Eating Potatoes and the Glycemic Index

Yes, potatoes are high glycemic.  A couple varieties, such as new potatoes may be medium, but for the most part, count on potatoes being in the high range. Does this mean that eating potatoes is bad for your blood sugar and weight control? Sometimes yes, and sometimes no, based on how you eat them.

If you eat potatoes loaded with butter, sour cream, and real bacon bits, the effective GI value is lower. The same holds true if you eat scalloped potatoes. That's because the addition of fat slows the digestion of carbohydrates in your stomach. The slower a carbohydrate is digested, the lower the GI value. Eating potatoes loaded with fat gives you another health concern - eating too much saturated fat. If you load the baked potato with non-fat versions of butter, sour cream, and bacon bits, you won't lower the glycemic index value.  So if you are one of the lucky folks who can eat saturated fat - meaning you don't have high cholesterol, have a super healthy ratio of HDL and LDL, and are at your ideal weight, then go ahead and load up your potato. Just be sure you're not at risk for developing insulin resistance from eating too much fat.

Another way to make your potatoes low glycemic is to prepare potato salad with a vinegar and oil dressing. Add some mustard and any other acid or sour tasting condiment, such as dill pickles, capers, or marinated vegetables. Adding acidic foods to high-glycemic foods lowers the effective GI value because it slows stomach emptying. If you eat a meal with a salad dressing that contains 3 teaspoons of vinegar per serving, you'll lower the effective GI value of the meal by 30 percent.

A surprise feature of potatoes is that baked sweet potatoes are low glycemic. That's right. They weigh in at a low 46 glycemic index value. They aren't actually a variety of potato, but rather a yam. Serve them baked, or roasted with olive oil and rosemary or a seasoning of your choice. They taste great as chili fries. You'll enjoy their natural sweet taste, too. Be a bit careful with sweet potatoes. If you serve a sweet potato casserole with marshmallows and brown sugar for Thanksgiving, you may need to consider it high-glycemic on the order of candy.

Using the above suggestions, you may be able to enjoy potatoes in moderation and meet your health and weight loss goals. You can find some potato recipes and suggestions in my books, The Complete Idiot's Guide Glycemic Index Cookbook and The Complete Idiot's Guide to Glycemic Index Weight Loss.

The Perfect Imperfect Chocolate Chip Cookie

I wanted to find the perfect 10 recipe for a low-glycemic chocolate chip cookie. This sounds like an oxymoron, but I thought I could figure this out. So I started modifying my mother’s favorite recipe. I had to take out the Crisco, most of the sugar, and most of the white flour. Then replace them with healthier choices. Plus, I added garbanzo bean flour for more nutritional value.

We were having dinner guests that evening, so I prepared two different recipes – a low-glycemic brownie and the chocolate chip cookies. My plan was to have my guests do a taste test.

I mixed up a batch, had the oven set to 375 degrees and started baking. Luckily I now line my cookie sheets with parchment paper or I would have had more of a mess. When the baking time was complete per the recipe, I opened the oven to the biggest baking disaster I’ve ever had.

Now let me tell you, when I was 16 years old, I was a junior winner for Colorado to the Pillsbury Bake-Off with a recipe I created from scratch. I definitely have put in my Gladwellian 10,000 hours of baking. (per Malcolm Gladwell author of The Outliers.)

The test batch of cookies were runny, flat, and browning way too much. They had spread into each other so I had sheets of flat cookies landscaped only by the small mounds of chocolate chips and nuts. And they were still running. Then I noticed that someone somehow had turned the oven off. I turned it back on to 375 degrees and waited five to ten minutes, checking with dread every minute or so through the oven glass window. Then I couldn’t take it any longer.

Out came the cookies. They looked awful. The only way I could get them off the parchment was to break them in pieces. Just before I threw them in the trash, I thought I should at least taste them. I did. And I kept tasting. They were utterly delicious. The crispy part tasted like a buttery toffee. The nuts and chocolate chips were like taste and texture treats. So…

I served them anyway. All eight of us at the dinner table ate them and kept on eating. Even as we played the fantastically funny game, “Telestrations.” (You will love it, too.) At the end of the evening, my guests took home doggie bags of broken shards of cookies.

