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 peanut-packed candy is not healthy. The total sugar content promotes tooth decay, eventual weight gain, and an addiction to that insidious sweet taste. A better choice is just eat peanuts. They are ranked way down on the chart. Choose dry roast, flavored only with a little sea salt.

For any weight reduction program, you need to know how each food impacts your system. Using the chart, you can select low-glycemic foods. After also checking their fiber and protein content, and making sure they are additive and pesticide-free, you may choose to include them in your diet. This way you lose weight while boosting health and energy.

A lot of the chart will make sense. Ice cream, candy, dried fruit, sodas, french fries, and white bread are generally known to cause weight gain. These are all ranked at the top of the chart. Some of the things in the 'to be limited' range of above 55 may surprise you, however. Granolas, flavored instant oatmeals and yogurts, orange juice, and rice do not promote weight loss. Fortunately, there are many, many foods that have a count of 54 or lower, so there's no need to feel deprived.

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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