My Understanding Of Glycemic Load
I’ve been reading about glycemic load and glycemic index quite a lot during the last few months, with a view to trying to understand what is the right way of eating carbohydrates, or in fact any foods for that matter. A great website for seeing what the glycemic load of a particular food has is The Glycemic Index, it has a database of tons of different foods, showing the carbs for each food and gl value each has too.
From my understanding of glycemic load, if the glycemic load of a food is below 10, then you will not get an insulin spike, meaning your blood sugar levels have remained in a healthy range, and so you won’t metabolise the excess sugar into fat. Obviously this is useful if you are trying to reduce your body percentage, and if like me you are trying to do this while still adding some muscle, it’s even better!
Another reason that it may be advantageous to keep one’s glycemic load low is because when performing intense exercise, such as sprint interval training or heavy duty weight training, your body greatly increases the amount of various hormones into the body, such as Testosterone, Humana Growth Hormane and Insulin Like Growth Hormone 1, which will cause your body to become more muscular and leaner.
An unwanted side effect of having an insulin spike, as one does if one eats too many simple carbs, is that the level of the aforementioned hormones in the body is greatly decreased. If you are training specifically with weights to gain muscle mass, you will do all the hard work in the gym, thus naturally increasing the hormone levels in one’s body, but all this will be to waste if one then eats too much simple carbs and causes an insulin spike.
So it seems to me that to have a lean, muscular body, it’s imperitive to train hard, be it with weights or by doing sprinting, to increase the hormone levels, then just leave the body to do what it will do naturally – gain muscle and lean up – whilst avoiding simple carbs and insulin spikes and the associated negative effects they have on the body and it’s fat levels.
One Response to “My Understanding Of Glycemic Load”
June 10th, 2009 saat: 2:11 pm
Interesting. I’ve been looking into this too but I think I generally do eat low GI foods. I always opt for wholemeal over white and get through loads of healthy fruits and veggies.
Interesting also about the weights/muscle point. The Glycemic website seems to contradict that theory on muscle building post-exercise in this paragraph. What do you think? Seems to me to suggest high GI post-exercise UNLESS trying to lose fat? Confuzzling.
” During recovery from exercise, muscle glycogen resynthesis is of high metabolic priority. The eating of high GI carbohydrates after exercise increases plasma glucose and insulin concentrations and this facilitates muscle glycogen resynthesis. If however, you are exercising for weight loss purposes or are involved in weight restricted sports, low GI carbohydrates after exercise may be more beneficial as the lower glucose and insulin concentrations will not suppress fat. “
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