The GI Diet

vibrant

Just wondering if anyone has any opinions on this diet? I know the bones of it - cutting out food with a high GI (like white bread, rice bananas) and eating foods with a low GI (such as porridge).

Is it another fad diet? Is it scary and dangerous like Atkins?

GuanYin

vibrant wrote:

Just wondering if anyone has any opinions on this diet? I know the bones of it - cutting out food with a high GI (like white bread, rice bananas) and eating foods with a low GI (such as porridge).

Is it another fad diet? Is it scary and dangerous like Atkins?

In a word yes.

If you want to lose weight, eat healthy balanced meals, cut out junk and overeating and most of all, exercise healthily.

Dieting, apart from anything else, effects the microbial content of your GI tract. Killing off the good microbes, not only gives greater opportunities to pathogens, but is also a suspected factor in the development of intestinal cancers (and thats not including H. pylori).

pwd

Replacing rice with brown rice and white bread with brown bread is a very good idea, particularly if you are trying to lose weight.
Cutting out bananas is a bad idea though.
As well as the higher GI, processed carbohydrate sources like white bread have a great deal of their useful nutrients removed.
A diet that is largely made up of refined carbohydrate is the most likely one to make you fat imo.
It's not a "revolution" like it seems to be getting packaged as though. The sort of guidelines the GI diet seems to be based on have been advised for as long as I can remember.

Sangre

My god I thought everyone knew not to eat proccessed food if you want to lose weight..

Think I'll make new book 'Lots of calories make-a you fat!'

It will revolutionize the world as we know it.

dudara

The GI diet is an extremely sensible way of eating. Cut out excessively sugary foods and replace over-processed white carbohydrates with complex brown ones. It really makes sense.

BC

The general rules of the GI diet are good because it simply advertises healthy eating. It doesn't say cut out anything, the idea is that if you want to eat a high GI food then you make sure you combine it with a low GI and try and keep the overall GL of the meal low.

But, like any diet its not perfect, for example chocolate is a low GI food but obviously won't help you loose weight.

Transform

The Gi is NOT a diet it is and index representing the results from carb foods and their speed of digestion. This info has been around for at least 20 years and was origingally created for diabetics.

Basics are - eat whole grains, beans, pulses, nuts, seeds, fruit and veg (but not overcooked).

BC

Transform, the problem now is that there are many authors/newspapers etc, who have taken the general GI information and made it into a diet. E.g http://www.gidiet.co.uk/ which is one of the most popular.

As a diabetic i generally follow GI principles but am not on "The GI diet".

windowgazer

It seems to be the most sensible 'diet' promoted by the media in recent years. Alot of common sense really (eat good unprocessed food). The reason it is being transformed into a 'diet' by journalists is because some people like to be given rules and told what they can/can't eat. They're suckers for instruction and won't stick to anything if they're told to 'eat healthy'. Its the viscious dieting circle. Most overweight people are on a diet, whereas people who don't obsess about their weight are usually the ones that eat healthily,have three round meals a day as recommended and are ironically enough slimmer. Bit crapfork really.