems with Using the Glycemic Index for Weight Loss &/or Diabetes Control The glycemic index, however, has a number of practical problems. For one, it fails to truly categorize foods according to their impact on glycemic effect because it doesn't consider the amount of a food that we tend to eat at one time. A good example of this is a carrot versus a Snickers bar. In the low carbohydrate diet craze, carrots gained a bad reputation due to their glycemic index. They rank 92 on the scale, which runs from 0 to 100. By comparison, a Snickers bar has a glycemic index of only 68. So does that mean Snickers are better choices than carrots for type 2 diabetes and weight loss? No. Because the amount of carbohydrate eaten at any one time is an important factor. If you take into account how much carbohydrate you eat in each carrot vs. each Snickers bar - which is the basis for a calculation called glycemic load - carrots rank as 7 and Snickers as 23. To get as much carbohydrate from carrots as one Snickers bar, we'd have to eat about 8 carrots in one sitting. The concept of glycemic load, then, appears to better to assess the effect of individual foods on blood sugar levels. Still, experts agree that this concept has more utility for research on how populations of people eat, not for individual diet planning. One reason is because glycemic load is based on measures of the glycemic index, and the measures themselves are highly variable according to, among other things, individual response, where a food is grown, how ripe it is, its physical form (whether it's whole or ground, for example) and how it is prepared. |
