Have you ever heard of losing weight while still eating bread, cereals, and pasta? Sounds incredible, doesn’t it? The diet we’ll present to you is filled with carbs that have a low glycemic index and could be one of the easiest ways to shed the excess fat without ever feeling hungry.
Control your blood sugar with low glycemic index carbs
By now, you must have tried almost everything to lose the excess fat, to fit nicely into those skinny jeans for the summer. You have surely drunk tons of grapefruit juices, counted the fat in your meals meticulously and got rid of all the bread, different types of pasta and every other type of carb you could think of. However, we want to present to you something much easier and enjoyable.
And it’s not low-fat, low-carb flavorless diet. It’s the low-glycemic index diet, and it’s something that’s become extremely popular in the past few years. And current research has confirmed its effectiveness repeatedly. Basically, following a diet that is comprised of foods that have a low glycemic index can help reduce your cravings, by controlling the blood sugar levels.
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Good vs. bad carbs
Explained simply, a low glycemic index diet has a high content of good carbs like whole grains and vegetables and a low content of bad carbs contained in burgers, pizzas, sweets, candy etc. The rest is made up of lean protein sources and healthy fats. This diet stands in the middle between diets that are rich in protein and satiating and the diets that are rich in fiber and offer more nutrients. And that’s not all. Diets based on different glycemic indexes are one of the most complex diets to have ever appeared. Some of them allow certain types of food, some of them don’t.
It can get really frustrating after a while. However, what the majority of nutrition experts agree on is that following such a diet isn’t harmful and has the potential to offer a lot of health benefits besides fat loss. Before following a low-glycemic index diet, here are some basic things you need to be aware of.
What is the Glycemic Index?
The glycemic index is a system of numbers associated with a particular type of carbohydrate that indicates the carbohydrate’s effect on raising a person’s blood glucose (also called blood sugar) level. This system was first developed for diabetes patients, however, it has become very useful in regards to deepening our understanding of how blood sugar levels impact hunger levels. The process is the following: when you eat a particular carbohydrate, blood sugar levels rise. This causes increased insulin release. Insulin, then, decreases the blood sugar levels, which in the end makes you feel lethargic and irritable. You’re then craving for something sweet. Plummeting blood sugar levels can make you hungrier a lot faster.
Balancing blood sugar levels
There are lots of ways in which you can control and maintain steady blood sugar levels. Exercising on a daily basis will most certainly help a lot, as well as properly timing your meals, but the most important thing are the foods you choose. This is the main aspect where low glycemic index foods can help you. Foods that have a glycemic index that is lower than 55 increase blood sugar levels slightly, the ones that are in the 55-70 range increase them a bit more and the ones that have a glycemic index higher than 70 take them through the roof. Low-glycemic foods affect blood sugar levels moderately, mainly because they can slow down digestion, which is why low-glycemic diet plans are often known as “slow carb” plans.
Several studies have shown that a meal containing low-glycemic foods can be a lot more satiating that a meal containing high-glycemic foods and can help reduce your cravings. This has led some nutrition experts to believe that these foods can ultimately lead to weight loss. Current research has also shown that following a low-glycemic diet can prevent insulin resistance, which is one of the main causes for diabetes development. What’s more, knowing that insulin resistance causes fat gain around the stomach, which is a well-known risk factor for developing a cardiovascular disease, following a low-glycemic can help protect your heart.
How to make it work
Following this type of diet is not so easy. It can become really tiresome wondering what to eat next unless you have an enormous list of items you’ll need to carry with you. And there’s a lot of confusion as to what cereals to pick, the type of bread or potatoes. What might seem as a low-GI food can quite often turn out to be a high-GI food. And you can’t rank the foods based on the glycemic index alone. There are lots of other factors to consider like the food’s nutritional value. For example, a chocolate cake can have a lower glycemic index than a wheat bread, but that doesn’t make it healthier. You have to take into consideration that the cake has more sugar, fat, calories and is low in fiber.
What complicates matters more is that the glycemic index rankings compare different foods based on a pre-set quantity of carbs, which is often 50 g. That isn’t the standard portion for the majority of people. Plus, when you begin to combine different foods, their impact on blood sugar levels starts to change. So, before you say it isn’t worth it, hold on. Here’s a list of how to get as many benefits as possible from a low-glycemic diet.
- Substitute as many high-glycemic foods as possible with healthy low-glycemic alternatives.
- Add or replace at least one low-glycemic food at every meal. Add fat or protein every time you eat a high-glycemic food.
- Opt for low-glycemic grains over processed as often as you can.
- Decrease the negative impact on blood sugar levels of any food by combining it with a food with a lower-GI. Like, substituting waffles (high-glycemic) with berries (low-glycemic).
- Measure your portions. Big portions, regardless of what they contain, almost always trigger a higher blood sugar response than the smaller portions.
Common alternatives
- Don’t buy instant oatmeal, make yourself a home-made oatmeal instead. The thing that makes the home-made oatmeal a lot healthier is because it has a high content of compact and hard starch granules, plus fiber. The granules are hard to break down, which slows down digestion. On the other hand, the starch that is found in instant oatmeal has already been softened during refinement, which makes it a lot easier to digest.
- Making a turkey sandwich with whole wheat buns and fried potatoes on the side, can be substituted with lean turkey inside 100% stone-ground whole wheat buns with tomatoes, avocado, lettuce and a cup of soup on the side. This type of wheat is a lot coarser, and that makes it more difficult to break down and digest. The soup is acidic and the avocado has fat in it. The acid and the fat slow the digestion process by slowing down the speed at which the food leaves the stomach.
- Eating pretzels can be substituted with some apple slices and peanut butter. The apples have a lot of fiber in them and the peanut butter a lot of fat, which combined together slow digestion.
- A vegetable stir-fry and some white rice can be substituted with cooking some chicken or tofu stir-fry with some veggies and basmati rice added. That’s because just like the instant oatmeal, the instant white rice is digested quickly since the refining process has already softened the starch granules. Basmati is a better variation since the starch granules are harder and compact. And the adding of protein in the chicken or the tofu will also slow down digestion.
- Don’t eat rice pudding. Eat some frozen yogurt (low-fat) with blueberries. The blueberries have acid and fiber in them, which as we already said slows digestion.
A List of Low Glycemic Diet Foods (For reference, the glycemic index of 55 and below is considered to be low) :
Food / Glycemic Index
1.Oats / 51
2.Peas / 393.Carrots / 19
4.Broccoli / 10
5.Cabbage / 10
6.Kale / 4
7.Tomatoes / 15
8.Cauliflower / 15
9.Whole Wheat Bread / 49
10.Mushrooms / 10
11.Quinoa / 53
12.Cherries / 22
13.Coconut / 45
14.Peaches / 28
15.Apples / 34
16.Pears / 41
17.Milk / 31
18.Yogurt / 33
19.Lentils / 30
20.Beans / 40-52
21.Sweet Potatoes / 48
22.Brown Rice / 50
23.Hummus / 6
24.Peanuts / 13
25. Strawberries / 40
