Glycaemic Loading

for Easy Weight Loss

Nigel Denby with Tina Michelucci & Deborah Pyner

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Introduction: The Ultimate Diet

Part I – What is GL?

1 GI and GL Made Simple

2 How to Follow the 7-Day GL Diet

Part II – Whose Side are You on?

3 It’s All in the Mind

4 KOKO – Keep on Keeping on

5 Every Second Counts

Part III – Your 7-Day GL Guides

6 The 7-day Fast and Friendly Plan

7 The 7-day Veggie Friendly Plan

8 The 7-day Foodie Friendly Plan

9 Variety is the Spice of Life

Part IV – Living a Low-GL Lifestyle

10 Low-GL Food Lists with Portion Guide

11 A Guide to Low-GL Shopping and Eating Out

12 Love Your Food and Your Body

Part V – Further Information

13 The Evidence – Research that Shows Low-glycaemic Diets Work

14 Your Questions Answered

Appendix 1 – A-Z of Low-GL Foods

Appendix 2 – Recommended Reading

Index

Index of Recipes

Acknowledgements

E-book Extra

About the Author

Reviews for the GL Diet

Copyright

About the Publisher

Introduction: The Ultimate Diet

In my role as both a clinical dietician working on the front line with patients, and as a dietician working in the media, the question I’m asked most frequently has to be: ‘What is the ultimate diet?’

It’s a claim that’s been made about so many of the diets that we now know to be at best useless and at worst dangerous. Before we can even begin to answer the question, I think we have to decide what the ultimate diet would need to include.

The ultimate diet – it works, it’s easy to follow, it’s based on sound scientific evidence, and it suits both men and women. There is no need to count points or calories or to weigh food. There is no humiliation or guilt! It is a diet for life – not just post-Christmas, and it’s safe. There is such a diet and it’s called the 7-day GL diet.

We know that every fad diet and every celebrity diet has maybe one or two of these attributes – but for me that’s not good enough. For any diet to bear my name, and more importantly for me to use with patients in clinics, I have to be completely satisfied that my criteria have been met.

I firmly believe that if we don’t have these high standards we will keep people in the ‘diet trap’, an unhealthy cycle leading to both physiological and psychological damage.

For me, the 7-day GL diet ticks all of the boxes. This isn’t a diet we thought up sitting in our office – it’s taken years of trials, research and adaptation to develop into a plan we are proud of and in which we have complete confidence.

From working with both men and women with weight issues I have learnt that while people like to have clear and simple guidelines, they are also more likely to succeed if given the responsibility of choice. This book will enable you to understand fully why the plan can work for you, and will help you to control your weight forever. What we want is for you to get to the point where you have learned enough to put the book away and get on with your life, without having to keep checking if you are doing things right.

The 7-day GL diet gives you the simple, flexible, straightforward foundations you need to start a new healthy way of eating. It will put you firmly in the ‘weight-control driving seat’ and keep you there!

Although it might seem like it, none of us goes upstairs one night thin and comes down the next morning with a weight problem – it takes years of repeated behaviour, and that behaviour becomes more ingrained with every failed dieting attempt. Writing the book has been both a professional and personal learning curve for all of us. Much of the advice, support and coaching we give to change these behaviours comes from our experience of working with real people, as well as from our personal stories of breaking free from our own ‘diet traps’.

With a combined 90 years of dieting experience between us, we created Diet Freedom to help other people just like us, people with busy, pressured lives who were frustrated with the continual cycle of either preparing for the next diet, or recovering from the most recent dieting failure. Along with our individual professional strengths – tireless researcher, amazingly experimental cook and diligent dietician – this experience puts us in a unique position to support you in your own quest for diet freedom.

You may notice throughout the book references to both our website www.dietfreedom.co.uk and Diet Freedom Fighters. The name ‘Diet Freedom Fighters’ was coined by GL dieters on our website forums, who have taken up the GL challenge and are getting great results. We set up the website as an added support network and are delighted that it is so popular, not to mention huge fun. We love it and wanted to make sure you are aware that there is a lot more support available to you after reading the book – in fact, there’s a whole community out there waiting to welcome you!

We really hope this book will give you the answers you have been looking for. We’d like to be the first to congratulate you on taking your first step towards success and achieving your goals!

