A New Year, A New Me
Posted by Neil Crosby on January 2, 2006 10:12 AM
Like I mentioned a couple of days ago, Becca and I have decided that it’s high time that we got a bit healthier about what we were eating. For a long time she’s said that the GI Diet would be one which is meant to be good; in that it doesn’t seem to be faddy, it encourages you to eat healthily with lots of yummy vegetables, and that you’re meant to have (healthy) snacks several times a day on it.
We’ve meant to start doing this “diet” for a while now, but with one thing or another it just happened yet. So, with the onset of the new year, I decided to shell out on the The GI Diet book, Antony Worrall Thompson’s GI Diet Cookbook, and a pair of scales that electrocutes you when you stand on them - the idea being that if I’ve spent a good chunk of money on stuff for this diet then I’m more likely to stick to it.
So what is this low Gi Diet? Concentrate - here comes the (pseudo) science bit (which I’m almost certainly remembering slightly incorrectly, so please don’t shout at me). Basically, when we eat and our food gets digested we get a boost in blood sugars, followed by a gradual (or more abrupt, depending on the food we’ve eaten) fall back to “normal” levels. Food which gets digested quickly gives a big sudden spike of energy followed by a just as sudden drop, whereas food which takes a while to be digested will give us the same amount of energy except that the spike and drop is spread out over a much longer period of time. We get hungry when our blood sugar drops below a certain point, and we eat more. So, eating foods which take our bodies longer to digest them means that our stomachs are doing more to digest the food, over a longer period of time, leaving us less hungry, meaning we snack on crap less, meaning we lose weight. Hurrah!
So, the basic thing of the diet seems to be to eat more fibre, more fresh fruit and vegetables, less processed food and basically be more healthy. I can do that! Anthony Worral Thompson’s book contains lots of sexy looking food designed to entice you into eating new things that you wouldn’t have tried before, and the main Gi Diet book contains big long lists of forbidden (red), acceptable (orange) and fantastic (green) foods which should be a help with making sure we stay on track with eating The Right Stuff.
So there we go - that’s what we’re going to be doing for now on - eating healthily (most of the time). I’m going to keep a record of my weight loss progress on this site, in the hope that I’ll keep up with it. Fingers crossed!