A useful practice would be to keep track of what you eat. Like, write it down. It's easy is your tastes are simple, but no matter what, it's worth doing.. Just a few jottings, really. Then maybe actually plot out the glycemic load of what you eat. It may be a bit embarrassing. Take granola bars? No sugar, all natural ingredients. Lots of "fruit juice" -- lots of "cane syrup". Plenty sweet. Tiny little bars, six to a box. It's easy, really it is, to eat the whole box, those six tiny little itty bitty bars. But when you rough out the glycemic load: 23 grams of digestible carbs. A glycemic index value of aprox 70 -- estimated from other granola bars with on-line values. We don't have to be too precise ... but a GL of about 95, for a box of tiny GBars. That is A LOT. A boxload. A whole day's worth of GL. Remember? A day's worth typically ranges between 60 and 180, with the mean a tad below 100. Like, say, 95.
Even if you don't eat the whole box, the GL of such an innocuous thing as a granola bar is 16 per. That is the equivalent of a bowl of rice. Or take a bag of microwave popcorn. No one eats a single serving. There are 2.5 "servings" in the bag. That, good sir or madam, is marketing BS. "See? A serving of our wonderful popcorn is only just a mere inconsequential 160 paltry calories!!!" True. But the bag has two and a half "servings" -- which as all math geniuses will know, amounts to 400 calories. Lies lies lies. The bag has a glycemic load, then, of 26. Adds up.
A healthful berry smoothie? Maybe a GL score of about 8. A whole big blender full of nutrition, for free, in terms of insulin. That's the easy thing about it. The really nutritious food is free. It's the trash that costs so much, metabolically. As has been said, the Lord God Almighty, Divine Archetect of the Universe, appointed seven annual feasts unto the Hebrews. Seven pig-out days. The body can handle it. But for Americans, every day is a feast day, three times a day. This is not actually the blessing some might suppose, especially since there is hardly ever any thankfulness that goes along with it.
It's not hard, estimating glycemic load. Most people average only 10 different sorts of meals, generally. We eat the same things over and over. For GL calculations, meat doesn't count, nor fat. It really is just the industrial carbs, and the hardcore starches -- potatoes and rice. After that it's just a matter of estimating the serving size, and that's simple too. About the size of your palm? (Palm, without fingers or thumb or wrist.) About the size of your fist? (Palm, with fingers and thumb -- twice as much.) So it's a little bit of figuring, and then you know it. It's like writing a check to pay a bill. Yes, it's a little bit of a hassle, having to spell out those words and know the date and sign your name. Such a chore. Then again, it's the price you pay to pay the price you have to pay.
A can of coke has a GL of 15. At least granola bars have a nutrient somewhere in there. But it's a matter of being serious. We see lots of folks at FitWorks, making beautiful progress, just a bit slower than they'd like, on the schlub. Well? Maybe it's time to do the math, instead of eyeballing it. Who would have thought that Coke and Granola could be comparable problems.
Be excellent.
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