This blog isn’t really about a diet. It’s about eating in an easy, natural, healthy way that has dramatically changed my life and the lives of many of my friends and family. It has brought me back from the brink of diabetes, and generated normal, healthy blood pressure and cholesterol numbers that have literally stunned my doctors. After years and years of frustration, trying unsuccessfully to lose weight by pitting my will power against the insurmountable foe of constant hunger and dieting, I now find myself eating satisfying foods until I’m full and then barely thinking about food at all for hours. Like tens of thousands of others, I’ve discovered the “low-glycemic diet.”
Nine months ago, I was more than 50 pounds overweight, weighing in at 213 pounds on a 5′ 6″ frame. My blood pressure was 160/94. My cholesterol numbers were abominable. My total cholesterol was over 200, my bad (LDL) cholesterol was 156 , my triglycerides were too high and my good (HDL) cholesterol was non-existent. I was a stroke (or a heart attack) about to happen.
In addition to the above disheartening numbers, my doctor told me my blood test showed I was on the verge of being diagnosed as diabetic, which simply meant my blood sugar was too high over a long period of time (an A1c blood test measures average blood sugar over a 90-day period…there’s a video explaining the test on this site).
While high blood sugar may not seem to be a “big deal”, the body doesn’t react well to high levels of sugar in the blood. Sugar causes proteins in our red blood cells to unnaturally bind together and “harden,” preventing blood cells from squeezing through the body’s smallest capillaries. Decreased blood flow in the body’s capillaries causes devastating problems like loss of vision, kidney failure, and necrosis (dying) of fingers, toes, ear lobes, and limbs. Not a disease you want. My son, a physician, told me simply, “Dad, you don’t want to become diabetic. Once you cross that threshold, there’s no coming back.”
I was devastated. I had tried to diet and lose weight unsuccessfully on and off for more than 40 years. Weight Watchers, Scarsdale, Jenny Craig, Atkins, and the South Beach diet were just a few of the diet plans that had paraded through my life over more than four decades, each holding the promise of weight loss, only to be followed by the predictable failure and defeat. Now, as I approached my 61st birthday, the consequences of being overweight were dooming me to a permanent condition of disability and increasing risk of death.
Why couldn’t I do this? Why was I always hungry, even after I’d eaten a meal? Why was my otherwise ironclad willpower powerless over this nemesis of constant hunger, fatigue, and weight gain? Why if I shunned fats were my cholesterol numbers so poor? Why? Why? Why? I’m a smart guy. Berkeley educated. What the hell is wrong with me?
I went online to try and understand what being diabetic was going to mean for me. My blood sugar was too high. Why?
I began reading about the insulin/glucose mechanism in the body. Sugar is the fuel that powers every cell in our body. When we eat foods that raise our blood sugar, the body produces insulin to transport sugar out of our blood. Insulin grabs the sugar (glucose) and looks around for a place to store it and get it out of the bloodstream so our body doesn’t suffer harm. First choice is the liver, which is the body’s “short term” storage for glucose (used historically for sudden bursts of energy, such as running from saber-tooth tigers)! But storage capacity in the liver is limited. Second choice is the muscles, which for those of us not in body-building competitions, just do not have enough available storage for all the sugar most of us unknowingly consume. Last resort are the fat cells, which can be produced by the body as needed to store unneeded sugar for future food shortages. Insulin shepherds the sugar into the fat cells and slams the door shut. My ever-increasing weight gain was a testimonial to the efficiency of my insulin and fat cell production.
The other thing I discovered was just how much hidden sugar we eat in our diets. Americans currently eat 2000% more sugar than our ancestors ate just a couple of hundred years ago. And there are different sugars: glucose, sucrose, and fructose…with high-fructose corn syrup being the most damaging to the body’s metabolic systems. High-fructose corn syrup is now present in everything from whole-grain breads to baby formula.
Most startlingly, many respected members of the medical community are now arguing that the “low-fat, high-carbohydrate diet” that has been the cornerstone of governmental dietary recommendations for the past 35 years is wrong and was based on a faulty research study (I kid you not…read on), and our high-carb (i.e., high sugar) recommended diet has been the cause of society’s dramatic increase in metabolic syndrome (diabetes, high blood pressure, high cholesterol levels, and obesity) rather than the cure for it. This isn’t a “fringe group” opinion…it’s an opinion also held by Dr. Robert Lustig, a renowned neuro-endocrinologist and head of the Pediatric Obesity Clinic at UCSF (you can watch his video, “Sugar: The Bitter Truth,” by clicking on the “Videos” section on this site).
