FIND OUT WHAT WILL MAKE YOU FAT ... AND KEEP A DIARY TO BEAT DIABETES

THE Personalized Diet claims to help you spot the foods that may be ‘bad’ for your health and waistline by working out how your body responds to different foods through measuring your blood sugar levels.

The authors say how high your blood sugar goes after eating is a direct measure of how harmful that particular food may be — and in the long-run may raise the risk of diabetes.

They recommend using a finger-prick test (as used by people with diabetes) to measure your blood sugar after eating to identify which foods are ‘good’ and ‘bad’ for you personally (see above), but if you can’t face jabbing yourself multiple times a day, you could try tracking your hunger levels instead. Using the scale 1 = not hungry at all, 2 = mildly hungry, 3 = moderately hungry, 4 = very hungry, 5 = extremely hungry, track your hunger before you eat, and then one, two and three hours afterwards. Foods that result in hunger after eating them correlate loosely to higher blood sugar spikes. The higher the number and the longer the number stays high (the longer you stay

hungry), the higher the spike. Foods that don’t make you feel hungry after eating them correlate to low blood sugar rises.

If you still feel hungry after eating (when you should be feeling full) this could be a sign the food has triggered a blood sugar spike — and subsequent crash. This is because you might notice hunger when blood sugar levels are beginning to drop too low in response to an insulin surge.

You can increase the effectiveness of this test (the authors, Dr Segal and Dr Elinav, say) by keeping a food diary of everything you eat and drink and weighing yourself once a week.

BLOOD sugar results can be volatile if you have a common condition called ‘pre-diabetes’ characterised by an out-of-kilter insulin response to blood sugar levels, which puts you at greater risk of type 2 diabetes.

The authors of The Personalized Diet claim that by identifying which foods are the best and worst for them personally, people with pre-diabetes should be able to manipulate blood sugar levels and return to normal — effectively reversing the condition — within a week.