Appetite Control: When You're Hungry All the Time (page 2 of 2)

A Swelling Survey

Pause for a moment and look at America: Two-thirds of us are overweight or obese, a figure that swells with each passing year. And yet, over the last 30 years, Americans have lowered the percentage of calories they get from fat while increasing their carbohydrates. The protein-diet pushers have jumped on these numbers to trumpet all-meat plans, but beef eating -- and its saturated-fat link to heart disease -- is the reason we turned to carbohydrates in the first place. No, the real key to our nation's weight-gain woes may be the glycemic index.

People tend to become hungrier after a meal of high-GI foods than they do after low-GI foods, says David S. Ludwig, director of the obesity program at Children's Hospital in Boston and a leading glycemic index researcher. After a high-GI meal, insulin levels skyrocket and blood sugar plummets. Stress hormones such as adrenaline scour the blood for more glucose. All of this translates to ravenous hunger, shaky lightheadedness and a craving for high-GI foods that can rapidly raise blood sugar. Remember Vicki Wadlow's experience? "As a result of the typically low blood sugar that occurs several hours after a high-glycemic index meal," Ludwig says, "people may become hungry and then overeat, at least in comparison to what would have been eaten after a low-glycemic meal." This cycle of too much, then too little, blood glucose is particularly severe in people who are restricting their calories and trying to lose weight, Ludwig says.

Garry Bryan, 47, rode this roller coaster. "Everyone I know who has been on a diet has complained about being hungry," says Bryan, a Greenville, S.C., computer consultant whose weight ballooned from 160 to 220 several years ago due to undiagnosed thyroid disease. Doctors reined in his thyroid troubles, but the weight stayed on. Low-fat diets didn't work, and very high-protein diets left him desperately tired of eating meat. Only by adopting a low-GI diet, in which he ate more lean protein food such as tuna and beans, was he able to get down to 165 pounds. "By dropping some of the high-glycemic index stuff like sweets, I lost a lot of the hunger," Bryan says.

At least 16 studies back up Bryan's experience. In one particularly nice example, Ludwig recruited 12 obese adolescent boys and fed them a high-, medium- or low-GI meal -- all containing the same amount of calories. For their next meal, the boys could eat as much as they wanted. After the medium-GI meal, the boys ate 53 percent less than they did following their high-GI repast. After the low-GI meal, the boys ate 81 percent fewer calories.

Such results have the feel of weight-loss magic. Can you imagine being full after eating just a fraction of your usual calories? While science is still trying to sort out exactly what makes a food score low on the GI, Ludwig and others have a pretty good idea. These foods generally tend to be less processed and come in the company of fiber, protein or fat. Since these nutrients take longer to digest, you're likely to feel full longer, and your blood sugar won't peak and plummet. By the way, high-GI foods that accompany low-GI ones score somewhere in-between. Equal portions of vegetables (about 30 on the 100-point index) over white rice (70) average a 50 -- a healthy score.

And there's belief that low-GI diets offer lasting results. Researchers in a recent study at Harvard School of Public Health and Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston found that subjects who ate a moderate-fat diet (35 percent of calories from fat -- primarily unsaturated fats like nuts, olive oil, avocado, and fatty fish such as salmon) lost as much weight as those who ate a low-fat diet (20 percent of calories from fat). However, those in the low-fat group gained back most of their weight quickly. The moderate-fat group maintained their weight loss for at least two years, according to study author Kathy McManus, director of the department of nutrition at Brigham and Women's.

You don't have to be a slave to GI to benefit -- an occasional baked potato or cookie is fine. But cutting back is smart. Vicki Wadlow says she strays once in a while. The "white things," as she calls high-GI foods, are for special events. During the holiday season, for example, she ate her share of Christmas cookies and gained a few pounds. But at the start of the year she returned to her low-GI ways and began to shed the weight she had gained. "It becomes not so much a diet, but a lifestyle change," Wadlow says. "This is a plan I'll stick with."

From Reader's Digest - July 2003

 

• Lose the Weight
• Healthy Foods
• Nutrition
• Healthy Habits
• • Mind & Body

• 5 Simple Rules to Beat Hunger
• Want to feel full longer? It's all in the numbers.
• 
• Fighting Fat: New Frontiers in Weight Loss
• 5 groundbreaking weight-loss weapons, plus 22 tips that will work for you.
• 
• Is Stress Making You Fat?
• It doesn't have to! Here's how to fight back like our ancestors did.
• 
• Resolve to Fight Fat
• Breakthrough information for slimming down, finding the perfect diet, and more!
• 

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