Nigel Denby

Registered Dietician

RD BSc Hons

PART I WHAT IS GL?

This section gives you all the background information about the diet and how it works. Most importantly, it tells you how to get started. It also explains why we feel the Glycaemic Load (GL) makes more sense than the Glycaemic Index (GI) alone, and gives you the simple science behind balancing blood sugars and permanent weight control.

You’ll find:

  A simple explanation of how the diet works

  A clear guide to getting started

  Tips on deciding what you want to achieve

“After I had my son I’d gained about 10lb, and in the first few months I was so busy getting used to being a mum I didn’t really have time to think about dieting. As the day to go back to work loomed closer and closer I began to panic. I’d got into a snacking habit that I just couldn’t seem to break. I’d worked with Nigel on nutrition stories before, and after he talked me through the diet I quickly got back in control of my eating, and lost the weight I’d gained in time for my first day back at work. I felt so reassured that I hadn’t needed to rely on a quick-fix diet. The concept of GL makes complete sense to me and has just become a way of life.”

Mishal Husain, BBC news anchor

Chapter 1 GI AND GL MADE SIMPLE

The first thing you probably want to know about this diet is: ‘Does it work?’

Well, from my experience as a dietician working with patients in my own clinics, I can tell you yes, it most certainly does. Every day I see more and more people who previously thought they were stuck in a ‘diet trap’ telling me that the GL diet is finally getting them back in the driving seat where their weight is concerned. They are looking at life with renewed optimism and excitement as a world of possibilities and freedom opens up to them with every positive step they take towards their weight-loss goals.

Slow Carbs not No Carbs

Before we start looking at GI and GL and the differences in more detail, we need to go back a little further so you can see how our understanding of carbohydrate management has evolved.

A few years ago I was actively and publicly criticizing the ‘high-protein, low-carb’ diet phenomenon that was sweeping the world. We knew people were losing weight, but as a responsible dietician I could never sit comfortably with the idea of cutting out a whole food group from our diet.

What we can say about high-protein, low-carb diets today is this: in controlled weight-loss studies, they perform no better than any other weight-loss programme in the long term, and worryingly we remain unsure about how safe these diets are in terms of heart health and long-term kidney function.

So, let’s get one thing straight: this is not a no-carb diet. The principle behind the GL diet is SLOW CARBS, and there’s a big difference in terms of success and long-term health.

Although research into the Glycaemic Index (GI) has been carried out progressively over the last 20 or so years in Australia (University of Sydney) and Canada (University of Toronto), and more recently in the United States by Harvard Medical School, * the GI only really began to hit the headlines a couple of years ago as a possible, healthier successor to low-carb diets.

How Can the GI Help Weight Control?

Foods that contain carbohydrates have an effect on our blood glucose (or blood sugars). This effect is measured as the ‘glycaemic response’. A food that will make our blood glucose level rise quickly is classed as high glycaemic, whereas a food that has little or no impact on our blood glucose is low glycaemic.

When we eat high-glycaemic carbohydrates we get a rapid rise in blood glucose or a ‘spike’. This is bad news for the body and prompts our pancreas to produce insulin, the most powerful hormone in the body, so not to be underestimated. Insulin comes rushing in to flush the glucose from our bloodstream as a safety mechanism and carries it to our liver and muscles, where it is stored as energy for later use. Healthy blood glucose is quite finely balanced – when blood glucose goes too low or too high it can detrimentally affect most of the organs in the body. If this situation becomes the norm it can have quite serious long-term health implications. The muscles and liver fill up very quickly, especially if we are not doing a lot of exercise to use up this ‘stored energy’ – by ‘a lot’ we mean the sort of training you might do to run a marathon. When the muscles and liver are full and can’t store any more glucose, the only thing insulin can do is transfer the excess to other body tissues, where this excess energy is stored as FAT. Yes, those awful wobbly bits!

Once insulin has done its job and dispersed the glucose from our blood, the ‘spike’ in blood glucose falls rapidly. This is a vicious cycle as the rapid fall prompts us to crave more high-glycaemic foods – which actually caused the problem in the first place!

If we eat low-glycaemic foods, we store less excess energy and blood glucose levels are kept stable. This gives a slow-release, prolonged energy supply, enabling us to go about our activities with fewer cravings, feeling more balanced and ultimately storing less fat.

