Welcome to Running: A FEVER. My name is Michael Davis. This is a podcast about fitness, diet, and medicine. My goal is to live a long, happy, healthy, active life right up to the very end. And I want to do it by loving my life enough to make it last as long as possible.

Welcome to the 82nd in our series, “Shattering the Yoyo,” in which we look back at successful times in the past to glean some information we can use to better our health today. Today’s review is from the Diet Department.

Episode 110 was what I called a “Monday Special” back then. It is a studio-recorded episode about a particular topic, usually just a few minutes long. I was releasing two episodes a week at the time, on Wednesdays and Fridays, both recorded during exercise. The relatively rare Monday Specials were in addition to the bi-weekly ones. This one is short, as was typical, so I have included most of it in the “previously on” section of the current episode.

I wanted to play this episode for you, and here’s why. This was one of the most beneficial episodes for me to make for myself in terms of my diet health. We’ve talked about how a “no” diet is no diet. But popular diets are usually based on certain foods being off-limits and sometimes other foods being eaten in large quantities. In other words, it’s about quantity, not quality. Take the Keto diet, for example. We discussed this in a recent episode. It’s about the fat. You eat lots of fat and almost no carbs.

However, diet plans rarely talk about the qualitative aspects of food as much as the quantitative ones. We need carbs, people. And if you’re going to have them, you want to have the best carbs for your health. The glycemic index is one way to rate these foods so you can have a balanced diet and eat well at the same time.

I keep forgetting whether high is good or low is good on this scale. LOW is good. Think of it as a speedometer. The higher your speed, the faster you are going. We want the body to absorb our food slowly and steadily to avoid spikes in blood sugar.

It’s good to remember that oatmeal is a superfood. I still eat it quite often for breakfast. But I’ve found a great new product from a company called Better Oats. It is steel-cut oats that cook in 2-1/2 minutes. So you get the benefits of a low-glycemic-index food, with the convenience of the other kinds of oatmeal that can be prepared much quicker.

Keep that glycemic index in mind, and for heaven’s sake, eat your oatmeal. It’s a superfood, and it’s delicious!

I hope you’ve learned something today. I sure did. And as always, if you have the fever, keep it burning. And if you don’t, catch the fever. And I will talk to you next time on Running: A FEVER.