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But I found an easy, healthy way to lose weight fast and improve my overall health. I simply started paying attention to the glycemic index of my food. The glycemic index is a number that tells you how much your blood sugar will go up after eating a particular food.

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

There are no gimmicks, no measuring or weighing of food and no counting calories when you follow the glycemic index for weight loss. This is a light bulb moment for my patients. Refined sugars and white flours make you hungrier and cause you to eat more calories. Fat, salt and — most importantly — sugar are added in large quantities to most processed foods. Bread, pasta, soda, fast food, gourmet coffee drinks and cereal bars may taste good, but the amount of sugar in our food is making us fat, diabetic and miserable.

Your body, digestive tracts and hormones are designed to process natural sugars, like those in fruits and vegetables. Refined sugar and flour affect our bodies differently than natural sugars:. When we eat, our bodies secrete lots of insulin. Insulin is a hormone that directs sugar and calories to be burned for energy or stored in our fat cells as part of our normal, healthy body process.

Then the whole cycle starts again. The more refined sugars and flours you eat, the more weight you gain. It clues you in to how your body will react to certain foods:. This is a more accurate representation of the human body and the hormonal mechanisms of weight and energy balance. Amazingly, different types of foods eaten at different times of day and in different combinations can lead to completely unique hormonal responses in the body, and it is these hormones—in particular insulin—that determine what happens to the food molecules once broken down by the digestive system, and how efficiently they are processed.

Insulin is released in response to glucose in the blood see Figure 1 , and is the primary hormone involved in fat storage and weight gain.

Diabetes: What You Need to Know

Though we often associate insulin with diabetes, it is a big contributor to weight gain for everyone—diabetic or not—and has to be tamed to successfully maintain a healthy weight. Because weight loss generally requires us to burn through fat stores, we need to control our insulin so that we signal to the body that it should burn fat, rather than store more of it.

Once the liver and muscles are filled to the brim with glycogen, the excess glucose is turned into fat triglycerides and sent out in the blood to be stored in the fat cells around the body. You can think of the liver and muscle as short term, limited storage space for energy in the form of glycogen, and fat cells as long term, essentially unlimited storage space for energy in the form of triglycerides. This signals to our body that we should burn stored energy, starting with glycogen.

Weight and Diabetes

Once the stores of glycogen run out, we start burning fat see Figure 2. The goal of weight loss is to burn excess stored fat by mobilizing it and bringing it to parts of the body that can use it for fuel. This part of the story is simple: we need to lower our insulin levels to burn stored fat. But what if our insulin levels never really fall enough to signal that we should be burning through our stored fat?

This is a similar scenario to the car with the clogged air filter — we can push the accelerator all we want but unless the oxygen insulin level is optimal, the engine cells cannot burn fuel fat efficiently. In the body , high insulin both impairs triglyceride breakdown in fat cells, and also inhibits fatty acids from entering into fatty acid oxidation in the mitochondria. At Levels, we believe that a key to success is knowing exactly how your body responds to different foods.

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.

Free E-newsletter Subscribe to Housecall Our general interest e-newsletter keeps you up to date on a wide variety of health topics. Sign up now. Diabetes management: How lifestyle, daily routine affect blood sugar Diabetes management requires awareness. By Mayo Clinic Staff. Show references Facilitating behavior change and well-being to improve health outcomes.

Standards of Medical Care in Diabetes— Diabetes Care. Nutrition overview. American Diabetes Association. Accessed March 24, Diabetes and mental health. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Insulin, medicines, and other diabetes medications. Insulin storage and syringe safety. Diabetes diet, eating, and physical activity. Type 2 diabetes mellitus. Mayo Clinic; Wexler DJ.

Initial management of blood glucose in patients with type 2 diabetes mellitus. Diabetes and women. Accessed April 9, Reece EA, et al. Management of diabetes mellitus. Wolters Kluwer; Taylor J.

The Real Reason You're Not Losing Weight

Over-the-counter medicines and diabetes care. Canadian Journal of Diabetes. Castro MR expert opinion. Mayo Clinic. April 20, See also Medication-free hypertension control A1C test After a flood, are food and medicines safe to use? Air pollution and exercise Alcohol: Does it affect blood pressure?

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