That’s the basis of all low-glycaemic diets. But why low GL (Glycaemic Load) rather than low GI (Glycaemic Index)?

So What’s Wrong with GI?

In principle nothing, except …

  The way the GI of a food is worked out doesn’t always relate to the amount of food we actually eat at one sitting.

  GI can be very confusing.

  If you base your diet on low-GI foods, some very healthy foods are excluded, such as carrots, watermelon, parsnips, pumpkin and broad beans to name a few.

  GI gives us the first part of the story. It tells us that not all carbohydrates are equal. But that’s a bit like knowing that you spend more money than you earn each month – it doesn’t actually help you manage your money and get back in the black!

What’s So Right about GL?

The Glycaemic Load (GL) gives you the whole story:

  GL allows you to understand with confidence how foods will affect your body.

  GL is based on carbohydrates in the portion sizes we usually eat, rather than the amount needed in a laboratory setting to work out the GI.

  GL means far more food choices.

  GL makes practical sense of the GI science. It’s the final chapter in carbohydrate management and offers a real solution to long-term weight control.

The Technical Bit – How We Work out the GI and GL of a Food

Note: if you don’t want to know about the science – and you don’t need to in order to follow the GL diet – then skip to Chapter 2.

GI – the First Part of the Story

To work out the GI of a food, scientists take whatever amount of a food is needed to give you 50g of carbohydrate. Now, with a food like bread that isn’t a problem because two slices of bread give us about 50g of carbohydrate. The bread is then fed to human volunteers and blood samples are taken from them at regular intervals to see how much glucose has been released into their bloodstream. The result of these tests is a GI number between 1 and 100.

Foods are classed as:

55 or less = low Gl

56–69 = moderate GI

70 plus = high Gl

So far, so good.

But let’s look at another food. Take carrots and use the same procedure. To get 50g of carbohydrate from carrots you would need to consume about one-and-a-half pounds (0.7kg). That’s a normal portion for a donkey maybe, but a bit excessive for the likes of us humans in one sitting. The volunteers (poor things) are fed the carrots, and the same blood tests and calculations are carried out as with the bread. The result is that carrots get a GI of about 75, making them high GI, which is why many GI diet books advise you not to eat them! Carrots are, in fact, a very healthy and low-‘GL’ food based on an average portion, so we can all thankfully continue to enjoy them as part of a balanced diet.

The GL Makes Sense of the GI

The GL goes a practical stage further. It takes the GI rating we’ve just outlined, but then very cleverly (thanks to Professor Walter Willett of Harvard Medical School who came up with the equation) takes into account the amount of carbohydrate in a portion of food we would normally eat. So now we know the effect a normal portion of carrots (around 100g) would have on our blood glucose levels, and that’s what gives us the GL rating.

It’s so simple and, more importantly, relevant to what we actually eat!

Foods rated using the GL do still get a number:

10 and under = low GL

11–19 = medium GL

20 plus = high GL

If you did want to count your GLs for the first few days to gain confidence that you are on the right track, you would be aiming to have 80GL or under on a low-GL day. A high-GL day would be 120GL or over.

BUT don’t worry. Although we do give some basic portion guidelines and GL references, you don’t have to count at all! Counting points and rigidly measuring and weighing foods is what turns us all off when it comes to diets. It’s the bit that makes diets boring, boring, boring and, besides, who has the time?

All you need to do is read through the rest of the book, start loving healthy, low-GL foods, losing weight and, best of all, be able to keep it off forever as the GL diet becomes a way of life.

As serial dieters we are all searching for our own elusive ‘diet freedom’. The GL finally brings this within everyone’s grasp without deprivation or hunger.

For us, this GL plan is the ultimate permanent weight-loss solution because:

  It works – you’ll see results in just seven days.

  It’s easy to follow.

  It’s based on sound, sensible science.

  It suits both men and women.

  There’s no counting points.

  There’s no endless weighing and measuring.

  There’s no hunger or feeling deprived.

  There’s no humiliation or guilt.

  It’s a healthy diet you’ll want to adopt for life, not just for Christmas …

  Oh … and it’s safe!

* The Harvard Medical School has carried out the longest running studies into human nutrition, stretching back over 20 years, and these are still continuing today.

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