Thursday 12 January 2017

Losing Weight With The Glycemic Index Chart

By Kathleen Adams


If you want to lose weight, have energy throughout the day, and stay healthy, you need to choose the food you eat carefully. There are many things to consider, like freshness, pesticide and herbicide load, fiber content, and protein count, but perhaps the first is a food's place on the glycemic index chart. This information will tell you how consuming any particular food will impact your blood sugar.

Metabolism is a complex process, but understanding the basics is all that's necessary. When a food is digested, glucose is released into the blood stream. This is a normal process that fuels your body, giving you energy and allowing the body to carry out its many functions. However, extra glucose is a signal to the pancreas to secrete insulin. This hormone causes the extra to be stored, to be burned later for energy or accumulated as fat.

Some foods are digested more quickly than others, which is why you can't simply count calories. A bagel, for instance, contains mainly white flour and water, so it's digested easily and its glucose is rapidly released into the blood stream. The resulting insulin release is greater than if you ate a chocolate chip cookie, a more complicated food. A Snickers bar has a lower glycemic ranking than popcorn. Since the object of any weight loss program includes limiting the insulin response, you need to make choices.

Of course, eating a peanut candy bar is not a good choice. Just eat the peanuts, avoiding tooth decay and addiction to sweets. Choose the dry roasted kind that are seasoned with a moderate amount of sea salt.

When planning a weight-loss program, knowing how a particular food impacts your system is helpful. The trick is to select healthy foods with a low rating on the chart. If the major part of your diet comes from low-index foods that are also full of fiber, high in protein, and packed with vitamins and minerals, you will lose those extra pounds and feel good doing it.

It'll be no surprise that you already know to avoid foods that top the chart. Candy, dried fruit, sodas, french fries, and ice cream are obviously not diet foods. However, you may be surprised at some of the foods in the 55 and up range that you should omit or limit. Orange juice, raisins, rice, flavored instant oatmeal and yogurt, and granola are in this too-high range.

That's one reason these charts are so helpful. You can avoid mistakes (like thinking a plain baked potato is OK, or a slice of watermelon) while getting menu suggestions. You may have forgotten about lentils, sweet potatoes, and hummus. Planning a week's worth of meals off the chart is fun, and you can eat a lot of hummus before you derail your weight loss momentum.

The index is a useful tool that can make this your most successful diet ever. Knowing more about the foods you eat can also help you avoid conditions like heart disease, diabetes, and high blood pressure.




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