This article is a review of the GI Diet. The diet is based on the principal that by eating foods with a low GI index, you will then be able to more quickly and easily lose weight.

GI or glycemic index in particular is a measure of how long it takes for carbohydrates to be digested and converted into glucose or blood sugar. The faster the rate, the higher the insulin spike. A high spike triggers your body to more easily store the excess carbs as fat.

Rick Gallop bases his book, The GI Diet on these principals. The following is a review of his diet.

Philosophy of the GI Diet

The basic philosophy behind Gallop’s diet is that by eating foods with a low glycemic value, you can lose weight without feeling hungry or counting calories.

He developed the GI diet in response to himself having loss weight using the Zone Diet. Because of his success on the diet, he recommended it to his friends. However, only 5 percent were able to stick to the diet. The biggest factors for them not completing the diet was that it was too complex and that they were always feeling hungry and deprived.

The development of the GI Diet was his answer to these problems.

GI Diet Design

The design of the diet is divided into two phases: the weigh loss phase and the maintenance phase.

Phase 1 Phase 1 is part of the diet where you will be losing weight. To accomplish this, Gallop created a list of color codes to represent the foods that you can eat. The colors, green, yellow, and red, are symbolic of traffic lights and each represent foods in a certain range of the GI index.

The foods color coded under green light, which have the lowest GI values, represent the foods you can eat in phase 1. Foods under the yellow and red light, which have higher GI values, are to be avoided.

Some of the foods color coded with green are apples, cereals, breads, beans, and soups.

His method for getting around counting calories has to do with how you fill up your plate. 50 percent should be with vegetables, 25 percent with lean meats, and the remaining 25 percent with rice, pasta, or some type of grain. He also states there are certain foods that you can eat as much as you would like, since they are very low in calories and help to fill you up.

You are to stay on phase 1 until you lose the amount of weight you desire. Also in his book is a wide list of foods and recipes that you can follow.

Phase 2 Phase 2 is the maintenance phase. In this phase, you start to increase your calorie intake and you also can start eating foods coded under the yellow light. He states that the biggest mistake you can make during this phase is to eat too much. As such, he cautions you that during this time you will need to eat fewer calories to maintain your present weight than you did before you started dieting.

As for red light foods, Gallop advises to only eat in moderation. If you don’t, you will only end up sabotaging your success.

Exercise

Even though he does mention the benefits of exercise, he is somewhat dismissive of it in terms of losing weight. He argues that to lose 1 pound of fat for, say a 130 pound person walking at 4 mph, you would have to walk 53 miles.

He does offers some suggestions for exercise though. Some exercises that he suggests are walking, jogging, hiking and cycling. He also briefly mentions the benefits of resistance training.

Precautions and Risks

Given that the diet contains a wide range of foods, with low GI foods and its core, there are not too many risks to the diet. The only precautions to keep in mind is that meats should be lean and low in saturated fats and be careful not to overeat, since to much of even low GI foods can lead to weight gain.

Overall Assessment

Overall, the GI Diet is based on sound weight loss principals in that it acknowledges that the only way to lose weight is by taking in fewer calories than you burn. By eating foods that have low GI indexes, you can more easily accomplish this since these foods are low in calorie, but are highly dense.

My only concern is that, even though he acknowledges the importance of exercise, he is, as I mentioned above, some what dismissive of it. What he fails to realize is that exercise, especially resistance training, is a way that you can train your body to burn calories 24 hours a day, not just when you are performing the exercise.

By building lean muscle, your body burns more calories, since muscle requires more energy to sustain than fat cells. Also, it is an accepted fact that as we grow older, we tend to lose muscle, which is the primary reason that we start to gain more fat. With exercise, you can retain, and better yet grow more muscle, which in the long run makes maintaining your desired weight more manageable.

Thus, to improve the diet, the only addition that I would recommend to Gallop’s book is that more emphasis be put on exercising as well as dieting.

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