My good friend, Greta, who's about 40 or 50 pounds overweight, is a living example of an educated, well intended fat person who doesn't eat much fat. Greta always buys low-fat products. Greta never eats fatty meats. And Greta hasn't had real butter in years. When Greta got on the scale last January 1st, she weighed a pound more than she did the previous January, which is really not so bad. However, she was truly horrified to discover her waist measurement increased by a full inch and a half! Greta is a full-fledged, card-carrying fat phobic person, yet despite that - or maybe because of it - she got bigger, not smaller. Fat takes the rap in everyone's diet, but what if it's not the fat? What if it's the sugar and all the highly processed, fiberless foods that quickly convert to sugar that are making Greta, you, me and everyone else get bigger and fatter? As Bill Clinton might say, It's the sugar, stupid!
Here's what I observe. Greta eats cereal, muffins, or bagels for breakfast. She eats sandwiches, buns or wraps for lunch. She eats crackers and chips for snacks. She eats breads, croutons, white rice and pastas with dinner. She eats fat-free yogurt, fat-free ice-cream, fat-free salad dressing, and low fat desserts. Greta's sole determiner of the goodness and healthiness of food has to do with whether or not it contains fat. If Greta checked the ingredients list of her favorite off-the-shelf products, she'd see that most of them are filled with sugar and high fructose corn syrup. Sugar and high fructose corn syrup are a food manufacturer's dream because they're fat free. That means they don't count. That means they're magic foods. Highly processed grain-type foods are magic too. Not only are they fat free, they're the kind of food our government instructs us to eat the most. The latest food pyramid displays breads, pastas and cereals at the bottom, the largest group. The message behind this image is to fill up on grain-based foods. So we do. And like Greta, we think we're doing something good for ourselves.
Too much sugar and too many highly processed grain-type foods are not good for us. These types of foods provide those excess but uncounted magic calories. Even more, too much sugar (and highly processed foods) in through the mouth results in too much sugar in the blood, which results in a cascade of other unwanted biological responses. Your body, being a good sport, produces excess insulin to remove the excess sugar in your blood. The excess insulin removes the excess sugar you're your blood, which makes you hungry...ferocious hunger is not unusual. Some people experience food cravings and/or out-of-control eating episodes. Why deal with this kind of physiological distress? Even more, insulin is an important and necessary hormone responsible for the storage of fat. So excess insulin in your blood predisposes your body to store fat, not to burn it. First it stores fat in your muscles and liver. That's short-term parking. If those spots are full, insulin stores fat in long-term parking, which are your fat cells. If those spots are full, it makes more parking spaces or more fat cells. Insulin may also inadvertently store fat elsewhere - like in your heart and brain vessels.
The healthiest, most skinnyfying preventive and healing action you can take for yourself is to stop eating in a way that produces excess insulin. And the easiest and fastest way to do this is to reduce or eliminate consumption of foods containing caloric sweeteners or foods made with fiberless, highly processed flours. Your new mission is to become a detective in search of caloric sweeteners and highly processed flours lurking in the packaged foods you buy. Disregard the claims made by the food manufacturer on the front of the container, and go straight to the ingredients list. This is the one and only place to figure out what ‘s in the recipe. Focus on the first four foods on the ingredients list. These are the foods that predominate. A food is a protein, a carbohydrate or a fat. Water, herbs, minerals and chemicals are not foods, so don't count them. Caloric sweeteners are easy to identify. They include all types of sugar (raw sugar, organic sugar, brown sugar, confectioner's sugar, etc.), high fructose corn syrup and every other kind of syrup. Highly processed flours are a little trickier to identify. In general, you're looking for whole grain products with a high fiber count, at least 3 grams of fiber or more per serving. Since only about 10% to 15% of grain-type products come to us in a less refined way, be prepared to pass over most off-the-shelf products in your grocery store.
Source : articlesbase
No comments:
Post a Comment