Weight Loss & the Glycemic Index
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The Glycemic Index of a food is derived by comparing the rate of digestion to that food, with the rate of digestion of pure glucose. Glucose is assigned a Glycemic Index of 100, and the tested food is charted against this standard. Glucose is the most widely accepted reference food; however some other systems use white bread instead. Foods with a high Glycemic Index (70 and above) are those that break down quickly and cause a spike in blood sugar levels. Foods with a low Glycemic Index (55 and below) break down more slowly and steadily, resulting in a more sustained supply of energy.

Having a basic understanding of this index is important in more ways than one.

If you have a sugar habit now in the form of high sugar content foods such as cakes, candies, ice cream or chocolate, it is going to be difficult to kill if you are also eating foods high on the glycemic index.

Women's bodies scream for chocolate when premenstrual food cravings surface. Researchers argue that this craving is because chocolate contains high levels of magnesium and prior to menstruation women's bodies experience magnesium deficiency. The problem is that for chocolate to be palatable it has to be loaded with sugar. My suggestion is to find another source of magnesium. Most good calcium contains magnesium, and I will be talking about vitamins later in this chapter.

There is a relatively new way to assess the impact of carbohydrate consumption called the glycemic load that takes the glycemic index into account. This gives a fuller picture than does glycemic index alone. I am not going to include that here for reasons of keeping things simple, but you do need to be aware of it in case you wish to take things a bit further. A GI value tells you only how rapidly a particular carbohydrate turns into sugar. It does not tell you how much of that carbohydrate is in a serving of a particular food. The carbohydrate in watermelon, for example, has a high GI. But there is not a lot of it, so watermelon's glycemic load is relatively low. A GL of 20 or more is high, a GL of 11 to 19 inclusive is medium, and a GL of 10 or less is low. There are a couple of flaws with the glycemic index, and I will explain them in a moment. The bottom line here is that you need to have an idea or baseline about how your body processes certain types of foods.

The problem with the glycemic index is that you do not know how empty or full or the type of food the person had in their system when the blood sugar per each food was measured. The other problem is that the sugar content in some fruits increases as it gets ripe.

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