Diet & Fitness

The Montignac Diet

What is it?
This is a low glycaemic-index (GI) diet for people who love their food, and is the latest offering from Michael Montignac - the godfather of GI dieting.

It combines two eating plans: one to lose weight, and the other to keep it off. The plans take inspiration from French cuisine, so the good news is that the foods that are blacklisted by calorie-counting diets - such as red wine, cheese and chocolate - are all allowed.

The method, which excludes high GI carbohydrates and saturated fats, allowed Montignac to lose 35lb in just three months.

Sample menu
The menus give two main meal options: either protein and fat, or high-fibre carbohydrate. Lunch should be the main meal of the day.

Breakfast: herbal tea; oatcakes topped with non-fat cheese; and sliced apples.

Lunch: cherry tomato and basil soup; chef salad of cheese, ham, boiled egg, tomatoes and olive oil; and a few squares of dark chocolate. Optional snack: almonds and hazelnuts.

Dinner: vegetable soup; wild mushroom ramekins with rocket; chopped apples with fromage frais.

They claim
The diet's golden rule is to eat as low on the glycaemic index as possible, in order to trigger fat loss. Most overweight people release too much insulin when they eat carbohydrates, and the stored glucose is then converted into fat.

Low GI foods stabilise the amount of insulin that is produced by the pancreas, which, in turn, improves the efficiency of your metabolism to allow you to maintain the weight loss. Montignac also believes the diet is successful because it allows you to eat the foods you love, so it is sustainable - even over Christmas.

Nutritionists say
There is now a large body of scientific evidence to support the low GI method. Claire Williamson, nutrition scientist for the British Nutrition Foundation, says there are proven advantages to following the basic principles of this diet: "Studies have shown that eating foods with a low GI can have health benefits - particularly for diabetics or people with insulin-resistant syndromes."

"It can also reduce the risk of healthy people developing diabetes and other diseases. Though it's still unclear whether this is a direct result of the GI rating, or other factors like the high fibre content, or the fact that many of these foods are also low in calories."

Williamson does warn that following a low GI diet can be quite difficult - because calculating the GI content of a meal is more complicated than it looks - but says that the long-term sustainability of the diet makes it a fairly sensible one.

Source Daily Telegraph