WHY ARE THESE FOODS NOT ALLOWED? Part I

There are some very sound body chemistry principles taking place behind every food you put into your body. We say it often – every food that goes into your mouth is either inflammatory or anti-inflammatory. It is either moving you towards health or away from health. We don’t make up the rules… we just explain them to you to help you succeed. So, let’s look at some of those foods and explain the concepts related to how they interfere with weight loss.

A good foundation for determining what foods we recommend, in general, is to start by explaining something called the Glycemic Index. The Glycemic Index is a value assigned to foods, based on how slowly or how quickly those foods cause your blood glucose (or blood sugar) to increase. Foods low on the glycemic index cause sugar to be released slowly and steadily, while foods high on the glycemic index cause sugar to be released rapidly.

This index assigns a number ranging from 0-100 to each food item, which represents the rise in blood sugar two hours after eating that particular food. Pure glucose, or sugar, is given the value of 100, and other foods are indexed in relationship to glucose. Foods with a lower glycemic index are best for weight loss while high glycemic foods contribute to weight gain. This process has an effect on how you feel after eating the food, including how satisfied or full you are, how quickly you become hungry again, and how much of a lift in energy the food tends to provide. However, the glycemic index doesn’t take into account other factors that can affect blood sugar levels in the body.

There is also something called the Glycemic Load of each food. It is the measure of how much carbohydrate is in an individual serving of a food. You multiply the grams of carbohydrate in a serving of a particular food by its glycemic index number and divide that number by 100. The end result is a glycemic load score that better predicts whether or not a food eaten in moderate amounts is healthy or not.           

So, unlike the glycemic index, the glycemic load considers both the quality and quantity of the carbohydrates you are consuming in order to provide a more accurate estimate on how foods influence blood sugar control. This is very important, because the higher our blood sugar spikes, the greater the amount of insulin that will be produced to lower that blood sugar. That is the role the hormone insulin plays in the body.

When insulin connects to the receptors on your cells, it allows them to take in blood sugar for energy or storage. If the cell is already full of sugar and needs no more, then insulin stores the sugar as fat. In other words, it doesn’t need the energy source right now.

So, you can see that while insulin is great at lowering blood sugar, it is also our body’s number one fat storage hormone,
which is why many diabetic medications, like insulin, can cause weight gain.

Insulin tells fat cells to store fat and prevents stored fat from being broken down. So, if we are eating foods with a high glycemic index and/or high glycemic load, or we are eating too much food at a time, we will struggle to lose weight. In fact, we will encourage weight gain. 

The reason behind this is usually due to a person being insulin resistant or having inflammation in their body. It is happening at the cellular level. Ongoing high blood sugar and insulin production caused by foods with high glycemic loads can lead to dangerous side effects of insulin resistance, including type-2 diabetes.

We need to eat foods that will not spike blood sugar and create a fast spike in insulin. Those are the foods on your GHS plan. They create a slow, steady release of insulin that will not cause the body to store fat. Many of the foods not on our plan are removed, first and foremost, for that reason.

Next week we will look at the foods we need to eliminate from our diet now that we know the chemistry behind them. We won’t see the reasoning as restrictive, but freeing, and setting us up to feel better and be healthier.