Читать книгу The GL Diet Made Easy: How to Eat, Cheat and Still Lose Weight - Nigel Denby - Страница 10

The GL goes a practical stage further. It takes the GI rating we’ve just outlined, but then very cleverly (thanks to Professor Walter Willett of Harvard Medical School who came up with the equation) takes into account the amount of carbohydrate in a portion of food we would normally eat. So now we know the effect a normal portion of food would have on our blood glucose levels, and that’s what gives us the GL rating:

• Foods with a high GI but with only a small amount of carbohydrate will generally have a low GL.

• Foods with a low or medium GI and a large amount of carbohydrate may have a high GL.

It’s so simple and, more importantly, relevant to what we actually eat!

Foods rated using the GL do still get a number:

10 and under is low GL 11–19 is moderate GL

If you did want to count your daily Glycaemic Load (GL) for the first few days in order to gain confidence that you are on the right track, you would be aiming to have a GL score of 80 or under on a low-GL day. A high-GL day would be 120 or over. If you are overweight and inactive it’s likely that your daily GL score is high and you are storing your excess energy as fat.

BUT don’t worry – although we do give some basic portion guidelines and GL references, you don’t have to count at all! Counting points, rigidly measuring and weighing foods is what turns us all off when it comes to diets. It’s the bit that makes diets boring, boring, boring – and besides, who has the time? Counting can also reinforce the obsessive behaviour around food that got quite a few of us here in the first place! Pay attention to what you’re eating and what your body is telling you. Once you’ve found your low-GL feet, it will all become second nature.