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Many eating plans are put together purely to achieve weight loss, but you can experience more than just another short-lived promise when you adopt the Glycemic Load (GL) Diet. Quick-fix eating plans come and go, and all too often they simply offer rapid, short-term, unsustainable weight loss at the expense of nutritional balance.
The GL Diet is far more than a weight-loss plan. The GL Diet can be part of a healthier, happier lifestyle.
Stabilize your blood sugars
 | When you eat high-glycemic foods you experience a rapid increase or a spike in glucose (blood sugar). This rise prompts your body to produce insulin (a powerful hormone). Insulin flushes the glucose from your bloodstream into your liver and muscles, which store the glucose for later use as energy. |
If you constantly eat foods that produce glucose, then you have a continual oversupply in your blood. When your liver and muscles can't store any more, they send the glucose to your fat cells —which expand rapidly! You need to expend energy to use up the stored glucose.
Eating low-GL foods means that your blood sugars remain stable because low-GL foods release a steady stream of glucose into the blood rather than a short, sharp glucose rush that you get when you eat high-GL foods. A steady drip-feed of glucose means stable blood sugars and fewer spikes and falls.
Get a handle on food cravings
Most people feel an overwhelming need to eat in the middle of the morning or the afternoon. All too often, the only food that can satisfy your craving is something sweet or salty and loaded with fat — in other words, high-GL foods. The fall that follows the spike in blood sugars after you've eaten high-GL foods is the point when food cravings occur most often. Eating more high-glycemic foods starts the blood sugar roller-coaster all over again.
 | Choosing low-GL foods at meal and snack times means that the blood sugar roller-coaster stops in its tracks. When you stop the dramatic rise and fall of your blood sugar levels, your cravings for sweet or fatty foods stop, too. |
Control your weight
You don't need to be a mathematician, or even a dietitian, to work out that if you eat fewer high-calorie, high-fat, high-sugar foods, your overall calorie or energy intake reduces. Cutting down on these types of foods is the fundamental requirement for weight loss.
Level your moods
When you eat high-GL foods and your blood sugars go up and down like a yo-yo, so too does your mood. Your brain is your control centre — if your brain is starved of energy, the rest of your body stops working. If one minute your brain has excess energy from high-GL food, and the next minute you have an energy slump, you and everyone around you will feel the effect — your bad mood!
| When you're low on fuel you get irritable and short-tempered. Many studies show that your cognitive performance (how you think and concentrate) is adversely affected when fuel supplies are low (when you're hungry). Ensuring that your brain has a steady and consistent supply of energy is vital. |
Balance your hormones
Regularly eating high-glycemic foods means that the hormone insulin (your system for controlling blood sugars) is working in overdrive. Making hormones and putting them to work is no mean feat and takes a lot of energy and resources. Your endocrine system (the system that controls your hormones) is involved in just about every aspect of your wellbeing. Your emotional, physical, mental, and even your sexual wellbeing relies on hormones to stimulate, mediate, and control chemical reactions that keep everything in harmony.
If your insulin is working in overdrive, some of your other hormones are likely to suffer as a result. Eating low-GL foods really can help to balance your hormones because their slow release into your system stabilizes your blood sugars and enables insulin to work normally.
No food is banned
Imagine a healthy eating plan where nothing, let alone an entire food group, is banned. How refreshing! Eating healthily means getting a better balance of foods in your diet to minimize the risk of disease, and does not put a complete ban on certain foods.
 | If you know that a food is high-GL, you can make an informed choice about how you want to handle it. With a high-GL food you can: |
- Eat it a little less often
- Mix and match it with other low-GL foods to reduce the overall glycemic effect
- Cook it in a way that reduces its glycemic effect
Anyone can do it
You don't need to want to lose weight to enjoy a low-GL way of life. The GL Diet has real potential benefits for people with heart disease, diabetes, and syndrome X (a collection of symptoms that increases the risk of heart disease and diabetes). The GL Diet can also help women suffering from pre-menstrual syndrome (PMS), polycystic ovarian syndrome (PCOS), and the menopause.
| Most fruits, beans, nuts, seeds, and vegetables are naturally low-GL, so the GL Diet is perfect for vegetarians. |
Improve your health
The World Cancer Research Fund estimates that eating five portions of fruit and vegetables a day could prevent 20 per cent of deaths from chronic diseases worldwide.
| Antioxidant vitamins and minerals found in fruit and vegetables help protect against the free radicals (unstable compounds)that damage our genetic material and cause cancer. |
Shockingly, some weight-loss plans advocate restricting your intake of fruits and vegetables. The GL Diet positively encourages eating most types of fruit and veggies. Too much saturated and trans fats in your diet can send your blood cholesterol levels soaring. Any eating plan that advises freely eating foods laden with these unhealthy fats is neither safe nor acceptable. The GL way of eating recommends eating foods containing saturated fats sparingly, as a treat. In general, use unsaturated fats in your GL plan, which helps protect against heart disease.
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