4. For Those who Know They are Overweight or Wish to Practise Calorie Restriction

Why 'weight-watching' is not that helpful

The trouble with weight-watching and weight charts is, they are designed for 'average people'. Average people are not particularly fit. But you cannot judge 'fitness' by weight anyway! For example:

This man weighs 260lbs:

So does this man:

…Now you can see the problem, right? Muscle weighs more than fat, although it takes up less room! If you diet and exercise, you will put on muscle and lose fat, but you may find your weight stays the same or even increases at first. You can see how that could confuse and dishearten someone who's told to "lose weight".

Even being told to 'lose fat' doesn't help. It's not the fat that kills you, it's the metabolic problem that put the fat there in the first place. If you treat the cause (and this is what a low GI diet does), the symptoms (the stored fat) will disappear and no more will replace it. On an ordinary 'weight loss' diet, counting calories will get rid of the weight, but it will come back as soon as you stop the diet. This is not true of low GI.

Where does 'fat' come from?

Some fats we first encounter as solid fats, like packets of lard or the fat on meat, some we encounter as liquids like bottles of corn oil. But most fats we use are made in the body. The body makes fats whenever there is too much fuel for it to immediately use. This is a handy trick because it can store energy for emergencies, but in most of our lifestyles that emergency spare fuel never gets used.

Most fat is made of sugars (high density carbohydrates)

Most fat in the body is made from fast-release carbohydrates [sugars]. One can of coke will make more fat than a whole plateful of wholemeal spaghetti bolognese. Don't waste your time and money on con 'diet' products that also turn into fat after you eat them. 'Diet' fizzy drinks may as well be called 'liquid lard'.

Every time you eat white sugar you may as well be eating lard, because that's what it turns into.

Another big fat maker is corn and its products. Cereal advertisers will tell you their products 'contain no fat'. They won't tell you that almost the entire bowl of cereal turns into fat right after you've eaten it. Anything made from corn or fried in corn oil has this problem too. So crisps and fries are some of the biggest culprits.

If you need to lose fat and you don't like exercise much, you can make five simple changes to your diet:

1. Replace sugar with honey

2. Replace your cooking oil with olive oil

3. Replace all white cereal products with wholemeal

4. Replace all corn products with alternatives. You can snack on nuts, oatcakes, fruit, cheese, yogurt, wholemeal toast, porridge, pancakes, coleslaw, sandwiches and even honey flapjacks.

5. Replace fizzy drinks with fruit juice [no sugar or additives, just juice].

Even if you do nothing else and get no exercise at all, within a month you will have lost fat and your waistline will be starting to slim down. If you take up the low GI diet your weight loss will be permanent.

This works because low GI changes your metabolism, and you stop storing fat. The number of fat-storing cells your body has made decreases, so there's nowhere to put it. Your blood pressure falls to a healthy level, and you will age more slowly. Your immunity will rise.

After a while, you will be able to eat whatever you like AS LONG AS YOU EAT LOW GI AS WELL. The signals from low GI carbs will keep your metabolism balanced and you will just excrete any unused fats instead of storing them.

Low GI will take a little work if you love fast food. You can make your own burgers using wholemeal buns and fresh meat fried in olive oil or grilled [instead of the gray minced offal we are usually served] –with a bit of salad and mayo you'll find they taste better than Mac Dollars, give you a better protein hit and won't make you store so much fat.

Many people who have never eaten venison before discover they prefer it to beef. It tastes very similar to quality steak and it's not so chewy. A small amount is very filling.

The GI thing

People who go on about the 'glycemic index' are talking about just this. Basically if a food has a low GI, it doesn't turn into fat after you eat it. Diet 1 above is a low GI diet, and if you can get that far and stick to it you will lose fat and gain muscle. If you don't feel ready for it yet you can take some of the five steps above –try one a month.

Crash dieting

Crash dieting can kill you, it's a very dangerous thing to do and it will weaken your immune system and your body, cause mood swings and depression, leave you with flabby skin, no muscle tone and feeling very fatigued. There is no need to turn into an emaciated size 0 supermodel in one week just to prove to others you can, plus even if you lose all your body fat in one month you could put it on again just as easily in another.

Fat that is lost slowly stays off, and skin tightens up as you gain muscle tone and eat good nutrients. A sensible low GI diet actually readjusts your metabolism at the genetic level so that you can't store fat so easily afterwards. What's more, you're likely to feel so much better and have so much more energy, you'll feel it's worthwhile sticking to it permanently.

Calorie restriction

You may have heard that mice on a calorie-restricted diet live twice as long, or something similar. This has encouraged many people to go on a 'calorie-restricted' diet, counting all the calories in everything they eat. Unfortunately, restricting calories alone does not have the desired effect, because that's not what the rodents were actually doing. They were also eating low GI foods!

Not many of us eat good quality lab rat food. Living on just two ice-creams a day is still calorie restriction, but it certainly won't make you live longer or lose fat. The mouse researchers have now noticed that low GI is the trigger for the genetic changes that assist longevity, not calorie restriction itself.