...Let me clear up a little on the confusion with the glycemic index. True there are some out there trying to capitalize on the diet, but there's plenty of free information if a person wants to follow the diet.
...It is about good carbs and bad carbs. Atkins said all carbs are bad. But the diet was researched by Dr Jennifer Brand-Miller at the university of Sidney. She's a professor of Nutrition there and was seeing that diabetics were having problems controlling their blood sugar following the Simple-complex carbohydrate rule that we've been brainwashed with for ages. Simple carbs digest fast, complex carbs digest slowly.
...So she started to study the effects of the different carbs on the metabolism of normal subjects. The study was very simple: A group of healthy subject were give a presiely measure amount of a particular carbohydrate and then their blood sugar and insulin levels were measured at different intervals for the next several hours.
...For a baseline they chose glucose which is metabolised the fastest and is, of course, the sugar that is used by our bodies. In fact, one thing to keep in mind, is that all carbohydrates are converted to glucose by our metabolism. So they made a list (glycemic index) of how all the foods(carbs) rated. They found that whether a carb is simple or not had no effect on the rate of metabolism.
...Their results showed that milk products (lactose) and fruit(fructose) were the lowest/slowest and the white starches were the fastest(potatoes, rice, and white bread). In fact potatoes metabolize at a rate that is 80% that of glucose and table sugar(sucrose) is only 65%.
...While this helps diabetics tremendously to regulate their insulin, there's a lot of us who have a condition similar to type 2 diabetes called metabolic syndrome. All this means is that our metabolism reacts very strongly to carbs that are digested quickly and produces way too much insulin than is needed. The insulin controls the blood sugar, so there's no problems like diabetes people, but the excess insulin is what causes the triglycerides to shoot up and can cause conditions like PCOS, hypertention, and reactive hypoglycemia.
...To answer the question about what I eat on a normal day. All I really did was reduce the amount of potatoes and rice I was eating. I didn't elimiate them just reduced the amounts. I stay away from things that are sweetened with corn syrup. Corn syrup is chemically identical to glucose. I don't eat gluten but if I wanted to eat a cookie, I would choose and oatmeal cookie anstead of a sugar cookie. Ice cream would be better than a piece of pecan pie. Fruits are excellant and most vegetables are excellant to ok but that's what the lists are for
...It's also a function of the index and the amount and that's where the glycemic load comes in. And that's the goal is to get the glycemic load of a meal down to a level that is well tolerated. Another way of cutiing the glycemic load in half without changing the diet at all is to eat smaller meals more frequently.
Rick