Glycemic Index Diet Plan
We're back again with another of our Top 100 Weight Loss Tips. Here is article 59 in the series bringing you one hundred different tips for approaching your wish to lose weight.
This post looks at the GI (Glycemic Index) diet plan and how it can be leveraged to help you to make serious inroads into reducing your weight in a healthy way.
What is the Glycemic Index?
But first, if you don't know what GI actually is, we'd better get that part out of the way first. The Glycemic Index is a measure of the difference between types of carbohydrates and is arrived at by ranking them according to their effect on a person's blood glucose levels.
Therefore carbs with a high GI will cause blood glucose levels to rise sharply, which the body combats by releasing large amounts of insulin into the bloodstream. This is bad for the body and leads to weight gain as, in its simplest terms the action of insulin on these sugars results in them being converted to fat.
Conversely, low GI carbs release glucose into the bloodstream slowly, allowing the body to use them rather than turning them into stored fat.
Glycemic Index Diet Plan
A diet based on the GI of carbs, then is one that works towards providing you with foods that the body is not so quick to convert into stored fat. A Glycemic Index diet plan attempts to provide you with only low GI carbs to achieve this end and in doing so reduces the incidence of stored fat, which is a good way to prevent weight gain and when combined with light exercise leads to weight loss.
A typical low GI diet plan would avoid refined flour based foods such as white bread and pasta, biscuits and cakes and concentrate instead on including alternatives that were made with wholewheat flour. That's because refined white flour is made up of high GI carbs and the main reason why things like white bread, pasta, biscuits and cakes will cause weight gain.
Of course, cakes and biscuits also contain high levels of sugars and trans fats, which are also bad for dieters! On the other hand, wholewheat food products generally contain low GI carbs which are less likely to cause weight gain as long as they don't contain excessive amounts of sugars and fats.
Another good low GI food is porridge, made from rolled oats. Oats are very low GI carbs which are extremely good for you not only as a diet aid but also as a health promoter, helping to reduce bad LDL cholesterol and normalize blood sugar levels while boosting the metabolism meaning you burn more calories, leading to a reduction in weight.
So if you are interested in trying this alternative type of diet plan, it is also a healthy option which will benefit you in many ways.
More in-depth information on the Glycemic Index can be found at the official GI website at: www.glycemicindex.com
100 Weight Loss Tips number 58 follows in the next post!
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Posted on Mon, 24 Aug 2009 in Top 100 Weight Loss Tips | 1 Comments
1 thoughts on "Glycemic Index Diet Plan"
Len says:
I tried the glycemic diet plan and found I lost weight real easy. Weight loss should be easy to achieve if you combine proper diet with lots of exercise anyways, but this diet in particular really helped me. Nice write up on it, by the way!