Two key guidelines:
1.
Medicine is a
science of statistics - let it be on your side.
2. Live consciously.
When I visited my physician last November, he warned me about my "numbers".
He advised two things:
1. Potatoes are not vegetable! - Stop eating potatoes and rice until you improve your numbers.
2. Exercise at least 3 times a week for at least 20 minutes.
While my physician was candid enough to explain to me the reasons to minimize carbohydrates, I was not too convinced about it. I grew up eating carbohydrates everyday, rice has been my favorite. The entire southern India eats nothing but rice. So why now suddenly they are the source of the problem?
I thought, if I believe that medicine is a science of statistics, then the world knows a lot more about medicine in last 30 some years. Thus there are things known to the science of medicine which conventional wisdom has not caught up with.
Learning about carbohydrates lead me to "Glycemic Index" or GI.
One of the definitions of GI:
The glycemic index measures how fast and how much a food raises blood glucose levels.
There is a lot of information on the web about GI, so I will let you Google that. But I just want to share the key elements of GI I learned (or learnt) which helped me understand the advise of my physician:
1. There are three basic classifications of foods based on GI - Low, Medium and High.
2. Low GI food - fruits and vegetables will release glucose more slowly and steadily.
3. Sugar, white or brown, has medium GI. Honey and Agave have low GI.
4. Potatoes, rice, white bread, corn flakes, wheat flower
have high GI.
5. If food with higher carbohydrates has high quantity of fiber - it reduces GI.
And most important statistics -
Several lines of recent [1999] scientific evidence have shown that
individuals who followed a low-GI diet over many years were at a
significantly lower risk for developing both
type 2 diabetes,
coronary heart disease, and
age-related macular degeneration.
Back to my numbers - after few following life style changes - in just four months, I brought my numbers back to normal (way below average):
1. Installed morning breakfast of Fruits and Vegetable smoothy - No bread and cheese anymore.
2. Ensure the dinners has none or very low carbohydrates:
- Salads - you will be surprised how many tasty options of salads there are which I never know of.
- If I do eat carbohydrates I ensure that I also eat protein (lentils) and fiber (whole grains).
3. Most of us do not need more than 1500 calories in a day.
I
consciously, monitored quantity of my intake and reduced it by at least 30%.
4. Replaced any junk food intake with Nuts, Dried Fruits as snacks.
Junk food is defined as, anything processed to be preserved and eaten over a period longer then 2 (two) days, primarily using frying as method of preservation.
5. Minimized SALT (key enemy) and replaced sugar with Honey and Agave.
Sugar is everywhere in the form of carbohydrates - so watch out and it is not as sweet as it tastes!
References:
1. Inactivity is the major contributor (53%) of the Heart Disease.
http://www.cdc.gov/heartdisease/facts.htm/
2. There is no alternative of plain, simple, serene water:
http://articles.mercola.com/sites/articles/archive/2008/01/12/what-happens-to-your-body-within-an-hour-of-drinking-a-coke.aspx
3. All about GI:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glycemic_index
4. GI of Sugar:
http://www.fitsugar.com/Glycemic-Index-Where-Do-Sweeteners-Fall-3031565
