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The G.I. (Glycemic Index) Diet

A close cousin to the high-protein Atkins Diet, the G.I. (Glycemic Index) diet focuses on managing the body’s blood-sugar levels through the kinds of food one eats, resulting in high energy, no huger pangs, and of course, weight loss. Understanding the Glycemic Index is a helpful way to understand the diet itself.

Professor of nutrition Dr David Jenkins discovered that traditional thinking regarding sugary foods was flawed; they did not necessarily affect blood sugar levels as dramatically as believed. In many cases starchy, carbohydrate-rich foods had a much larger impact. In 1981 he created the Glycemic Index, a scale that listed foods in the order of blood sugar level impact.

Foods that raise blood sugar levels slowly and steadily have the lowest ratings on the scale, which runs from 0 to 100. The faster and more dramatically a food increases blood sugar, the higher the number. Glucose is used as the reference, and has a GI of 100.

The G.I. Diet uses the Glycemic Index to guide dieters into a daily meal plan that centers on low-GI foods. The theory is nothing new, with age-old motherly wisdom holding that sugary snacks are empty-calorie quick fixes that often leave the consumer crashing and looking for more after a short period of time.

G.I. Diet creator Rick Gallop contends that eating foods that take their time releasing energy-giving glucose into the bloodstream provide a longer-lasting, stronger source of energy. Getting a sustained burn from non-instant oatmeal and seven-grain toast is the recommended breakfast over a bowl of sugar-o’s or a toaster pastry, which, thanks to the processed flour and sugar in their ingredients, would dump their energy store into the bloodstream quickly, causing a dramatic spike. Good for a quick dash to catch the train, perhaps, but the just as dramatic crash to come is rough on the appetite, causing a hunt for another snack. Repeating this pattern often enough will result in constant overeating, which naturally will result in a constantly expanding waistline.

Managing meals on a G.I. diet could be tricky, as most G.I. tables offer the ratings of individual foods. Combining foods together in a tasty arraignment often means changing the G.I. impact of the foods taken as a whole. Getting the most out of a diet of this nature would be a game of averages; the more your meals consist of low G.I. foods, the better your chances of the entire meal being low G.I. Eating right becomes as simple as making the right choices of food based on their index rating.

The G.I. Diet itself works to make weight loss easy by a simple, easy to follow system, modeled after a traffic light. Red is for foods to stay away from if you want to lose weight, yellow is for foods that should be eaten with caution and in moderation, and green is for foods that can be eaten with relative abandon. As mentioned on their website (www.gidiet.com), “If you can follow a traffic light, you can follow this diet.”