The Key to Weight Loss without Dieting

There is a revolution going on in medicine,about which most Americans and many of their doctors are unaware. It has to do with something called insulin resistance.

Your body needs the hormone insulin to handle carbohydrates, foods your digestive system breaks down to sugar. Recently, researchers discovered that people who are overweight make plenty of insulin, but their bodies become resistant to its effects. Consequently, they have to make five or six times the normal amount to handle certain carbohydrates. And that’s a big problem. Too much insulin, whether taken as medication or produced by the body, consistently makes people fat.

Researchers have been zeroing in on the foods that trigger excessive insulin secretion. As you would expect, the culprits are carbohydrates, but not all carbs—only ones that flood the bloodstream with too much glucose too fast. Scientists measured the effects of various carbs on blood glucose and rated them on a scale called the glycemic index. A few diet book authors spotted this research and published lists of the glycemic indexes as guides for weight loss.
Unfortunately, the glycemic indexes did not turn out to be as helpful as dieters hoped. They actually seemed to increase the number of forbidden foods. The indexes of many healthy foods were higher than those of obviously fattening ones. For example, the glycemic index of carrots was higher than spaghetti. The result was more, not less, dietary confusion.

Actually, the scientists that developed the glycemic indexes never intended them to be used as guides for dieters. The problem is that the amounts of food they used to obtain these measurements bore no relationship to the amounts people typically eat. For example, to measure the glycemic index of carrots, researchers had to use seven full-size carrots, but to get readings on spaghetti, they only had to use one cupful. Of course, most people don’t eat seven carrots in one sitting, but they often consume a cupful or more of spaghetti.

Getting It Right:Glycemic Loads

Recently, scientists developed a rating system that corrects glycemic indexes for the amounts people typically eat. It’s called the glycemic load and unlike the glycemic indexes, it clearly separates foods that trigger excessive insulin secretion from ones that do not. This might seem like a mundane technicality but pay attention! It makes a world of difference when it comes to losing weight.

As it turns out, only a few foods are responsible for the excess insulin secretion that causes most people’s weight gain. The culprits are mainly
a) foods that contain high concentrations of starch and
b) sugar-containing beverages.
All of the offending foods share the following attributes:
• They are truly “unnatural” in that they were introduced into the human diet only recently in the span of human existence.
• They have a peculiar digestive pattern in which they pass through your mouth without stimulating your taste buds then turn to sugar as soon as they reach your intestines.
• They enter your bloodstream in the first few inches of your intestines, never traversing the remaining twenty-two feet where many weight-regulating hormones come from.
• They drive your blood sugar levels to heights never experienced by your prehistoric ancestors.
• Aside from being a source of calories, they are of no nutritional value.

For hundreds of thousands of years before th advent of agriculture about ten thousand year ago, humans consumed what we would con sider an extremely low glycemic-load diet Hunter-gatherers ate mainly meat and crud vegetation such as unripe fruit, grasses an roots. Starch was a miniscule part of their diet We now eat hundreds of times more starch an sugar than our prehistoric ancestors did an some people’s bodies can’t handle it. It’s trigger ing epidemics of obesity and diabetes.

Here’s the good news. It’s easy to reduce th glycemic load of your diet. Even folks why don’t have much self-discipline can do it because it doesn’t require dieting in the usual sense of the word. You can reduce the amount of insulin your body has to make just by replacing a few largely tasteless foods with richer more flavorful choices.

There’s another way to reduce the amount o insulin your body has to make and that’s wit exercise, but not the sweaty, strenuous kind. I you add thirty minutes of walking four days week to a low glycemic-load diet, your insuli levels will drop like a rock, fat globules will clea from your blood, you’ll feel calmer and mor energetic because the highs and lows of bloo sugar will level out, and you will have remove the driving force behind your weight gain.

Perhaps, the best news of all is that lowering your glycemic load doesn’t require giving u sweets. In fact, candy is recommended.

By Rоb Thоmpsоn, M.D.