Top Tip to Energize your life

Lose weight, eat soup!

The wintry weather and short, dark days seems to drive us to eat sticky sweet carbohydrate foods. This could be a natural process which nature has cleverly designed to keep our spirits up during the long winter months; carbohydrate foods help to improve mood. These days, however, there are many many more sweet foods to choose from and there is a danger of overdosing on what nature intended!

Processed foods contain sugar in large quantities. Even a jar of pasta sauce is thickened with maltodextrin – a refined starch – which behaves in the body as though it was sugar. Consequently you may be eating more sugar and/or processed starch than you thought!?

Insulin is the hormone which regulates the level of sugar in your blood – which is kept within quite narrow limits. Too much and you feel spaced out and hyper; too little and you feel dizzy and faint. Insulin works by removing sugar from your bloodstream and converting it ultimately to fat. You don’t have to eat fat to get fat! A lot of sugary and processed foods will work just as well.

Insulin is often known as the fat storage hormone. It does a good job, but if you constantly bombard your system with sugar, cells in your body soon become resistant to the signals from insulin. You become overweight or obese, insulin levels in your blood rise, but are ineffective and your energy levels follow the path of a roller coaster. This can lead to type 1 or type 2 diabetes, and you will need help to control your blood glucose level. Type 1 is usually controlled by taking insulin. Type 2 can be controlled by changing the types of foods you eat. Switch to good quality starchy/high fibre carbohydrate foods, with some protein and fat. A bowl of thick vegetable soup with lentils or beans, a chunk of crusty wholemeal bread with some butter, tahini (sesame seed spread similar to peanut butter) or a little cheese is an ideal combination. The carbohydrate in the bread, soup vegetables and beans will soothe your mood without sending your blood sugar haywire. Soup is also a wonderful warming food when the weather turns cold – good for the soul and stomach.

Past Top Tips...

• Summer Porridge - 06/01/2010
• Burning Calories - 07/07/2009
• Lose weight, eat soup! - 13/01/2009
• Winter food for dark days - 27/10/2008
• Injury beating food - 04/04/2008
• Love Your Liver - 02/02/2008
• eating in season - 01/08/2007
• Bad hangovers. Why alcohol is only partly to blame - 01/07/2007
• Caffeine - Do you need it? - 01/04/2007
• The Power of Porridge - 01/02/2007
• Talking Turkey - 12/12/2006
• Fabulous Foods - Honey - 22/10/2006
• Fabulous Foods - Brown Rice - 01/06/2006
• Thoughts on The Atkins Diet - 01/05/2006
• Thoughts on the GI diet - 01/05/2006