Part One | Part Two | Part Three | Part FourPart Four
By: Jean Johnson for Reflux1
“I don’t want to put too much emphasis on the medicinal potato thing at night,” Jill Schmidt said, picking up where she left off in the last installment of her story. “Because there’s another tool I use in addition to the Overeaters Anonymous (OA) 12-step program that I feel is has been at least as helpful. It’s called the glycemic index and like the potato idea, I think it has gone a long way toward helping me free myself from my beloved sugar.” Schmidt stops talking for a moment. Her brown eyes soften and tears come. “Sometimes it’s hard to believe I’ve really freed myself at last. I was so strung out. Breakfast, lunch and on into the evening, day after day, year upon year. And now this daily reprieve. It’s like becoming the person I always wanted to be.”
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Eat Well with the Glycemic Index
The Canadian Diabetes Association has the best webpage on the glycemic index that we’ve found at www.diabetes.ca
Foods with low glycemic scores and best to choose most often include:
Skim milk and plain non-fat yogurt
Soy products
Sweet potatoes
Apples, plums and oranges
Oats and pumpernickel bread
Dry beans like lentils, garbanzos, kidneys and pintos
Less often:
Banana, pineapple, raisins
Whole wheat and rye bread
Brown rice, new potatoes and popcorn
Least often:
Watermelon and dates
Baked potato, rutabaga and parsnips
Packaged cereals, white bagels and soda crackers
French fries, ice cream and candies
Table sugar
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Participants in OA generally design their own food plans, although many like Schmidt consult a nutritionist. The idea, though, is to figure out what might be reasonable steps toward freedom from using food as the equivalent of a drug. “Learning to deal with life without your food, or as I call it ‘my blankie,’ is not all that easy when you’ve been dragging around with it forever like I did,” said Schmidt. “While I thought I just liked the taste of all the goodies, I now realize that I was using food to stuff down my emotions – all those feelings of anger and fear and resentment that seem so terrifying. But I’m getting ahead of myself and into 12-step land. What I wanted to talk about first is the glycemic index.
“The glycemic index is a tool that’s been around for two decades now. It’s a way of looking at carbohydrates in terms of how rapidly they’re broken down into glucose during digestion. The idea is to try and keep blood glucose levels relatively even so that cravings for simple sugars that arise when the body is particularly low on fuel will be kept well at bay.”
If Schmidt is starting to sound like a nutritionist instead of a recovering heavy weight it’s because she’s spent a lifetime investigating ideas that could rescue her from a fate she considers akin to death.
“It’s true,” she said, laughing. “As a librarian I suppose I’ve been nosier than the usual customer, and I’ve been so very, very pained by my size that I had the motivation to keep searching for something – anything that might unlock the key to the prison I lived in. I cannot convey out utterly miserable I was, nor how tremendously grateful I am to have finally found my way out of that nightmare.”
Back to the glycemic index, however, Schmidt says the basic idea is to go for the whole grains and limit refined, starchy foods. “And beans,” she said. “We Americans tend to dismiss beans with a few preemptory jokes not to mention a fixation on two basic bean recipes – chili beans and Boston baked. But if beans are cooked well until lovely and soft, they melt in your mouth and pass through your digestive tract unheard. My lunch often has a liberal helping of home-cooked beans in either a winter soup or summer salad that I pattern after all that delicious Italian and French cuisine. For mere pennies I get good protein, leave a light footprint on the planet and have food low on the glycemic index to boot. It’s a great deal.”
The index also points people like Schmidt toward fresh fruits and vegetables, and cautions folks to watch their portions.
“This is something that stymied me forever,” Schmidt said. “I was so afraid I wouldn’t get enough at mealtimes that I ate these huge portions. Now that I realize what I’m after is stable blood glucose, I eat moderately at meals and then have 1 to 2 snacks to fill in the gaps. And that doesn’t include my baked potato before bedtime.”
Schmidt explains that she eats the potato even though it doesn’t fare well on the index. “What they say is not to avoid a food just because it ranks low (or actually high on the numerical score). Instead the idea is to get at least one of the high ranking foods (with low scores) at each meal to help balance things out.”
An average day for Schmidt starts with something she calls panacuka (PAN-a-COO-ka). “It’s a corrupt spelling of the Dutch word for pancakes I think, and my answer to a morning croissant,” said Schmidt.
“Basically my panacukas are a whole grain pancake with a fun name. There’s no recipe really, this morning I whisked in an egg, a little salt, and some flax meal oil – about a tablespoon. Then a couple big spoonfuls of soy flour, whole wheat flour and flax meal. For the liquid I had a half bottle of dark porter beer left from the other night, so I used that along with some vinegar and yogurt. And for leavening I use around a teaspoon of soda for what I estimate at every cup of dry ingredients. Usually I end up adding more liquid to get the batter right – extra vinegar, water, or some milk.” Schmidt laughs again.
“In my panacukas, anything goes as long as it’s nutritious. But I’ll bet if you tried one, you’d be sold. They’re very light and not pasty or gluey like white stuff. Great with an espresso whether plain or with some yogurt and fruit on top. Sometimes I even grate apples and pears into the batter. And then there’s always wheat germ and the oat and wheat brans and any leftover brown rice or quinoa or millet. It all works for me,” said Schmidt.
Schmidt laughs again at the suggestion that she is still compulsive about food, as well as our query about drinking beer. “On the beer and wine score, I do enjoy a drink with dinner sometimes. One is the most I generally have and as happened the other evening, sometimes I don’t even finish that. I do think the French and Italians have something going as far as enjoyment goes, though, and part of that is a nice glass of wine or beer to complement the meal. We Americans have tried to replace quality with quantity for too long, now.
“But on the food compulsion, that’s an affirmative. A person never is cured from this disease. So what I’ve tried to do if take my love for food and turn it into a healthy thing. So far it’s working in large part because of the 12-step program. And I’ll get to that next if you like.”
Concluded in Part Five
