Not everyone who comes to the Carbohydrate Addict’s Center has a constructive attitude, but Bobbi did. Unlike many of the people who have come to us unhappy with themselves and their lives, Bobbi would have to be classified as a positive person.
She was forty-six when we first met. She was married (“pretty happily,” she said), had two daughters in high school, and a job as an administrative assistant in a large insurance office.
Her dieting history was about what we have come to expect. Several times she had dieted, lost some weight, then regained what she lost. But her losses and gains had been limited to the ten- to fifteen-pound range. She took our test and was identified as being almost dead center in the moderate addiction range.
She wanted to lose “at least fifteen pounds, although twenty would make me ecstatic.” She also expressed a concern that at times her eating seemed to get out of control. When she was home alone, she said, she would sometimes find herself eating without being able to stop. She had noticed that when marketing she would buy things in anticipation of being alone, although she often told herself the food was for others. On more than one occasion she had waited for everyone else to leave the house, taken out her store of goodies, then sat in front of the television and “pigged out.” What bothered her most was that she found this to be probably the most pleasurable experience that she had had for a very long time and that she was finding that she wanted to do it more and more often.
We told her about the Carbohydrate Addict’s Diet, explaining the normal mechanism of insulin release and how its dysfunction probably caused some of her behavior. Then we explained the diet’s guidelines. Bobbi left our session bound and determined to lose weight.
When she returned two weeks later for her scheduled appointment, she was bitterly disappointed. She hadn’t lost any weight, she said.
We asked to see her weight chart. To our surprise, she admitted she didn’t have one. She explained that she had weighed herself on the first day, a week later, and then again that day. Wasn’t that enough? she asked. Other diet programs she had used required that she weigh herself once a week or that she not weigh herself at all.
Daily weighing is critical, we explained. We gave her a scenario.
Say she weighed 156 on the day she started the diet. Most people’s weights vary a pound or two from day to day, so let’s assume that although Bobbi’s typical weight was actually 158, she happened to be at a low-weight point on that first day. Assume she stayed dutifully on the diet for a week, then, at week’s end, weighed herself. Even if she had really lost two pounds she might well appear to have made no progress—having weighed herself at a day or time when the scale read 156.
People can use their weights as an excuse to eat. When they lose weight they tell themselves, Great, I can eat now. If they gain weight they say, What’s the use? I tried so hard and I gained weight, so I might as well eat. If their weight stays the same, they say, “No matter what I do, I’m not going to lose, so I might as well eat.”
That’s why we recommend daily weighings, which are then averaged for the week. This routine helps avoid such counterproductive reactions. It gives the dieter a chance to see how he or she did over the entire week; it’s the way scientists measure changes, taking as many readings as possible to average and compare them over time. It also helps you to understand the changes in your weight that take place naturally.
Several weeks later Bobbi was very much an advocate of daily weighing. “I can’t tell you how important it is. Before, I would get on the scale after a week of torture and find that I had gained a half a pound. Or I would eat like a pig for a week and my weight would stay the same.
“Now I see that it was those stupid weekly weighings. Now I can see the ups and downs during the week but I can also see the trend of the weight loss beyond the false highs and lows.
“That’s really important in keeping my motivation going.”
Bobbi lost twenty-two pounds in four months. After two years, she has maintained her goal weight. And continues to weigh herself every day and to average her weight each week. “It’s become second nature to me. It keeps me sane and it keeps me slim.”
Averaging your weight. In order to measure the rate of your weight loss, your daily weights should be averaged. This averaging helps smooth out the highs and lows, and gives you a more realistic picture of what is really happening with your weight loss.
As Bobbi found, high-weight or low-weight days can make it appear as if you are gaining when you are losing (or vice versa). This accounts for people who have been cheating on a diet but find that when they report for a weekly weigh-in at another diet program, they are told that they have lost weight or stayed the same. But the cheating will usually catch up with them in a week or two.
By averaging your weights, you compensate for high- and low-weight days and get a more accurate reading of what is really happening with your weight level. Taking regular and frequent measurements compensates for the highs and lows of any natural phenomenon. The human body is the same—it isn’t a machine, but it changes and adjusts constantly to countless factors.
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Carbohydrate foods that break down quickly during digestion have the highest G.I. factors. The blood sugar response is fast and high. In other words the glucose (or sugar) in the bloodstream increases rapidly: Conversely, carbohydrates which break down slowly, releasing glucose gradually into the bloodstream have low G.I. factors. An analogy might be the popular fable of the tortoise and the hare. The hare, just like high G.I. foods, speeds away full steam ahead but loses the race to the tortoise with his slow and steady pace. Similarly, the slow and steady low G.I. foods produce a smooth blood sugar curve without wild fluctuations.
For most people most of the time, the foods with low G.I. factors have advantages over those with high G.I. values. But there are some athletes who can benefit from the use of high G.I. foods during and after competition. The substance which produces the greatest rise in blood sugar levels is pure glucose itself. All other foods have less effect when fed in equal amounts of carbohydrate. The G.I. factor of pure glucose is set at 100 and every other food is ranked on a scale from 0 to 100 according to its actual effect on blood sugar levels.
The G.I. factor of a food cannot be predicted from its composition or the G.I. factor of related foods. To test the G.I. factor, you need real people and real foods. There is no easy, inexpensive substitute test Standardised methods are always followed so that results from one group of people can be directly compared with those of another group.
The G.I factor is a clinically proven tool in its applications to diabetes, appetite control and reducing the risk of heart disease.
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One day it will be possible to prevent diabetes. Unfortunately at the time of writing this, it is not possible to do so. We are confident that diabetes will be preventable because we know enough about the development of diabetes to direct research towards prevention and there are hopeful discoveries in this field.
We know that some people inherit an increased risk of diabetes, and we can identify these people by a blood test. We know that in most people, diabetes takes months or years to develop and during this period there is a gradual process of damage leading to the loss of the vital islet cells needed to make insulin. We can recognize that this process is going on by finding the evidence of it in the blood. This is done by detecting the presence of islet cell and insulin antibodies.
We know the process of damage is a self-destructive process called an auto-immune reaction and we have drugs that can slow down or even halt the auto-immune reactions in the body. There seems no doubt that more effective drugs that will control the process safely will be developed in the future.
It may moreover be possible one day to protect the islet ceils from self-destruction by a process perhaps similar to immunization. Major research laboratories and groups in many centers are actively working in this exciting area of diabetes.
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