Now here’s what’s really weird. Just a couple weeks ago we were in Madrid at the popular evening spot, Mercado. And they were selling a cookie that looked exactly like my cookies. They didn’t taste as divine, but I wanted to show you the picture so you know what to expect when you bake them.

I’m baking them again on Thursday to take to an Art Gallery opening for the Utah Watercolor Society. And if the guests can overlook the weird appearance of the cookies, they’ll be standing by the dish all evening. I want to share the recipe with you: Chocolate Chip Lace Cookies, Yield: 36 cookies

Each serving has: 108 Calories 2g Protein 10g Carbohydrates 1g Fiber 7g Fat 3g Saturated Fat Glycemic index: low Glycemic load: 3

[2/3] cup butter
1 cup sugar
1 large egg
1 tsp. vanilla
1 cup almond flour
2 TB. corn starch
2 TB. garbanzo bean flour
[1/2] tsp. salt
1 cup chocolate chips
[1/2] cup walnuts

1. Preheat oven to 325 degrees. Line 2 baking sheets with parchment paper.
2. In an electric mixer, cream butter and sugar. Add egg and vanilla and mix well. Fold in almond flour, corn starch, garbanzo bean flour, and salt. Stir in chocolate chips and walnuts.
3. Drop by spoonfuls onto baking sheets, leaving plenty of room for cookies to spread. Bake 15 to 20 minutes until browned and cooked throughout. Enjoy.

Have a terrific Halloween,

Lucy Beale, author The Complete Idiot's Guide to Glycemic Index Weight Loss Version 2, The Complete Idiot's Guide Glycemic Index Cookbook, The Complete Idiot's Guide to Eating Well on a Budget

www.Lucybeale.com, http://lucybeale-weight-loss.blogspot.com/

Weight Loss Personalized

I’ve collected anecdotes and stories for you this summer, mostly of how friends and family and others have lost weight and how they eat to stay at their desired weights. After you read through these, send me an email if you have a personal method that works for you.

A neighbor lost 30 or so pounds by not eating starchy carbohydrates before dinner. So he says no to pancakes, bagels, bread, doughnuts, pizza and more, then enjoys some with dinner.

A recent story in the New York Times states emphatically that the real reason French women don’t gain weight is not that they can’t, but that they WON’T. They refuse to overeat. In other words, they will themselves to stay at their ideal weight. And, they don’t use getting older as an excuse for getting bigger.

One friend was counting calories daily and eating 2100 calories a day. For a guy who’s 6’1” that doesn’t sound like enough calories. Plus he’s an avid mountain biker and weight-lifting enthusiast. His personal doctor advised him to up his calorie intake to 3000. (That’s more like it.) And he’s losing the last stubborn pounds. For him, it wasn’t about how many calories, but rather the type of calories. He’s eating more meats, poultry, and fish, and lots more vegetables and fruit.

At an outdoor mountain wedding dinner, a friend and I were commenting on the terrific cupcakes that the Snowbird kitchen baked up for the party. He took a couple bites. Then he put his fork down and stopped eating. I had to know why. He said he had eaten enough food for the meal, and he finds it painful to eat too much. I was wowed. He was a naturally thin person who knew instinctively how to listen to his stomach and could feel the “stop eating” signal. Yes, he is thin.

An Alabama doctor discovered his tuxedo no longer fit just before a big event. He started on an interesting diet – “if it tastes good, spit it out.” It worked.

One amazing sign at a public market kiosk in Boston: “Boston Fried Bread.” People weren’t standing in line to eat fried bread, although I know it is wonderful. Here in the West we call it sopapillas or Indian Fried Bread. At the State Fair it’s called Funnel Cakes. No matter what it’s called, it seldom belongs in person’s stomach for weight loss success.