I was beginning to realize that the way I had been eating for most of my adult life had caused my pancreas, the source of my insulin creation, to become exhausted. It was simply giving up. With insufficient insulin to usher my high levels of sugar into my fat cells, the sugar was simply staying in my blood. In addition, years of constantly high levels of insulin in response to the recommended low-fat, high-carb eating guidelines had made my cells “insulin-resistant” to whatever little insulin I was producing. Without the ability to control my blood sugar levels, I was rapidly becoming diabetic.
For the first time in my life, I was scared. I started reading everything I could about controlling high blood glucose levels, and I discovered that certain foods contributed to significantly “spiking” or raising blood sugar levels while other foods did not. Food is divided into three categories: proteins, fats, and carbohydrates. Fats (animal fats, butter, nuts, oils) and proteins (animal meats, eggs, and cheeses) don’t contain much sugar and don’t contribute to blood sugar problems. That leaves carbohydrates, the breads, cereals, pasta, rice, and fruit juice we’ve been told should comprise more than half our daily diet. If half my daily diet was comprised of sugars, it began to dawn on me why I might be borderline diabetic.
I learned that not all carbohydrates are the same. You can decide to heat your house with oak, but an oak log in a fireplace burns more slowly than its same weight in oak kindling. Similarly, some foods release sugar slowly and steadily into the bloodstream while others, just like kindling, result in a sudden release of sugar. How a food behaves is measured by its “glycemic index”…a measure of how quickly a carbohydrate converts to sugar. A low glycemic index is much like a slow burning oak log; a high glycemic index is like quick-burning oak kindling (a link to a list of the glycemic index of various foods is including on this site).
The sudden release of sugar into the blood prompts the pancreas to release large amounts of insulin, which sweeps the sugar out of the blood (often into fat cells) and depletes the blood of sugar. The resulting depletion of sugar creates ravenous hunger that even the strongest will power has difficulty overcoming, which prompts another round of eating (often eating high-glycemic foods) and then another never-ending cycle of eating–insulin production–fat creation–ravenous hunger–eating–insulin production–fat creation–ravenous hunger–etc.
My metabolic syndrome disorder was beginning to make sense. The high-carb, low-fat diet I’d been struggling with for years was overloading my body with sugars, which was making me tired, hungry, and fat. And those supposedly “healthy” carbohydrates I was eating (rice, pasta, cereals, breads) were the very high-glycemic culprits that were spiking my blood sugar throughout the day and making me hungry enough to eat a carpet.
So I simply eliminated high glycemic foods from my diet. Difficult to do? Not at all. I dumped the potatoes, white grain breads, crackers, popcorn, pastries, commercial cereals (all of them), bagels, rice, cookies and pastas I used to eat from my diet. That’s it. Everything else I could still eat, and eat as much of as I wanted to.
The result? I’ve lost a total of 43 pounds. My hunger is normal. Scary normal. I don’t miss any foods because I NO LONGER CRAVE THEM. My blood pressure is 110/74. My cholesterol numbers are phenomenal: my total cholesterol is 160 (awesome); my bad LDL cholesterol is 69 (below 100 is considered “ideal”); my triglycerides are 89 (anything under 150 is considered “desirable”) and my good HDL cholesterol is 70 (60 is considered great!). And I’ve been eating (I kid you not) eggs (often two daily, with yolks), meat, poultry, fish, cheese, vegetables of every sort, fruits, nuts, seeds, olives, and REAL BUTTER! I’ve been drinking a glass of wine with dinner and eating huge satisfying meals that eliminate my hunger for hours and leave me completely able to eat normally.
And the diabetes? Gone. My A1c is has stayed in the pre-diabetes level for years.
So for the first time in my life I’ve found an eating plan that works and I’m writing a blog to encourage others to take a look at the information that I (and many others) have discovered. Eating a low-glycemic diet isn’t a diet at all. It seems to be the way the human body was MEANT to eat. It feels good, natural, effortless. It’s EASY.
Most importantly, I promise you, it’s life-changing.
[UPDATE JUNE 2023] Twelve years after first putting this website together, I recently had bloodwork done and a complete physical two months before my 73rd birthday. My numbers continue to improve and are still astounding my doctors: Total cholesterol 114 (goal range under 200); HDL good cholesterol 69 (anything above 60 = lowest heart attack risk); Triglycerides 54 (goal is anything less than 150); LDL bad cholesterol 48 (goal is less than 100). My blood pressure, once an unhealthy 160/94, just measured 113/69, and my A1c is a stable 6.2 (down from a high of 7.9 when I started this blog). The low-glycemic diet continues to work wonders.
Next article: The Origin of the Unhealthy Low-Fat, High-Carb Diet
Eat Low-Glycemic 