Wait… no counting calories?

Saltzman, S. Lifestyle intervention reduces body weight and improves cardiometabolic risk factors in worksites. ScienceDaily, 12 June Tufts University, Health Sciences Campus. Fasting glucose as a marker for greater weight loss on a high-fiber, low-glycemic diet. Retrieved December 7, from www. Following two weeks of monitoring with glucose ScienceDaily shares links with sites in the TrendMD network and earns revenue from third-party advertisers, where indicated.

Boy or Girl? Living Well. View all the latest top news in the environmental sciences, or browse the topics below:. If you are struggling with your weight, make it a point to follow this easy system. Your goal is to make sure the majority of the food you eat is non-processed, free of refined sugar and white flour and ranked at 55 or less on the glycemic index. For example, Harvard Medical School published a list of glycemic indexes for over common foods. In the beginning you may be surprised — the indexes often are not what you would expect.

The one number to track to lose weight – it’s not calories! - Tufts Medical Center Community Care

In time, though, you will develop a good sense for what will make you gain weight and what will help you achieve your health goals. Your privacy is important to us. Learn more about our website privacy policy.


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Wait… no counting calories? Click To Tweet This is a light bulb moment for my patients. How does refined sugar and flour make us fat?

The one number to track to lose weight – it’s not calories!

This process — breaking down complex carbs into smaller pieces so they can be absorbed and digested — helps you feel full. Processed sugar and white flour consist of short chain sugar molecules — simple carbs. Simple carbs are absorbed quickly by the body and cause a fast, substantial increase in blood sugar — also called a sugar spike. What happens when you have low blood sugar? You get hungry. At Levels, we believe that a key to success is knowing exactly how your body responds to different foods.


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  • Blood sugars may be key to optimizing weight loss approaches.

Reading this, you might think that we should just eat very few carbohydrates and stick to high fat foods in order to decrease insulin and lose fat and weight. A few problems have become increasingly clear regarding standardized glycemic indices:. Why do conventional attempts at weight loss fail?

Three things: metabolism, hormones, and the brain. The reality is that our bodies have evolved to help us survive and hold on to energy in the face of starvation through a variety of complex mechanisms. Simply eating less ie, calorie deprivation is a common approach to weight loss, but thwarts our efforts by reducing our resting metabolic rate. When the body senses an environment of food scarcity, it uses energy more efficiently and also reduces its use of stored energy. This translates to fewer calories expended per day.

What is Blood Sugar, and How Does it Work?

The types of foods we eat after losing weight also seem to affect our ability to maintain weight loss. The brain is also affected by dieting in ways that promote weight regain. In other words, calorie deprivation leads us to become hyper-focused on obtaining food. Hormones, including those beyond insulin, play a major role as well. Its levels also increase as fat mass increases. High insulin levels are also thought to lead to leptin resistance, preventing appetite-inhibition, and leading to a cycle of increased weight gain.

This means that we need more and more circulating insulin to get glucose into cells, leading to higher baseline levels of insulin. This process directly counters weight loss efforts.

The Most Accurate Method to Determine Your Blood Sugar is Not A1C

Real-time glucose measurements give us the power to understand how the foods we eat affect the level of glucose in our blood, and by rough proxy, our insulin levels. Unlike traditional dietary strategies like calorie counting — which have been shown time and again to be ineffective for sustained weight loss — glucose monitoring provides insight into the underlying physiological processes that lead to fat storage. It can also exacerbate hypertension, arthritis, gallstones, high cholesterol, low back pain, bronchitis, and musculoskeletal problems.