VB6: Eat Vegan Before 6:00 to Lose Weight and Restore Your Health . . . for Good

by Mark Bittman

To lose weight, you’ve got to not only eat fewer calories but less of the foods that are easiest to convert to glucose and stored fat. And the best way to do that is to minimize the amount of rapidly digestible excess glucose in your bloodstream. This makes sense for another reason too: Besides being stored as fat, glucose (remember: blood sugar) stimulates the pancreas to secrete the hormone insulin. Insulin regulates blood sugar levels, making sure that the blood has enough glucose to provide energy for the body’s cells. But it also helps determine how and when the body stores fat by triggering a complex chain reaction that’s designed to regulate hunger and send out satiety signals. Put simply, less glucose (that is, less sugar and fewer hyper-processed carbs) equals less insulin production, and less of both results in less storage of fat.