Title : Control Your Blood Glucose
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Control Your Blood Glucose
Blood sugar (glucose) control is not just important for those living with diabetes; it’s a crucial aspect of health for all of us.
We now know that even if your body manages to get blood glucose under control so that your fasting levels are normal, big ‘spikes’ in blood glucose after eating are damaging to blood vessels around the body.
They also force your body to have to produce a lot more insulin than it is really designed to in order to deal with the glucose load. Over the long term this can literally exhaust the cells in the pancreas that release insulin, increasing your risk of type 2 diabetes.
Having chronically high insulin levels is damaging in itself, but it also affects fat metabolism. When insulin levels are high, this signals that there is plenty of glucose around and so it ‘tells’ fat to stay put in your fat cells. Your body is essentially in storage mode, when fuel coming in from a meal is being stored for later use. If this situation continues for too much of the day, your body rarely gets out of storage mode into fuel burning mode. In other words you rarely have to draw on your body fat to fuel your body and so it just sits there, accumulating over the weeks and months.
The other thing is that dynamic falls in blood glucose signal you to eat. The brain interprets this as a serious situation and the priority is to bring levels back to normal. This means when you get a big blood glucose high after eating a meal full of easily and quickly digestible carbohydrates, your body reacts with releasing a huge dose of insulin and blood glucose levels plummet an hour and a half or so after the meal. You get the urge to eat again, especially another carbohydrate-rich food… and on the cycle goes.
So what can you do to help your body to control blood glucose levels so that there are gentle rises and falls throughout the day, keeping both the demand for insulin down and your appetite in check? Put the following tips and tricks into play and you’ll feel the difference:
Avoid carbohydrate-heavy meals
Even if the carb-rich foods you choose are good ones – our smart carbs – if you eat too many of them in one sitting you inevitably end up with a high blood glucose level. It is of course even worse if the carb-rich foods were not the best choices. A big load of carb-rich food with a high GI means an even bigger blood glucose spike… and later crash.
Your best way to avoid this is to make sure you are sticking to the Dr Joanna Plate. If less than a quarter of your plate is your carb-rich food, then you’ll have the balance right. This means adjusting typical meals such as big bowls of pasta or rice, where the carb food dominates (because it is the cheapest part of the meal by the way). Boost up the vegie content of the meal instead and reduce your portion of the carb to match. Watch for additional carb-rich foods in the same meal. For example skip the breadbasket if you’re having a pasta dish, or skip the rice with your curry if you want to enjoy a roti (wholemeal flat bread).
Go for a walk after meals
The temptation after eating is to sit and relax, particularly after dinner. However for blood glucose control the best thing to do is go for a walk. I’m not suggesting you start running or sprinting up the stairs – that’s not a good idea on a full stomach. But a gentle walk around the block makes a world of difference to what happens in your body. It changes the metabolism of the body and signals that fuel is required. This means that muscles take up glucose from the blood more quickly and less insulin is required to get levels back to normal.
Choose smart carbs
We favour smart carbs on Get Lean as they provide you with maximal nutrition while taking longer to digest, translating into better appetite control and a gentler effect on blood glucose.
The GI – or glycaemic index – is a useful tool to help you select smart carbs. Foods with a low GI have been measured for their effect in real people, and the impact on blood glucose is about half or less that of drinking a glass of pure glucose dissolved in water.
However the GI is not the be-all-and-end-all. You still want to consider the nutrition of the food choice. Not all foods with a low GI are healthy and don’t make my cut as a smart carb. For example ice cream is low GI but it’s far from being a smart carb!
So a smart carb is low GI, but it is also high in fibre and/or high in nutrients. These include minimally processed wholegrains, legumes and starchy veg in their skins.
Include fat in the meal
Fat slows down digestion. With fat in the meal, food takes longer to leave the stomach and therefore trickles food down into the small intestine where it is broken down and absorbed into the blood stream. The result is better blood glucose control.
Now this doesn’t mean you need to load tablespoons of butter or coconut oil into your meals! Fat is energy-dense stuff and a little goes a long way. But the quality of the fat also matters. The Dr Joanna Plate is again your best guide. The slice of healthy fat is in addition to any fats naturally present in the protein food such as salmon or a slice of cheese, so on Get Lean we promote a moderate fat menu.
Think of that slice of healthy fat as a drizzle of best quality extra virgin olive oil, a handful of nuts or seeds, some gorgeous creamy avocado, a dollop of hummus or drizzle of tahini.
Eat more soluble fibre
Although we have recommendations for total fibre intake (25-30g a day) different types of fibre have different effects in the body. We need them all for optimal health. Soluble fibre is the type that has a key impact on blood glucose levels.
Soluble fibre, as the name suggests, dissolves in water to form a gel. To see what I mean pour a handful of chia seeds into a glass of water and let it sit for a few minutes. The soluble fibre on the outside of the seeds dissolves in the water so the mixture becomes thick.
This is exactly what happens in your small intestine when you consume soluble fibre rich foods. The resultant gel slows down the attack of digestive enzymes. This means it takes longer for the carbohdyrates in the food to be broken down and absorbed up into the bloodstream as glucose. Soluble fibre effectively lowers the GI of the meal.
Soluble fibre rich foods include oats, barley, chia, beans, lentils, chickpeas and many fruits.
Fast between meals
In a world where we are surrounded by food choices, we never have to go long between mouthfuls. Although I agree with eating regular meals and the occasional snack to avoid getting so hungry you overeat, the bottom line is that constant grazing on food is not helpful for most of us.
If there is a continual stream of food coming in from the gut, you probably never get truly hungry and never feel truly satisfied with the meal. This makes it pretty hard to control your appetite. But it also means you rarely have to call on fuel stores, living instead hand to mouth so to speak.
When you have not eaten for a couple of hours your blood glucose levels are kept at normal levels by the liver – it has a store of carbohydrate called glycogen and when glucose levels drop it breaks down the glycogen to release glucose into the bloodstream. If it never has to do this because you’re always eating more carbohydrate, then those stores never empty and there is nowhere for any excess intake of carbohydrate to go.
Give your body a break and ensure you have periods between meals where you move from the fed to the fasted state. Adults are perfectly equipped to go several hours without food.
Source :
http://naturalhealthyfood.net/
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