Printed on the front of the menu at the famous old Tic Toc Diner in New York City: “Eat Heavy.” I can’t tell you the history of this amazing suggestion. The food wasn’t that heavy, but perhaps it was in times gone past. The food was good, though.

In the movie, “Eat, Pray, Love”, the heroine claims she stopped stepping on the scale to avoid early morning self loathing. However, she continues to eat and eat and eat. (And we watch her do this!) Too bad she doesn’t use her new-found self awareness to eat mindfully. But then again, it’s only a story.

Folks have been asking me just how effective HCG is for weight loss. When a person takes the shots, they’re put on a strict 500 calorie a day diet and told to exercise religiously. The results are comparable to a starvation diet – a person loses lots of weight fast. Proponents claim the program prevents muscle loss while it increases the loss of body fat. Here’s the problem: I’ve never known anyone to keep the weight off. Even the “poster” models for the advertisements. When the severe diet and the shots end, a person rebounds and most of the time gains back the weight they lost plus some.

If you’re stuck on a weight loss plateau or aren’t seeing the results you want in losing weight, try these strategies:
1. Weight yourself first. For the next week, avoid eating all wheat products. You may need to read the labels on cereals and processed foods. At the end of the week, weigh yourself again. If you lost more than just a couple pounds, wheat could be keeping the weight on. I wouldn’t call this an allergy, but more like a wheat-sensitivity.
2. Do the same with dairy the next week. Weigh and then don’t eat any dairy or milk products for a week.
3. If you eat soy, as in soy shakes and tofu, then the next week, do the same with program with soy.
Sitting is fattening. Even if you exercise regularly. New research indicates this is serious. I experienced this as I’ve been writing my new book on Glycemic Index Snacks. After 3 months of sitting hour by hour at the computer I was packing on weight and flab in my middle area. I think stress also contributed. Yuck. It just isn’t fair. I do some form of Pilates, hiking, or yoga virtually every day. Now that the bulk of my book is completed, I’m moving more during the day and my middle is back to normal. If you have a desk job, be sure to move around. Wiggle. Stand up when you talk on the phone. Set the timer on your phone or computer to ring after an hour of sitting so you can stand up, stretch, and walk around. During your break, take a couple flights of steps to rev up your energy-burn factor. Don’t be a sitting fat duck.

One of our sons moved downtown and had to park his car several blocks away from his apartment. Then he and his wife got a dog. Between walking the dog and walking to the car, they both lost their extra pounds and look terrific. Their challenge now is to keep the pounds off since they left the big city for the burbs.

Now that summer is almost over, write a weight loss affirmation for yourself and your situation. This is the key way to get started. Stay with the positive. In other words, don’t write. I’m losing weight, but rather “I am now a naturally healthy and thin person. I weigh (insert your ideal weight) and I do what thin people do.” Then let the power of your affirmation unfold and present to you the method and techniques to use to reach your goal.

All the best,

Lucy Beale, author
The Complete Idiot's Guide to Glycemic Index Weight Loss Version 2
The Complete Idiot's Guide Glycemic Index Cookbook
The Complete Idiot's Guide to Eating Well on a Budget
www.Lucybeale.com, http://lucybeale-weight-loss.blogspot.com/

take a pass on juice and agave nectar

I’ve been researching again. And before you read further, I need to warn you – you may not like the newest research. I don’t like it at all. The research brings up feelings of guilt about what I fed my son when he was an infant and as he was growing up. But, honestly, none of us knew then what research now tells us.

Brian was allergic to cow’s milk so he drank soy formula. Today we know that ingesting unfermented soy products disrupts hormones and is known to depress thyroid function. I know plenty of folks who were able to stop taking thyroid meds when they stopped eating soy all the time. (Edamame – the green unprocessed soy beans are fine to eat.)

But now, it’s juice that’s in the news. Juice. Any kind of juice. The news: eat the whole fruit – it’s healthy for you. Don’t drink the juice. It contains fructose – fruit sugar – in high concentrations. People who have a glass of juice a day are 18% more likely to develop type 2 diabetes than those who don’t drink juice. This includes orange juice, and apple juice and those expensive exotic juices sold as being high in antioxidants that cost upwards of $30.00 a bottle. Also, the whole fruit helps you maintain a healthy weight. The juice makes your body store fat and raises cholesterol. Fructose stimulates your liver to store fat.

