Weight-loss problem food #1 - White Potatoes
Yeah, I know… you love your potatoes, and they love you… but it’s tough love for sure. I have to call a spade a spade here…they’re pretty much useless little turds. The skin has some benefit, but unless you’re consuming organic potato skins, you’re most likely getting an excess of pesticides and herbicides, as potatoes have been known to be highly contaminated with these “nasties”. This being said, most people remove the skins, and eat the starchy component, which is the biggest problem area.
Why? Because potatoes are super dense in high-glycemic carbohydrates. Being high-glycemic means that a carbohydrate is absorbed into the bloodstream at a rapid rate, spiking your blood sugar fast, giving you a quick energy boost, but a subsequent “crash”. In fact, potatoes have been shown to spike your blood sugar faster than white sugar!! This can be useful in certain situations, such as pre-workout and post-workout, but for the most part, these high glycemic foods cause fat storage in the body.
Mechanism of action: If we can’t burn off the carbohydrate load (which typically happens with high carbohydrate, high-glycemic foods), it gets stored as fat. The body can typically deal with moderate carbohydrate loads, but not huge loads, which is why choosing higher quality carbohydrates is probably the best way to shed the excess pounds in the long run.
Recommended Replacement foods:
Sweet potatoes - these bad boys spike your blood sugar only about half as fast as white potatoes do, and they taste badass.
Squash - these little funksters have an extremely low glycemic index rating. My fav’s are the butternut squash, and the spaghetti squash. Both are very easy to cook - you more or less cut them in half, scoop out the seeds (I dry these out on a plate for about 24-36 hours, and hit them with some sea salt for a future snack), and bake them for about an hour at 375F. instructions can be found here
I’ll be hitting ya with 3 more problem foods over the coming weeks.
June 5th, 2008 at 1:15 pm
Haha - Future snacks! Are those snacks from the future? Anyway, this doesn’t apply to me - I don’t eat potatoes (unless they are completely deep-fried in oil).
June 5th, 2008 at 1:32 pm
You got it! Squash seeds are the way of the future… Aliens love squash seeds! That’s why they program us humans to have responses like, “I don’t like squash!”, despite not trying one in the last decade… Ah, the things people will say to hold onto their white potatoes… You heard it here first - SQUASH IS THE WAY OF THE FUTURE!!