The Glycemic Index Diet for Dummies - Meri Raffetto [28]
Choosing lean-protein foods is essential for weight loss and general health. Some examples of lean-protein sources are skinless chicken breasts, lean cuts of beef and pork, egg whites, fish and shellfish, and soy foods. You also need to eat fat. Believe it or not, fat is healthy when it's the right kind and when you consume it in moderate amounts. Look for unsaturated fat sources, specifically oils, seeds, nuts, nut butters, olives, and avocados. Do your best to avoid saturated and trans fats such as butter, cream, lard, and hydrogenated oils.
Consuming a protein source and a fat source at each meal is a great way to slow down your bods digestion and conversion of carbohydrates into sugar to provide long-term fullness and nutritional health . . . both of which are keys to long-term weight loss!
Eating the right amounts of low-glycemic fruits and vegetables along with portion-controlled low-glycemic starches is great, but if you're pairing those foods with excessive amounts of butter, oils, or high-fat meats, your hard work may all be for naught. Pay attention to your portion sizes. Fats in particular are very calorie dense, so keep a close eye on 'em. One teaspoon of oil, 1 tablespoon of nut butter, or six almonds, for example, is plenty.
Chapter 4: Taking Portion Size into Account with the Glycemic Load
In This Chapter
Seeing how glycemic load improves the practicality of the glycemic index
Determining a particular food's glycemic load
Using the glycemic load to increase the kinds of foods you can eat
Looking at the glycemic load levels of common foods
The glycemic index is a wonderful tool for determining your best carbohydrate-containing food choices. But like many things in life, it has its limitations, specifically those relating to the amount of food you'd actually eat in a serving, mixed foods, and even different food-preparation methods. As the glycemic index diet has grown more and more popular, new concepts and information are doing their part to lessen the impact of some of these limitations.
One such concept is the glycemic load. Although the glycemic index shows you the quality of your carbohydrates (as explained in Chapter 2), the glycemic load breaks those carbs down into the quantity you'd typically eat at one sitting, which can turn a high-glycemic food into a low-glycemic food. Glycemic load is one of the most important concepts to understand so you can make the best food choices based on a realistic portion size. That's why I share the basics of it with you in this chapter.
Going from the Glycemic Index to the Glycemic Load
The glycemic load, which is based on the idea that a high-glycemic food eaten in small quantities produces a blood sugar response that's similar to the response produced by low-glycemic foods, is a much more useful tool for your day-to-day use. It allows you to have more food choices than the glycemic index does alone. That's good news because no one wants to be too restricted in what he or she can eat. But to create the glycemic load, researchers first had to come up with the glycemic index.
The glycemic index concept was developed in 1981 by two University of Toronto researchers, Dr. Thomas Wolever and Dr. David Jenkins. Their research compared the effect of 25 grams of carbohydrates (just picture two slices of bread if you're not familiar with the metric system) to that of 50 grams of carbohydrates (picture four slices of bread) to see whether the smaller amount created a lower glycemic response in the human body based on the lower quantity of carbohydrates.
However, with the amount of carbohydrates varying so much in different foods (for instance, some fruits and vegetables have only 5 grams of carbohydrates whereas starches have up to 15 grams), 50 grams of carbohydrates (the standard amount used for glycemic index testing) doesn't always depict the portion size a person may typically eat. To account for this variation, in 1997, Harvard University's Dr. Walter Willet