Eating for Health and Pleasure, Slow-Burning Carbohydrates, GI Dieting

Imagine it’s now late afternoon and you haven’t eaten for quite a while. You decide, this time, to eat a low-GI food (a reminder: these are foods that have low scores on the Glycaemic Index, because they dissolve into their component sugars much more slowly than high-GI foods).

You decide to eat a plain bowl of pasta. Pasta cooked for a short time (say 10 minutes) has a GI of about 45, which is very low indeed. Because the carbohydrates in pasta break down into sugars very slowly, the sugar is released bit by bit into the blood over a long period of time. The blood sugar therefore rises gradually, say to 6. It certainly doesn’t shoot straight up to 10, as would be the case if you had eaten a slice of bread or a baked potato.

When you’ve finished your meal, you get up and get on with your day - you go back to work, go for a walk, play on the computer or bath the kids. Even if you decide just to slump in front of the television, your body continues using up energy. Because the blood- sugar level is 6, there is enough energy in the blood to keep you going. After a little while, however, your blood-suga_r level begins to drop again because you are using up the energy quite quickly doing all the things you normally do.

Imagine that your blood-sugar level continued to drop to 5 (normal), then to 4 (shakiness), then to 2-3 (fainting). Before you knew it, you’d be lying comatose on the floor. But clearly this never happens.

Why? Because as the blood-sugar level begins to drop, your body registers this slight drop, and begins burning its reserve energy. Where does this reserve energy come from? From the fat stores on our thighs, tummies, hips, and so on!

Even though your stomach is full to the brim with pasta, that pasta is delivering its sugar so slowly to the blood that the body is forced to burn body fat as a supplementary source of energy. In a way, we can say that - because low-GI foods dissolve so slowly - our bodies are ‘tricked’ into believing that we haven’t actually eaten enough. The body’s response is to reach into the fat stores and burn those.

This is why low-GI carbohydrates can be regarded as ‘fat-burners’.

The bottom line

• Carbohydrates with a high GI (fast-dissolving sugars), such as brown bread, baked potatoes and cornflakes stimulate metabolism by building more dense muscles.
• Carbohydrates with a low GI (slow-dissolving foods), such as pasta, Basmati rice and baked beans, deliver their sugar to the blood so slowly that the body is forced to start burning fat.

What does this mean? To lose fat effectively, the bulk of our diets should comprise low-GI foods, so that our bodies are kept busy burning fat most of the time. We should also include some high-GI foods for taste, convenience, and occasional spurts of muscle building.

Carbohydrates should be eaten in very large quantities. They are, after all, our ‘petrol’, and if you want to be a fuel-injected person who fires on all cylinders, you must radically increase your carbohydrate intake.

Eating for pleasure and health

The amount of carbohydrates you need to eat will depend on a variety of factors, including:

• Your height
• Your weight
• Your age
• The amount of exercise you take
• Your stress levels
• Concomitant disorders, such as depression
• Past dieting habits
• the extent of your insulin resistance, if any
• Your family history of Syndrome X symptoms

A very tall, lean athlete, for example, could quite happily eat up to 45 portions of carbohydrates (that’s the equivalent of nearly two loaves of bread) a day, but an average 20-year-old woman who did regular weight-lifting and who wanted to lose a few kilograms of fat would need about 20 portions.

However, let me stress that if you have any other health problems, or have special nutritional needs (you’re pregnant, for example, or a very active sports person) you will need to consult a registered dietician who specialises in glycaemic control.

Possibly related posts: (automatically generated)
Eating for Health and Pleasure, Slow-Burning Carbohydrates, GI Dieting

• Muscle building, Sugar will not make you too Muscular
• Sugar is not the Villain — Fat is, cutting fat to Lose Weight
• Jungle Smoothie
• Fast Burning Carbohydrates in your Diet continue...
• 21 Dieting steps to Glowing good Health continue...
• Common Concerns of HighProtein Diet on Weight Loss
• Dieting tips, What's Slowing Your Metabolism?
• Scientific Dieting for Boosting Your Metabolism continued
• Dieting to recover Energy Levels
• Why does a low-kilojoule diet not work in the lone run?