The Glycemic Index Diet for Dummies - Meri Raffetto [57]
Eating too few calories
Eating a very-low-calorie diet can be extremely harmful to your body's metabolism. If you dip too low in your calorie intake, your body simply compensates by decreasing your overall metabolic rate, which can ultimately hinder your weight-loss goals.
Many weight-loss programs prescribe very-low-calorie diets (1,000 calories or less) to help you lose excess pounds. Although your body decreases its metabolic rate (described earlier in this chapter) to compensate for this lower calorie level, something else happens at the same time. This low calorie level may create a situation where your body turns to lean body tissue, or muscle, for energy. This decrease in overall lean body mass lowers your metabolic rate even further.
Consider this example: Sally had recently gained weight and wanted to get the excess pounds off. Her metabolic rate was 2,500 calories per day, which means she was consuming around 2,500 calories each day to maintain her current weight. Sally turned to a popular diet program, which estimated her daily calories at 1,000 (without accounting for daily activity). The result? Sally lost 10 pounds in two weeks and was absolutely thrilled. She kept up with the diet for about a month, losing roughly 3 pounds of lean muscle mass (not good), along with body fat, and decreasing her metabolic rate in response to the lower calorie level (even worse!).
Sally's metabolic rate used to be 2,500 calories; now it has decreased to approximately 2,000 calories. When Sally goes back to her old eating habits, which were landing her on an average of 2,500 calories consumed per day, she'll gain her old weight back plus more.
To avoid falling into the trap of eating too few calories, remember this: You still have to eat in order to lose weight. Yes, this statement may go against all other dieting concepts you've encountered, but you're seeking a long-term weight-loss solution, not a short-term fad diet.
Maintaining a food journal (covered in Chapter 6) can be a great way of checking your food intake. It also gives you a record that you can share with a registered dietician or nutritional professional to make sure you're getting enough calories to support your weight-loss efforts.
Chapter 9: Presenting Foolproof Healthy-Eating Strategies
In This Chapter
Making the best low-glycemic food choices
Balancing proteins, carbohydrates, and fats for successful weight loss
Defining moderation for long-term weight-loss success
Knowing and feeling comfortable applying simple healthy-eating strategies can mean the difference between giving up and finding weight-loss success. Why? Because after you have a few rules down you can apply them to any situation and make them work in your lifestyle. You know the old saying "you can give someone a fish or teach him how to fish so he can have fish for life"? Eating a balanced, low-glycemic diet works just the same way. Sure, I could give you a book of menus to follow, but I'd prefer to give you some simple healthy-eating strategies so you can use them in any scenario you might experience.
This chapter delves into a few basic healthy-eating strategies that can help you benefit from low-glycemic foods, keep your calorie level in a good range, and get your food cravings under control — all without you having to count calories or solve awful math equations whenever you want to eat something. After you know these tricks of the trade by heart and start practicing them, they'll become second nature to you.
The purpose for simplifying healthy-eating strategies is twofold: so you can get the results you're looking for by decreasing your glycemic load and your calorie level and so you can make your new diet changes work easily in your life.
Tips for Choosing Low-Glycemic Foods
The goal of healthy eating on a low-glycemic diet is to balance your food choices every day, even when your days are hectic. Well, when life gets busy and you start depending on high-glycemic grab-and-go foods, you'll