And congrads to Brian – he’s doing so well today in spite of my best intentions at the time.

But this fructose problem is even bigger than juice. Lately lots of us have been thrilled with 100% agave nectar. It’s mild tasting, very low-glycemic, and low in carbohydrates. But today, we’re no longer thrilled. The high percentage of fructose in agave nectar does the same thing in the body that fruit juice does. The Glycemic Research Institute in Washington DC had to STOP a research study on agave nectar because of ethical considerations regarding the health of the participants.

The juice, agave, fructose research is very serious – so for now cut out or cut back on juice and eat the whole fruit.

I've been in Boston this weekend. I need to tell you, I couldn’t live here AND in good conscience eat according to the glycemic index. I’d be eating or at least tempted to eat way too much risotto, pastry, and bread. But the fabulous seafood availability would perhaps balance the “white, fluffy, and sticky” indulgences.

As an update on my yoga process: I’m in my fifth month of doing yoga, either at home or at the Bikram studio and my allergies are minimal. Virtually gone most of the time – and based on my allergy history – that’s amazing. Now when I feel them arise, I find a mat or get on the floor and do a series of Sun Salutations and I feel so much better. I know you may be thinking that a pill is much easier and I can’t disagree. But just knowing that I can have some control over my own allergic reactions gives me a crazy sense of power. Perhaps even an exhilarating sense of power.

And I wish you a wonderful sense of personal power as our days are longer and the sun is shining and the flowers are lushly blooming.

Warmly,

Lucy Beale

hold the bread, pass the butter

Have you ever stayed at a hotel or motel that offers free breakfast? I just returned from a week-long road trip to Sedona, Arizona. Our motel offered a complete breakfast – eggs, sausage, fruit and plenty of those ubiquitous high-glycemic starches –cereals, breads, bagels, waffles, and such. It was easy to eat the healthy foods and pass on the starches. When I first started to avoid eating high-glycemic carbohydrates, I had a hard time convincing myself that those yummy starches such as cakes, cookies, muffins and pasta were not good for me. But then, when I noticed how they made me feel – less energy, more anxious, it became easier to just say no. Today, I view sandwich bread, bagels, and tortillas as merely wrappers. To eat, peel off the wrapper and eat what’s inside.

On our drive back to SLC, we stopped for the night at a motel in Page, AZ near Lake Powell. The breakfast “menu” was only high-glycemic starches, coffee, tea, and milk. Seems the motel’s nutritional advisors haven’t gotten the message yet – high-glycemic starches aren’t in any way good for you, but rather supply only “dangerous” calories. I’m hoping those menu planners read some of new food research. An article in this month’s May 2010 Scientific American is titled, Carbs Against Cardio: refined carbs bad: saturated fat not so bad. The bottom line, “hold the bread, and pass the butter.” The article states that “processed carbohydrates, which many Americans eat in place of fat, may increase the risk of obesity, diabetes and heart disease more than fat does.”

Speaking of those “dangerous calories,” several new research studies are positively scary and somewhat macabre.
Rats on junk food pass cancer down the generations. www.newscientist.com
Junk food turns rats into addicts. www.sciencenews.org
Rats fat on junk food would rather starve than eat healthy foods. www.sciencedaily.com
The junk food in these experiments is high-fat and high-glycemic – the kind found in the snack section of the grocery store. I need to tell you that these articles make me feel a guilty about what I fed my son as he was growing up. However, he instinctively wanted eggs for breakfast and loved them so much that he learned how to cook them himself when he was two (I managed the stove, he scrambled the eggs) and he really didn’t care for that boxed cereal. Seems his instincts were right on.

