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- 📈How to Avoid Blood Sugar Spikes. Part 1.
📈How to Avoid Blood Sugar Spikes. Part 1.
Improve Blood Sugar Management and Slow the Development of Diabetes-Related Complications.
If you’re like me and have been living with diabetes for a while, it’s easy to overlook some of the basics that can make a huge difference in managing your blood sugar levels. Today, I want to focus on one of those basics: the Glycemic Index (GI) 🍽️.
Understanding the GI can be invaluable for managing your blood sugar levels and slowing the development of diabetes-related complications.
Let’s dive in 🌊
What is the Glycemic Index?
The Glycemic Index (GI) is a scale that ranks foods based on how quickly they raise your blood sugar after you eat them.
Foods with a High-GI are digested and absorbed rapidly, causing a swift spike in your blood sugar 📈.
Conversely, Low-GI foods are absorbed more slowly, leading to gradual increases in your blood sugar.
Knowing the GI of foods can help us better predict how our bodies will respond to a meal and we can make smarter choices, which is especially important for those of us managing our diabetes
How to Find the Glycemic Index of Food
Unlike the carbohydrate content, the Glycemic Index of foods isn’t usually listed on the packaging 📦. So, how do you figure it out for store-bought or freshly-made meals?
That’s where Haema can help. Just take a picture of your meal 🤳🏼, and Haema will identify the food and predict its GI for you. Instead of giving you a specific number, we break it down into easy-to-understand categories: low, medium, and high.
Knowing the GI is only part of the solution. To manage your blood sugar, aim for low-GI meals. This doesn’t mean you have to avoid high-GI foods entirely; it’s about understanding how to lower the GI of your meal. You can do this by adding other food components or adjusting the order in which you eat to reduce the glucose impact ⚖️.
If you’re not sure how to lower your meal's GI? Just take a picture of your meal, and Haema will guide you on how to tweak it for a better impact on your blood sugar 🍽️.
I designed Haema with features that help you reduce the Glycemic Index of your meals, so you can still eat the same meal with a few tweaks to slow the absorption of glucose and avoid those frustrating blood sugar spikes. You can download it here—I really hope you find it as helpful as I do! 💡
Benefits of Eating Low-Glycemic Index Meals
Eating meals with a low GI can have so many benefits, including:
Reduced Risk of Complications: A low-GI diet has been shown to lower the risk of common diabetes complications like retinopathy, nephropathy, and neuropathy 💪.
Improved Blood Glucose Control: Studies show that a low-GI diet can significantly lower HbA1c levels, a key marker for long-term blood glucose control 📉.
Better Lipid Profiles: Low-GI diets can help improve cholesterol levels by reducing LDL (bad) cholesterol and potentially increasing HDL (good) cholesterol, which lowers the risk of heart disease ❤️—a major concern for those with diabetes.
While the GI measures how quickly carbohydrates in food raise blood sugar, it doesn’t account for the quantity of carbohydrates in a typical serving size.
That’s where Glycemic Load (GL) comes in, and it’s important to understand this as it provides a more complete picture of how a food affects your blood sugar levels than just the Glycemic Index (GI) alone. I’ll explain more about this in tomorrow’s post.
Throughout this month, I’ll also share practical tips on how to reduce the glycemic index and load of your meal, so stay tuned! 🔍
🌟Guess the Glycemic Index of This Meal!Vote Please (meal shown below) |
Last Night Dinner Includes Salmon with Sweet Potato and Broccolini
See you tomorrow!
Jish 💜
Type 1 Diabetic & Co-Founder @ Haema
We’d love to see how you incorporate low-GI foods into your meals! Tag us on social media with your meal photos and use #HaemaMeals!
Download Haema Here
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