Rob Thompson - The Glycemic-Load Diet: A Powerful New Program for Losing Weight and Reversing Insulin Resistance

the Glycemic Load Diet

A POWERFUL NEW PROGRAM FOR LOSING WEIGHT AND REVERSING INSULIN RESISTANCE

ROB THOMPSON, M.D.

Copyright 2006 by Robert Thompson. All rights reserved. Manufactured in the United States of America. Except as permitted under the United States Copyright Act of 1976, no part of this publication may be reproduced or distributed in any form or by any means, or stored in a database or retrieval system, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

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DOI: 10.1036/0071462694

To Kathy, Maggie, John, and "Nan"

Contents

Acknowledgments

I AM INDEBTED to my agent, Elizabeth Frost-Knappman, for encouraging me to write this book and shepherding it through its early stages. Natasha Graf, my editor at McGraw-Hill, was immensely helpful, bringing her considerable talents to bear on guiding me through the development and organization of the manuscript.

Molly Siple, M.S., R.D., provided exactly the recipe-writing touch I was seeking. Ms. Siple is nutrition editor at Natural Health magazine, chef extraordinaire, and author of several acclaimed cookbooks, including Low-Cholesterol Cookbook for Dummies (John Wiley and Sons, 2004), Healing Foods for Dummies (IDG Books, 1999), and Recipes for Change: Nutrition/Cookbook on Foods for Menopause (Dutton, 1996). She has taught at the Southern California Cordon Bleu School of Culinary Arts and continues to lecture and write articles on cooking and nutrition.

I would like to thank my longtime friend Lean Carroll for carefully reading and editing the manuscript and patiently sharing her thoughts with me. I am also indebted to my office staff, Nadine Warner, Lisa Gierlinski, and Charlene Brown, for so often going beyond the call of duty to make my life enjoyable. Most of all, I would like to thank my wife, Kathy, certainly for her editing skills but especially for her unwavering patience, encouragement, and support.

Introduction

W HEN I STARTED practicing medicine twenty-five years ago, I followed the party line. I recommended calorie counting and low-fat diets for weight loss and was usually disappointed by the results. People just kept gaining weight. Then, in the 1990s, some of my patients started ignoring warnings about fat and cholesterol and going on low-carb diets. The results were astonishing. Folks who had been unsuccessful at losing weight for years started shedding pounds more easily than they thought possible even as they ate generous amounts of rich food. Remarkably, their blood cholesterol and sugar levels looked better than ever. It was as if they had stopped ingesting a toxin that had been poisoning them for years. I became convinced that the low-carbohydrate approach had tremendous potential for helping people lose weight and regain their health. Indeed, as additional research came out, the medical establishment, mired in low-fat orthodoxy for decades, has come around to thinking the same way.

But just when medical science is focusing more attention on carbohydrates, the public's interest in low-carb diets is waning. People rushed to try the Atkins dieta radical low-carb regimen popularized in the 1970sand the South Beach diet, a sort of second-generation Atkins diet, but the programs didn't work the way they hoped. People lost weight but usually gained it back. Although these diets allowed plenty of rich food, they created irresistible food cravings. People just couldn't continue them for long. Disillusionment set in, and the low-carb craze began to die down.

In recent years, billions of dollars have been spent researching human body chemistry. Medical science knows much more about carbohydrate metabolism now than it did when the lowcarb movement began:

• Food scientists have developed a way of measuring the metabolic effects of different carbohydrates, called the glycemic index . This concept, only in its infancy when the low-carb movement began, has evolved into a powerful model, the glycemic load . This new way of looking at carbohydrates radically changes the low-carb approach to losing weight. It is the key to a natural weight-loss-promoting eating style that is satisfying and easy enough to follow for life.
• Scientists now know that most overweight people have a genetically influenced metabolic disorder called insulin resistance that makes them susceptible to weight gain from eating carbohydrates with high glycemic loads. Researchers have pinpointed the foods and behavior patterns that bring out this condition and can now target treatment toward relieving it.
• Recently, physiologists have discovered the metabolic quirk that causes insulin resistance. It's a disorder of the body's slow-twitch muscle fibers. What's exciting is that exercising these muscle fibers creates much less fatigue than exercising others.

These and other new concepts can help you harness the weight-loss power of carbohydrate modification and slow-twitch muscle activation with a lifestyle that's much easier to follow than previous weight-loss regimens. It really is possible to lose weight without "dieting," in the usual sense of the word, or engaging in strenuous exercise.