The Petite Advantage Diet by Jim Karas

one of these evil carbohydrates, they very quickly empty into your bloodstream as glucose and spend very little time in your stomach. Again, that’s why they are called “simple”–because all the good stuff has been stripped away, so your stomach has very little work to do. You want food to stay in your stomach (that’s what protein does, since it is difficult to digest) and slowly empty into your bloodstream. But these evil carbs don’t do that.
    Insulin and the Blood-Sugar Dance
    A “quick empty” is a major problem when it comes to hunger, which you are trying to avoid. A “quick empty” will lead to a big insulin surge. The human body is very efficient. It frequently operates in a “you do this and I’ll do that” manner, generally to help it operate smoothly and in a balanced rhythm. That’s good, and balance is truly what you want for your body. But that balance has to be used to your advantage and, in this instance, it’s to your disadvantage. The “blood-sugar dance” is something that you want to manipulate properly and not let get extreme. You want your blood-sugar response to seem more like “easy listening” than “heavy metal rock.” The goal of the blood-sugar dance is to maintain a slow, steady stream of food emptying from your stomach and turning into glucose for your body to use. That keeps hunger to a minimum, as your mind and body keep saying to each other: “Okay, there’s a steady flow of glucose coming our way. No need to ask–hunger–for more.”
    Your ultimate partner in the blood-sugar dance is insulin. When blood sugar enters the bloodstream in a slow, “easy listening” way, the pancreas releases insulin in a similar way. Think of insulin as the drawbridge that allows the glucose to enter your cells for energy, or fuel. Most of this storage occurs in the liver and muscles. Without insulin to guide the way for glucose to enter, the sugar runs amok and causes tremendous damage to your body and to your desire to lose weight. I will elaborate on this in a moment.
    Virtually all food turns to glucose, so that is not the issue. What is the issue is how quickly your food empties from your stomach and turns to glucose. Your goal is to consume foods that slowly leave the stomach and turn to glucose. When you consume a simple carb as a “stand-alone” food–which means you are not combining it with other fats or proteins, as when you get up first thing in the morning and grab breakfast–that’s good. But if breakfast is a white bagel–that’s bad. You get the unwanted “quick empty.” A quick empty is not advantageous, as it will be interpreted by your body as a big “heavy metal” sugar party in your bloodstream. Your body doesn’t want to be the host of that big sugar party and wants to shut it down quickly. That prompts your pancreas to push out a big insulin surge that pulls all that sugar out of your bloodstream.
    Think of what happened when your parents came home early from vacation to find you throwing a big summer bash for 150 of your closest friends. They threw the lights on, killed the music (heavy metal?), and said “everyone out!” That’s what your body does to the big sugar surge; it makes the pancreas secrete insulin to do its dirty work and get the sugar out fast. The human body is very, very smart. It knows that too much sugar in your bloodstream is a negative. Why is that so bad? Hunger .
    Hunger and Energy
    When you get that big insulin surge after your blood sugar is overly elevated, you crash , as the insulin strips all the sugar out of your bloodstream. I know you have probably felt this in the past. You just feel wiped out. What most people then do is reach for another processed carbohydrate. That’s why those brownies you avoided all day suddenly become irresistible at 3:30, or you find yourself lured to the “break room”–a carb-lovers, “vending-machine fantasy.” When you do this, you hit your body with another sugar surge, followed