• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 438 0

probably find yourself saying, "I'll get back on track tomorrow." But that behavior counteracts all of your weight-loss efforts. I'm not saying you should eat all low-glycemic carbs all the time. Instead, I want you to feel comfortable choosing them most of the time (meaning at least one low-glycemic food per meal) while balancing your intake of medium- to high-glycemic foods. This two-pronged approach can help you stay on track whether you're at home, on vacation, or out to lunch with friends. The following sections cover a few quick tips for making the best low-glycemic food choices.

Get acquainted with the glycemic index list

Take the time to become familiar with the glycemic index by reviewing one or more of the lists that are readily available (see Chapter 7 for one specific Web site you can seek out). The glycemic index list is your starting point because it can famiarize you with what foods have a low, medium, and high glycemic index. You'll need to focus at first to pick up on which foods are low-glycemic and which ones are medium- and high-glycemic, but soon you'll have memorized the glycemic nature of the foods you eat the most and you won't need to depend on the list as much.

When in doubt, always keep in mind that using low-glycemic foods in moderation gives you great benefits.

Pay attention to portion sizes

Following the low-glycemic list of foods is simply following a low-glycemic diet. Following a low-glycemic diet for weight loss requires closer attention to the all-important portion size. Even if you're regularly choosing low-glycemic foods and balancing them with medium- and high-glycemic foods, if you don't pay attention to your portion sizes, you may never lose weight. Here's why:

The glycemic load of a food typically increases when you eat larger amounts.

Your calorie level for the day is determined mostly by the portion sizes you eat.

The tricky thing is that the portion sizes used for glycemic index testing may be a little different than the typical recommended portion sizes for calorie control. Glycemic index testing uses very small amounts of food, so when you eat more, the glycemic load also increases. (I cover glycemic load and what makes it different from the glycemic index in Chapter 4.)

You can generally gauge that if a food's glycemic load is very low, it likely won't go up too much if you decide to eat more of that food. If the glycemic load is near medium or already in the medium category, then it'll go up from there.

Of course, you also need to retrain your brain to recognize appropriate portion sizes of different foods for calorie control. Portions in today's restaurants have increased so much that the new, larger sizes have become normal in most people's perceptions. But eating those jumbo-sized portions regularly is a surefire way to sabotage your weight-loss efforts and up the overall glycemic load of your meal. Use Table 9-1 as a general reference for scaling back your brain's mental image of the appropriate portion size.

A good exercise to help you get your portion sizes under control is to measure your food for one day so you can see what the actual portion sizes should look like on your plate. You don't have to be perfect and measure your food every day (that's no way to live your life). Measuring your food for just one day gives you enough of an idea of how much to put on your plate.

Keep the glycemic load of your meal at or under 25

If you feel more comfortable tracking numbers and having some guidelines to work toward, then this advice is for you: Strive to consume a maximum glycemic load of 25 per meal. Doing so allows you a good variety of carbohydrates foryour meal including grains, vegetables, fruits, and/or dairy products.

Here's what one possible under-25-glycemic-load meal looks like:

1/2 turkey sandwich on whole-wheat bread with a slice of cheddar cheese, tomato, lettuce, and sliced avocado (glycemic load of whole-wheat bread = 8)

1 cup of tomato soup (glycemic load = 8)

8 ounces of fruit yogurt (glycemic load = 7)

The total