The Glycemic Index Diet for Dummies - Meri Raffetto [23]
Regardless of whether blood glucose is being spent or stored, the influx of blood glucose in your blood can create spikes and crashes depending on what you eat. This process leads to food cravings, moodiness, and fatigue — all of which can make weight loss difficult to accomplish.
In the next sections, I explain how following a low-glycemic diet can reduce the excess fat your body may be storing and positively affect your food cravings.
Figure 3-1: Insulin lets blood glucose enter the body's cells.
Keeping blood glucose levels down
Low-glycemic foods play an important role in keeping blood glucose levels down. Your body coverts these foods into blood glucose more slowly and over a longer period of time. That means your body needs less insulin to get the energy into your cells, so your pancreas is spared from being overworked. It also means there's less excess insulin just hanging around as fat storage. That's a plus for weight loss if I ever heard one!
High-glycemic foods, on the other hand, get converted to blood glucose very quickly, causing a rush of blood glucose into the body in large amounts. The result? You feel satisfied and revived for about 30 minutes following a high-glycemic snack, but after those 30 minutes are up, you start to feel fatigued and hungry all over again. Eating more low-glycemic foods helps reduce fatigue and hunger and prevent chronic high blood sugars.
Counteracting insulin resistance
Extra blood glucose (blood sugar) typically gets converted to body fat when you've eaten too many calories. Although this process happens to everyone, it may be more challenging for individuals with insulin resistance, a condition in which a person has a diminished ability for his blood glucose to respond to the action of insulin, causing the pancreas to secrete even more insulin to compensate (see the following figure). Many individuals, particularly those with prediabetes, diabetes, metabolic syndrome, or Polycystic Ovary Syndrome, have some varying degree of insulin resistance, which causes their bodies to store more calories as fat when their insulin levels are consistently high.
Warning: If you're overweight, you may have a small amount of insulin resistance without even knowing it. Individuals who are overweight, especially those who carry a lot of belly weight around the middle, are at a higher risk for being insulin resistant, a fact that explains why weight loss can be a little more challenging for these folks.
Researchers are currently studying the effects of a low-glycemic diet to see whether it enhances weight loss by helping individuals have better control over their blood gucose levels. Although many studies show promise, the official verdict is still out. No study has consistently shown that a low-glycemic diet helps healthy people lose more weight than your average calorie-restricted diet. This fact just means more research is needed, especially among people who have known insulin resistance.
What's wrong with chronically elevated blood sugars? Over time, too much sugar in the blood for too long can damage the blood vessels and nerves, leading to kidney disease, blindness, nerve damage, heart disease, and foot problems.
Controlling food cravings
Food cravings occur for many reasons, both physiological and psychological, but one core cause of food cravings is erratic blood glucose levels. When your body's blood glucose levels go through high spikes throughout the day, you can wind up feeling hungry — hence the unwanted yet nagging food craving.
Imagine facing a busy day at work and getting the kids off to various appointments. You don't have time for more than a couple handfuls of pretzels as you race from work to pick up your kids. Even if this was an adequate snack calorie-wise, you'd likely feel starving in an hour or so. Why? Because pretzels are a high-glycemic snack that sends your blood glucose levels spiking only to drop off quickly shortly afterward.
Often food cravings go hand in hand with low blood glucose levels.