What are low glycemic foods? How do they help you keep the weight off?
I’ll try not to make it too complicated. I promise.
Low-glycemic foods are foods that contain carbohydrates that are slowly digested and absorbed after you eat them. For example, beans, whole grains, and vegetables are pretty low on the glycemic scale. In contrast, high-glycemic carbohydrates are foods like white bread, cookies, and candy. These are foods that are digest quickly and are rapidly absorbed into the blood stream.
The reason it’s important to understand glycemic response, to some degree, is because our changing estrogen levels often lead to insulin resistance. You’ve heard of insulin right? Insulin is that hormone we need to help absorb glucose—it goes up when we eat carbohydrates.
But here is the kicker—high insulin levels also keeps us from metabolizing stored fat. Plus, it makes us hungrier so we eat more. A low-glycemic diet helps us keeps insulin levels lower and also helps us not be hungry so much.
Foods that include lots of sugar, potatoes, refined wheat pasta, white rice, and white bread all can cause a higher glycemic response if eaten alone. So here is what you need to do. Either avoid high glycemic carbohydrates or eat them with protein and fat to slow down digestion and absorption.
Here is an example…add peanut butter to a sliced apple. The fat and protein in the nut butter slow down the absorption of carbohydrate in the apple. Add nuts to your oatmeal or eat a piece of string cheese with that orange.
So should you only eat low carbohydrate foods?
No. Several popular lower-carbohydrate diets, such as the South Beach Diet, use lower glycemic carbohydrate foods in the first phase. It’s still, somewhat controversial because we don’t usually eat one food at a time. We eat combinations of foods. Meals. And when we add protein and fat to that meal, the glycemic response drops. Plus we have no way of knowing how much, short of testing your own blood sugar all the time. Oh, please don’t do that!
So, what should you do?
There is no doubt that eating a low glycemic diet is a good thing in the long run. Eating less sugar is always good. Need a refresher on that. Read why here. For the purposes of blog and helping you maintain weight through peri-menopause and beyond, we are going to limit ingredients like white flour, white sugar, white rice, sugary drinks, juice, processed foods and other high glycemic carbohydrates and instead use whole grains (oatmeal, whole wheat flour, quinoa), brown rice, beans and lots of vegetables.
[…] The key to healthy snacking is choosing whole foods that will raise your blood sugar level slowly. It’s not necessarily choosing all low glycemic foods but COMBINING foods so we have a lower “glycemic load.” I don’t mean to get all scientific here but the truth is most people don’t eat foods in isolation so the glycemic load is the how several foods combined together affect the blood sugar level. That is why just looking at a glycemic index of foods really doesn’t mean anything. For more on this topic click here. […]