Fast-Track principles

This is a diet, or a way of eating, that will:

• Lower insulin levels and stabilize blood-sugar levels
• Banish food cravings
• Eliminate energy peaks and troughs, and mood swings

Enhance concentration

• Re-educate you into a way of eating that will increase your vitality and improve your overall health
• Help your body to burn fat and normalize your weight.

It is vital that you understand the principles of this diet and follow it responsibly. If you are fundamentally healthy, but insulin-resistant and experiencing any ofthe accompanying symptoms, this plan will help you redress the balance and find a level of carbohydrate intake with which your system can cope. The Fast-Track Plan offers you a kick-start and is aimed at women with a BMI of over 35 and men with a BMI of over 25.

For the period of this plan you base your diet on an approximate ratio of 50 per cent high-quality protein/20 per cent low GI carbohydrates/30 per cent healthy fats. You begin the first two weeks of the diet by restricting your carbohydrate intake to 20g (³/4oz), your protein to 150g (5oz) Biological Value and healthy fats to a minimum of 40g (1 1/2oz). On a very simplistic level this means:

• 3 cups low GI vegetables per day.
• 1 portions of protein three times per day and portion twice per day as a
  snack. (A portion of protein is the equivalent to the size of your palm.)
• Around a half to a whole teaspoon of allowable fats at every meal.

Within 48 hours your body will start to burn its own fat as fuel, as your body switches into benign dietary ketosis.

Ketosis

Being in ketosis means that your body burns fat because it isn't taking in sufficient glucose to meet your energy needs. Under everyday conditions the carbohydrates that you eat are converted to glucose, which is the body's primary source of energy. Whenever your carbohydrate intake is limited to a certain range, for a long enough period of time, your body will draw on its fat stores — turning this into a source of fuel called ketones. When you burn a larger amount of fat than is immediately needed for energy, the excess ketones are discarded in the urine.

Dietary ketosis has received a bad press because it is often confused with ketoacidosis, a life-threatening condition most often associated with insulin- deficient, type 1 diabetes.

Benign dietary ketosis, however, is a natural adjustment to the body's reduced intake of carbohydrates, as the body shifts its primary source of energy from carbohydrates to stored fat. The presence of insulin keeps ketone production in check so that a mild beneficial ketosis is achieved. Blood-sugar levels are stabilized within a normal range and there is no breakdown of healthy muscle tissue, as long as sufficient protein is included in the diet.

Measuring ketosis

On a rapid weight-loss diet you will usually start to burn fat instead of sugar within the first 48 hours. To measure the ketone levels in your urine, buy urinary test strips, called lypolisis strips, from any pharmacy, which will show you if your carbohydrate/insulin balance is at optimum levels for fat burning. You should do this twice a day: before breakfast and before your evening meal. Your levels need to be between trace and small (0.5-1.5 mmol-l).

Caution: if your levels rise to above moderate (4 mmol-l), you are not eating enough and should increase your low GI carbohydrates until the ketones are reduced to between trace and small (0.5-1.5 mmol-l). Always drink plenty of water: at least eight large glasses per day.

The link between carbohydrates and insulin resistance

The hormone insulin plays a major role in the metabolism of carbohydratesand their conversion to energy in the body. When you eat carbohydrates, they are converted into glucose in the bloodstream, which triggers the release of insulin. This virtually escorts the glucose to the body's cells, where it can be used as energy. If there is too much glucose, the insulin turns it into glycogen, which is stored in your muscles and liver ready to be converted back toglucose when it is needed.

However, in the high-refined 'carob' world in which we live, we often have too much glucose floating around in the bloodstream, and then insulin converts it to fat. And our body cells may become so flooded with insulin that they cease to be responsive to it, so the pancreas keeps producing more and more insulin in an attempt to get energy to your cells. This is known as 'insulin resistance'.

Over a period of time, less and less glucose gets used as energy, and more and more gets laid down as fat. Since insulin also sends messages to the brain to tell you that you are hungry, more and more insulin means increasing cravings for carb-laden food.

The only people who are benefiting from refined foods are:

• The dentists who have to patch up your decaying teeth
• The pharmaceutical companies who have to sell you drugs to sort out the symptoms of your ailing immune system and your susceptibility to chronic and degenerative disease
• The food manufacturers, who are only really interested in profit. If you add to this a high intake of caffeine, alcohol, smoking and a lack of exercise, then you will almost certainly be taking a wobbly walk down the road to ill health.

Is it enough just to cut out refined carbohydrates?

