You can see the pancreas plays a very important role in the weight management story, by providing us with the necessary insulin to balance the glucose levels and its PEAKS. We need to treat this organ right and be considerate to it.

 

If we want to be Pancreas’ friend, this is what we should be doing to help it:

 

1)   Learn about the Glycemic Index (GI) and Glycemic Load (GL) of food and limit the amount of highly glycemic food we ingest. If we have our pancreas always working too hard for us, it will tire and become less effective.

 

 

 

2)   Give your pancreas a rest. It needs at least four hours to rest between shifts, which means you need to have four hours between each meal. You will learn more about this in Step 4 of the method: number, organization and composition of meals.

 

 

 

3)   Never have highly glycemic foods by themselves. When we have glucose alone it generates a huge response, pushing the pancreas to generate as much insulin as possible to remove such a high amount of glucose as soon as possible. Those candies you eat to alleviate your hunger, not only hit your pancreas hard, but also act opposite to alleviating hunger, as we will see later. Always eat high-glycemic foods like sugar, chocolate, sugary or alcoholic drinks, pasta, rice, fruit, etc. with protein and fat, and, when possible at the end of a meal, when we have already had some other food in our tummies. If there is something else in our tummies, especially some protein or fat, glucose won’t be wandering around by itself activating all our mechanisms trying reduce the amount of glucose in our bloodstream.

 

 

 

4)   Try to exercise before eating. You will deplete your glycogen reserves during exercise, which will be ready to fill up again with your next meal instead of storing the energy contained in the food ingested as fats. Your glucose levels in blood will be under control because the glucose will be immediately transformed into glycogen in the liver to be used when needed later on.