Diabetes Health Tips

Controlling Your Blood Sugar To Lose Weight

July 18, 2009
By J White

Each health expert has there own philosophy about what they believe is the best way to lose weight. However, if there is one thing that most if not all would agree upon is that the quickest way to start losing fat is to control your blood sugar.

Yes, you have probably seen this phrase used a lot on this site and others. But before you can truly learn how to control it, you need to know what it is.

Blood Sugar Defined

When the term “blood sugar” is used, the term is actually referring to the glucose in your blood. The source of glucose in your blood comes from the carbohydrates that you eat. Your body must break down the carbohydrates into this form before it can be used as energy.

To handle the glucose running through your blood stream, your body secretes insulin, a hormone, from your pancreas. The insulin then tells the cells in your liver, muscle, and fat tissue to take the glucose from your blood, which is then converted to and stored as glycogen in the your liver and muscles.

When the cells that store glycogen are full, the remaining glucose is stored as triglyceride in adipose tissue, more commonly known as fat.

High Blood Sugar

As you can deduce, high blood sugar means more storage of fat in your body. Moreover, if this process continues unabated, your body could become insulin resistant, which means your pancreas has to produce more and more insulin to manage a blood sugar concentration that initially was handled by a smaller amount of insulin, which could eventually lead to type 2 diabetes.

So controlling your blood sugar is not only important for weight loss, but controlling it will also lower the risk of developing diabetes and other diseases.

How To Control Your Blood Sugar

The easy answer to controlling your blood sugar or glucose levels is to tell you to cut back on the carbohydrates you eat. This is partly true. But controlling your blood sugar has more to do with the type of carbs you eat as oppose to the amount.

For instance, a 100 Calories of lentils will have a different effect on your glucose levels than 100 calories of chips. This is because your body has to do more work to get to the carbohydrates in the lentils as oppose to the chips. The reason for this is that the carbohydrate in lentils are more complex than the simple carbohydrates found in chips.

Because of this complexity, your glucose levels will not become as elevated as it would be with the chips, which also means a slower rise of your insulin levels. This slower rise of insulin is part of the process that helps you to control your blood sugar. So to control your blood sugar, you need to eat more complex carbohydrates.

And what are complex carbohydrates? These are just about any type of carb that is still close to its natural form. More precisely, it is foods that have not been processed.

So, by eating these types of foods, you can control your blood sugar. And when you do, along with cutting back on your calories, you can lose weight more quickly, as well.

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