I’ve been away from this blog for QUITE some time, but have been learning and doing in the time between.  Healthy eating for families is my starting point, I really want everyone to set down at the table together eating the same food.

I have made a breakthrough (one of these days I’m going to photograph all those weighing-machine tickets that show the gradual change and backsliding!) and that was that the root of weight control is carbohydrate control.  We vary in how much carbohydrate we can take, and as we gain years we have also to gain some insight into this to keep trim.  My little Kindle book explains this simply – go look for Waistline by Anne Smith.  The ‘skinny’ version is only $0.99 but the bigger one is more detailed.

Unless we have type one diabetes, our bodies can produce insulin, and they do this in response to our blood sugar going up, to return it to normal.  Modern, refined carbohydrates (flour and sugar products primarily) raise the blood sugar very fast (they have a high Glycaemic Index or GI), which pushes our bodies to make lots of insulin.  A big rush of insulin then overdoes the lowering of blood sugar and we get a bit low and feel hungry again.  We know about this yo-yo effect, but what does it have to do with weight gain?

From what I understand, our bodies can only store calories (energy both from fat and from carbohydrates) if insulin is present in high enough quantities.  The body is in effect saying ‘ too much blood sugar, store that energy for later and make the blood sugar level safe’.   Over the thousands of years we have lived on earth, fattening carbohydrates were not abundant, and most of the time our blood sugar would  have been much more stable, not rising and falling as dramatically as it does on the modern  ‘western’ diet.  We had lean times and times of abundance, but we didn’t have constant access to high GI foods.

If we can get our blood sugar back where it was before the rise of high GI foods, we can fight weight-gain much more effectively than by semi-starvation (low calorie diets which make our bodies more efficient at hanging on to calories) or exercise.

More soon!