Totally banishing all things processed and adopting a healthier diet based on fresh produce is a definite start, but if you have a weight problem linked to insulin resistance, it may not be enough, because if you are still eating a diet that is too high in the wrong sort of carbohydrates — coupled with not eating enough protein or fat to slow down the rate at which these excessive carbs are hitting your blood-sugar levels — you will still have problems. A low-fat/high-carb diet can give you a nasty shock every time you jump on the scales.

The thing to remember is that all carbohydrates have an effect on your blood sugar, and every gram of carbohydrate consumed is equal to one gram of glucose in your bloodstream. So if you are eating more than your body can burn for energy, or can safely store as glycogen in the liver, the rest will be turned to fat.

The key factor in balancing blood-sugar levels and banishing thesymptoms of insulin resistance is controlling your intake of carbohydrates. In order to do this effectively you need to know which ones have the greatest impact on your blood sugar and which do not.

Initially, this will need a little time and effort on your part as you learn about the different sorts of carbohydrates. You may find that the changes you have to make to your diet are quite drastic, but before long — as you start to feel and look better — you will be amazed at how little you miss the wrong kinds of carbohydrates such as processed and sugary foods. Youwon't feel the need to pile your plate high with potatoes and pasta, because your newly balanced blood sugar levels won't be crying out for acarbohydrate fix.

The Ten Steps of Body Clock Diet

The ten steps of the Body Clock Prescription that follow don't take much time or many resources but they go a long way toward helping you stay healthy if you are well or feel better if you are ill.

1. Follow the Body Clock Diet. Put protein in your morning meal, snacks and lunch, either by drinking the Rhythmic Shake or by emphasizing high protein foods. Move most of your carbohydrates from breakfast, lunch and morning snacks to the evening.
2. If you scored high on the insulin resistance test, adhere as rigorously as you can to the Body Clock Diet. Because insulin resistance is at the root of so many conditions, you want to capitalize on your ability to bring down your serum insulin level. Eat the maximum tolerable amount of your protein during the day and save as many of your carbohydrates as possible for one meal in the evening. Craving carbohydrates is your enemy in this regard; you will probably need to make a gradual transition to the level of strictness that I'm recommending. That way, your insulin levels will come down step by step; they will not be screaming for carbohydrates while I'm screaming at you not to eat them.
3. Excess alcohol and caffeine interfere with circadian rhythm. The definition of excess depends on the person and on the time of day. In the early evening, the effects of alcohol are minimized by most people's capacity to easily metabolize two to four ounces of liquor over a two- to four-hour period. But efficient alcohol metabolism declines dramatically after 10:00 p.m., making late night drinking particularly disruptive. Avoid caffeine except at around 4:00 p.m., the one time of day when its circadian effects are neutral.
4. Stay away from diet drinks because they send a false signal to your body. They promise the potential arrival of sugar and then, after engaging your body's mechanism for raising insulin, let you down when the sugar doesn't arrive.
5. Get plenty of full spectrum sunlight in your eyes and on some part of your skin every day. When you expose your eyes to sunlight — and I hope it's obvious that I don't mean staring at the sun — do it without wearing spectacles. These days spectacles of all kinds block both the healthy and the injurious types of ultraviolet rays. So get out in the sun, take off your glasses and soak up a moderate amount of sunlight — at least one-half hour near dawn or dusk — every day. This does not require sunbathing, simply being out in the sun. If you live in a northern latitude where the winter days are short and there are lots of rainy, snowy or cloudy days, then consider getting a light box like those prescribed for people with seasonal affective disorder. Expose yourself to the light box for at least a couple of hours every day.
6. Establish a regular time for going to bed at night and getting up in the morning and get sufficient sleep every night, preferably during the natural period of darkness between sundown and sunrise. While you're asleep, expose yourself to light as little as possible. If you wake up in the middle of the night to pee, don't turn on the light. Instead, use a dim flashlight or nightlight to light your way to the bathroom. Even a tiny amount of light at night will squash your melatonin peak. Remember that melatonin is an antioxidant and informational substance whose narrowly timed peak in the middle of the night, following a healthy exposure to light during the day, may be suppressed by ill-timed light. Failure to have a peak release of melatonin at night is like missing a bus that comes only once a day.
7. Encourage rhythmic harmony by learning to breathe with your diaphragm. When you relinquish control to your diaphragm, your breathing will take on the normal rhythm directed by the unconscious part of your brain rather than the potentially asynchronous rhythm generated by your chest muscles. This works especially well when you engage in stressful activities that make you unconsciously hold your breath. For example, when I am on top of a ladder trying to hammer in a nail that is slightly out of reach and I dislodge the nail, bang my thumb or bend the nail, I stop and say to myself, 'Baker, stop holding your breath and take a deep one with your diaphragm.' Then the nail goes right in. The same is true for threading a needle, looking for lost keys, worrying about finding a restroom when you're downtown with a filling bladder, waiting in line at the bank or driving on the freeway.
8. Engage in some form of rhythmic exercise at the same time every day, preferably in the afternoon when muscle strength is at its peak and most people perform best. If you can walk, walk. If you can swim, do that, especially if you can find nonchlorinated water to swim in and are strong enough to swim with a good steady rhythm. If you prefer, ride a bike. But whatever you do, remember to breathe in a relaxed way, using your diaphragm, so that the effort of your exercise reinforces rhythmic harmony in your body instead of allowing unnatural chest breathing to interfere with it.
9. Working out to music takes exercise one step farther by permitting you to synchronize your activity with the beat of the music. Of course, the ultimate refinement of exercising to music is dance. If you are ill and unable to move about, then simply listen to music, but really listen so that the music penetrates your being rather than simply acting as a background to whatever you are doing. Some types of music are more healing than others. I asked Millie Grenough, a music therapist and author of Sing It! Learn English Through Song, what would be the best choice of music for a person with inflammatory illness.³ She said, 'It can be anything from Mozart and Vivaldi to favorite Broadway tunes, from long-remembered lullabies or Tibetan chants to your favorite song when you were sixteen. The main thing is that it be music the person loves.'
10. Meditate daily to reinforce and integrate your body's rhythms. And if you're ill, use meditation as the platform from which you launch the powerful tool of visualization. When you dance, you put your whole body's movement into the embrace of something bigger than yourself — the music. When you are fully the captive of the music, you are free to receive its blessing. And every step of the dance is a choice you make to stay with the music.

