Embrace Good Health With Natural Foods
If you're on the Southbeach Diet, you're aware of the concept of Glycemic Index. For those just joining in, the Southbeach Diet, like the Atkins diet, focuses on how your body responds to food, rather than counting calories.
While caloric intake restrucuring and restriction is a part of both diets, the key insight is understanding that when your body eats carbohydrates, it will extract energy (blood sugar, or glucose) from the most easily digested foods first. Which means sugars, starches and the like get digested, and converted to blood sugars, which trigger insulin release.
If you've ever watched a bunch of kids eating sugary foods, you've seen this cycle in action - they eat, they get hyperactive, then their insulin spikes and they crash - they get crabby and sleepy and have low energy. This happens to you when you eat processed foods with a lot of free carbohydrates or sugars in them.
The key here is that your body craves these foods for that energy spike. Deep down, below the level of conscious thought, your body still thinks you're a Neolithic hunter, traipsing across the savannah, and might need a burst of speed to outrun a leopard by climbing a tree. To get that burst of speed, you have a taste for foods rich in carbohydrates. Now, when we were all hunter gatherers, a taste for carbohydrates meant that you weren't going to get a Hershey bar. You were going to eat fruits and nuts, and maybe some tubers or soaked wild grains. All of these are natural foods, and mix the carbohydrates with soluble fiber, which makes them slower to digest. This means the energy is released more steadily and slowly, and you get a constant burn of energy, rather than flash-jitter-crash cycle. This same concept, eating foods with carbohydrates that also have dietary fiber, is one of the key concepts of the Southbeach diet. In effect, it's leading you back to good health with natural foods, the way your body intended it to be. It's a bit alarming, when you go on the induction phase of the Southbeach diet, to realize just how strong your craving for processed sugar and processed flour is, but it's worth it to kick the habit. You'll not only lose weight, but you'll gain a more regular energy source, regular digestion, and amelioration of a lot of secondary digestive problems like irritable bowel syndrome. So, look for natural foods, like potatoes, apples, carrots and whole grains on the Southbeach diet, and let the good healthy diet build from natural foods.
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