A second article in the same issue of Scientific American, Genetic in the Gut: Intestinal microbes drive obesity, is fascinating and may help allay some folk’s guilt about being over-sized. Our digestion relies on a vast array of intestinal microbes. Some synthesize vitamins, others break down certain compounds in foods. We depend on those microbes. But, research is showing that some genetic mutations in some intestinal microbes can lead to insulin resistance, obesity, and the symptoms of metabolic syndrome: large waists, diabetes, high blood pressure, and heart disease. They don’t know what causes the microbes to mutate – it could be random, they could be adapting to a junk food diet, or the answer could be something else entirely different. At present, there isn’t a magic formula to correct the genetic mutations but I’ll bet the researchers are working long intense hours to find a safe and easy way to help us lose those obesity-causing microbes. Stay tuned.

And this from The New York Times: Being fat is bad for your brain. In this blog, Olivia Judson cites several research studies that show that people who were fat around the middle at age 40 were more likely to succumb to dementia in their 70s. You can read this blog at http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/04/20/brain-damage/?emc=eta1. Now I need to tell you that my father had dementia and he was never overweight in his life. So this kind of research deals with percentages and possibilities and isn’t necessarily so for everyone.

On a more fun note, new research says that spending even 5 minutes in the great outdoors or in their backyard improves a person’s mental health. Just five minutes. So when you walk to the mailbox, linger and smell the flowers. No wonder folks who garden enjoy it so much.

My favorite dessert these days – yes, I still eat dessert – is a small mini scoop of ice coconut cream. It doesn’t contain dairy or sugar, but rather is made from coconut milk and agave nectar, so it’s low-glycemic. It’s very creamy, cold, and delicious. I found it first at the health food grocery store, but now our local regular grocer stocks it in the specialty area of the frozen food aisle. With summer coming, it’s time to bring out my Frosty maker. I freeze pure fruit juice and then put it in the machine to make a sort of sno-cone or sorbet. Refreshing, cold, and delicious.

Check out the April 30 post on www.Budgetsmartgirl.com/posts/ in which Susan reviews my new book, The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Eating Well on a Budget.

Also, check out my blog at http://lucybeale-weight-loss.blogspot.com/. My newest post is about how people slow down their metabolism.

Have a glorious spring,

Lucy
Lucy@lucybeale.com

Kashi or Coke?

A friend who eats Kashi for breakfast every morning asked about the glycemic index of the cereal. She's been told it's super healthy. Guess what? It came as a shock to both of us that the GI value for Kashi is 65, while the GI value of Coca Cola is 63. Those values are on the border between high and medium glycemic. That means the "healthy cereal" stimulates an increase in blood sugar levels and insulin levels and stress levels. Now who needs that for breakfast?

A Slow Metabolism? Causes and Solutions

Here is my "tongue-in-cheek" list of ways to slow your metabolism. Of course, we all want a faster metabolism. It's easy to blame one's genetic makeup for a slow metabolism and not realize that how we live every day can slow down or rev up how we burn calories. Here's the list of what not to do:

1. Sit around. Enjoy long hours of screen time with the computer or television. Those screen-time hours slow your metabolism more than reading a book or working a crossword puzzle.

2. Stay indoors, preferably in darkened rooms. Just being in the sun boosts your metabolism and enhances hormonal function.

4. Eat high-glycemic starches – especially those made with wheat and potatoes. Don't eat a balanced diet. Avoid eating proteins (meats, fish, poultry, eggs, cheese) and fats – they actually can help boost your metabolism.

5. Don't have an exercise plan. Avoid the fitness center, exercise classes, and home fitness videos.

6. Don't do recreational exercise. Don't hike, fish, hunt, take a walk, play tennis, swim, or snowboard.

7. Hire others to do your household work for such activities as mowing the lawn, gardening, and spring cleaning.

8. In place of an exercise program, enjoy activities that require little physical movement, such as billiards, video games, bowling, and cards.

9. Don't take vitamins, vitamin D, or fish oil. Instead, assume that you receive all the nutrition you need from those high-glycemic "enriched" carbohydrates.

10. Drink tons of sodas, either diet soda or those sweetened with high-fructose corn syrup. Both slow your metabolism.