The GI of food: How low should you go? continue...

Insulin and carbohydrates

Your pancreas produces the hormone insulin. Of all foods, carbohydrates stimulate the secretion of insulin most.

Eating carbohydrates with a low GI causes slow absorption of the food and so, slow entry of glucose into the bloodstream, with a gentler rise and fall in the curve. This means that the pancreas is not over-taxed and can produce less, and more consistent levels of insulin.

To recap briefly on what was said in What's wrong with sugar and starch?: if the pancreas is over-stimulated for long periods of time, because of mostly eating foods with a high GI (such as refined starch and sugar), it may become exhausted and insulin resistance or even type II diabetes could develop. Even if they do not cause diabetes, high (and unnecessary!) insulin levels are undesirable and dangerous. And similarly, high glucose levels in the blood are as dangerous. And we know for a fact that it seriously affects your body fat percentage!

It is sensible to know and understand and to remember when next you crave foods with a high GI (such as bread or refined sugar) that insulin plays a direct part in how your food is metabolised. It also determines whether your body will burn fat or carbohydrate to meet your energy needs. And finally, it determines what your body will do with the available energy in your blood - use it, or store it as body fat.

If you can't go low, go without

Which means go without the fatty topping or other additions to the carbohydrates. By now we all know, GI aside, that what we odd to our carbohydrates is usually what adds to our weight. And by now we also know that carbohydrates - either sugar or starch - don't taste as good without those little additions. They require that 'little something' to make them more palatable: cream with the pasta, gravy on the rice, butter on bread, cheese on pizza and of course dollops of cream on meringues. These succulent little extras not only make the food taste more delicious, which makes us eat more of it, but the fat also aids excessive fat gain.

Go slow, go low!

Believe this: if you can control your food intake in such a way that you eat mostly low GI carbohydrates, your weight will decrease steadily and rather satisfyingly. Your health will improve and your moods will be better. You will have fewer mood swings and you will feel less exhausted. Your appetite won't get out of hand and you won't have those dangerous food cravings. You will enjoy a better quality of life for longer and have the energy with which to enjoy it!

These are not unfounded claims - they are provable and based on scientific trials, conducted worldwide by independent universities and medical authorities.

The magical benefits of low GI foods were discovered when clinical trials proved that the GI of food influences the rate at which animals gain body fat and develop abnormalities in insulin secretion. These trials were extended to humans and proved how the GI of food influences sport performance and appetite control. From there it expanded into lifestyle improvement and more effective body weight control and thus the GI revolution was born. It changed the way in which millions of dieters selected and ate their food. It also changed their body weights for life - downwards!

Yet, it is not always possible to avoid the foods we love; and as far as I'm concerned, it isn't advisable either. We are sensual beings and to ignore or not to respect the cravings for foods that please us sensually, is a sure way of falling back into those old habits of bread and honey and chocolates and all the other high GI foods.

The answer is therefore to combine your foods wisely. One can have high GI bread, topped with low GI cooked beans or humus. At breakfast time, for instance, one can have low GI oats with high GI toast to follow, Combined, the overall GI will be lower than simply having toast with jam and cheese or wheat cereal and toast.