Using GL to sort the good, the bad and the suicidal 125 them like calories and add them up and then try to stay under certain limits. Carbohydrate is an important part of our diet and rather than decreasing our intake we need to simply eat more low GL carbohydrates. I get my clients to use GL to compare one food with another. Basically when it comes to fruit and vegetables, what GL is measuring is how much fibre and water there is in the food as well as carbohydrate. So foods with very low GLs, like lettuce and pumpkin, have lots of fibre and water and relatively little carbohydrate. For this reason GL gives us a direct measure of the healthiness of these foods as low GL simply means high fibre and / or water content. With manufactured and pre-prepared foods it is a little more complicated. While mother nature tends to create foods that are mostly fatty( e. g., meat, cheese) or mostly carbohydrates( fruit and vegies), food manufacturers do the opposite and mix it up to get the taste benefit of both carbohydrate and fat wherever possible. Suicidal foods like doughnuts and fries are good examples. So manufactured foods may have a low GL and be high in fat. This is the converse of what we discussed in the last chapter where‘ low fat’ can often mean‘ high carb’. Often what GL is measuring in manufactured or pre-prepared foods is the degree of refinement of the carbohydrate. Bread is a good example. Basically the higher the GL the more refined the grain in the bread and the more quickly it is broken down to glucose that appears in your blood. The lower the GL the grainier the bread with larger particles of carbohydrate that are more slowly and incompletely absorbed. In summary, from the physiology perspective, the goal is not to eat a low carbohydrate diet: we need to eat plenty of carbs. Instead, the goals is to swap high GL carbohydrates for lower GL equivalents. If anything, I would support a‘ low GL diet’ but not a‘ low carb diet’. From the psychological point of view we are going to use GL to evaluate how far we can move to lower GL foods while still eating foods we like. As you have hopefully realized by now, it is all about not making too great a sacrifice. Too great a sacrifice is the beginning of self-sabotage and leads to inevitable rebound over-eating.