Glycaemic Loading
for Easy Weight Loss
Nigel Denby with Tina Michelucci & Deborah Pyner
Contents
Introduction: The Ultimate Diet
Part I – What is GL?
1 GI and GL Made Simple
2 How to Follow the 7-Day GL Diet
Part II – Whose Side are You on?
3 It’s All in the Mind
4 KOKO – Keep on Keeping on
5 Every Second Counts
Part III – Your 7-Day GL Guides
6 The 7-day Fast and Friendly Plan
7 The 7-day Veggie Friendly Plan
8 The 7-day Foodie Friendly Plan
9 Variety is the Spice of Life
Part IV – Living a Low-GL Lifestyle
10 Low-GL Food Lists with Portion Guide
11 A Guide to Low-GL Shopping and Eating Out
12 Love Your Food and Your Body
Part V – Further Information
13 The Evidence – Research that Shows Low-glycaemic Diets Work
14 Your Questions Answered
Appendix 1 – A-Z of Low-GL Foods
Appendix 2 – Recommended Reading
Index
Index of Recipes
Acknowledgements
E-book Extra
About the Author
Copyright
About the Publisher
Introduction: The Ultimate Diet
In my role as both a clinical dietician working on the front line with patients, and as a dietician working in the media, the question I’m asked most frequently has to be: ‘What is the ultimate diet?’
It’s a claim that’s been made about so many of the diets that we now know to be at best useless and at worst dangerous. Before we can even begin to answer the question, I think we have to decide what the ultimate diet would need to include.
The ultimate diet – it works, it’s easy to follow, it’s based on sound scientific evidence, and it suits both men and women. There is no need to count points or calories or to weigh food. There is no humiliation or guilt! It is a diet for life – not just post-Christmas, and it’s safe. There is such a diet and it’s called the 7-day GL diet.
We know that every fad diet and every celebrity diet has maybe one or two of these attributes – but for me that’s not good enough. For any diet to bear my name, and more importantly for me to use with patients in clinics, I have to be completely satisfied that my criteria have been met.
I firmly believe that if we don’t have these high standards we will keep people in the ‘diet trap’, an unhealthy cycle leading to both physiological and psychological damage.
For me, the 7-day GL diet ticks all of the boxes. This isn’t a diet we thought up sitting in our office – it’s taken years of trials, research and adaptation to develop into a plan we are proud of and in which we have complete confidence.
From working with both men and women with weight issues I have learnt that while people like to have clear and simple guidelines, they are also more likely to succeed if given the responsibility of choice. This book will enable you to understand fully why the plan can work for you, and will help you to control your weight forever. What we want is for you to get to the point where you have learned enough to put the book away and get on with your life, without having to keep checking if you are doing things right.
The 7-day GL diet gives you the simple, flexible, straightforward foundations you need to start a new healthy way of eating. It will put you firmly in the ‘weight-control driving seat’ and keep you there!
Although it might seem like it, none of us goes upstairs one night thin and comes down the next morning with a weight problem – it takes years of repeated behaviour, and that behaviour becomes more ingrained with every failed dieting attempt. Writing the book has been both a professional and personal learning curve for all of us. Much of the advice, support and coaching we give to change these behaviours comes from our experience of working with real people, as well as from our personal stories of breaking free from our own ‘diet traps’.
With a combined 90 years of dieting experience between us, we created Diet Freedom to help other people just like us, people with busy, pressured lives who were frustrated with the continual cycle of either preparing for the next diet, or recovering from the most recent dieting failure. Along with our individual professional strengths – tireless researcher, amazingly experimental cook and diligent dietician – this experience puts us in a unique position to support you in your own quest for diet freedom.
You may notice throughout the book references to both our website www.dietfreedom.co.uk and Diet Freedom Fighters. The name ‘Diet Freedom Fighters’ was coined by GL dieters on our website forums, who have taken up the GL challenge and are getting great results. We set up the website as an added support network and are delighted that it is so popular, not to mention huge fun. We love it and wanted to make sure you are aware that there is a lot more support available to you after reading the book – in fact, there’s a whole community out there waiting to welcome you!
We really hope this book will give you the answers you have been looking for. We’d like to be the first to congratulate you on taking your first step towards success and achieving your goals!
Nigel Denby
Registered Dietician
RD BSc Hons
This section gives you all the background information about the diet and how it works. Most importantly, it tells you how to get started. It also explains why we feel the Glycaemic Load (GL) makes more sense than the Glycaemic Index (GI) alone, and gives you the simple science behind balancing blood sugars and permanent weight control.
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