What fruit is your body most shaped like? The answer may give you a clue to the kind of foods that will best support your weight loss goals. A study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association found that people with an apple shape – those who carry most of their weight around their middle – lost five times more weight on a low carbohydrate diet than those who followed a conventional low fat diet.

“One of the most interesting questions in field of obesity is why some people do well with conventional weight loss diets and others do not,” says Dr. David Ludwig, director of the Optimal Weight for Life Program at Children’s Hospital Boston. Ludwig is the study’s senior researcher and author of a new book, Ending the Food Fight.

The study included 73 obese adults between the ages of 18 and 35 who were assigned to either a conventional low fat diet or to a low-glycemic-load diet, which is one that stabilizes blood sugar after meals and is similar in nature to the Mediterranean diet. With all other factors kept equal, researchers found that dieters who secrete higher levels of insulin tend to do better on this type of eating program. 

“We found that people who secrete insulin slowly lost the same amount of weight on both diets, whereas people who secrete insulin rapidly lost almost five times more weight on the low-glycemic diet and kept all of that weight off for the 18 months of the study. Virtually all long-term weight loss studies show that dieters regain a substantial amount, if not all of the weight they’ve lost after a year,” says Ludwig. The fact that dieters in the low-glycemic group lost substantially more weight and kept it off is, therefore, quite note worthy.

The Connection Between Insulin and Weight

Ludwig says a glucose tolerance test that is able to detect the rate at which a person secretes insulin is not yet being used because more needs to be done to ensure its accuracy. “As a suitable guideline, people with a body shaped like an apple, with body fat mostly in their midsection, tend to be high insulin producers and might do better on this kind of diet.” Ludwig points out that no body type does worse with this low-glycemic- load approach, but apple-shaped people derive the greatest benefit.

Although most people understand that concentrated sugar will raise blood sugar quickly, fewer may realize that refined starchy foods, such as white bread, many potato-based products and most prepared breakfast cereals can digest in the body in just moments, causing blood sugar and insulin to skyrocket. “We know that people vary in how much insulin they produce after eating and we know that foods and diet differ in how much insulin they require our bodies to make. The combination of a low fat, high carbohydrate diet in a person with high insulin secreting tendencies seems to be particularly bad in terms of weight gain,” Ludwig says. 

Dieting Tradition

Over the past three decades, general ideas about weight loss have swung between diets that reduced fat and loaded up on carbohydrates, to those that eliminated all carbohydrates from a person’s diet and had them load up on fat. While people have had short-term weight loss with both approaches, neither approach, according to Ludwig, has proven to be successful over the long haul. Diets that restrict major food groups are simply not realistic for a life-long approach to maintaining a healthy weight.

A Measured Approach to Dieting

Ludwig proposes a low-glycemic-load diet and a balanced approach to healthy eating involving the three key factors affecting body weight: biology, behavior, and environment.  “We feel this approach is the perfect compromise. You don’t restrict any major food group. Instead, you focus on the quality of the fats and the carbohydrates. Higher quality, slower releasing carbohydrates like fruits, vegetables, beans and unprocessed grains digest slowly and keep blood sugar and hormones stable for hours after the meal.”

The same holds true with fats, according to Ludwig, who emphasizes what he refers to as high quality, healthful fats, which include olive oil, avocado, fats from fish and nuts. “We think that by focusing on the quality rather than eliminating entire classes of foods, people will support their body’s metabolism better but they’ll also be psychologically happier,” he says, pointing out that our tendency is to rebel against highly restrictive eating programs.

In addition, everybody in the study, regardless of body type, did better in terms of their HDL cholesterol and triglycerides, which are key heart disease risk factors. So, as well as an effective way to lose weight — particularly for those who carry most of their weight in their midsection — the low-glycemic-load diet can help to prevent diabetes and heart disease. 

Lisa Zamosky is an independent health care journalist who writes for consumer and professional audiences in magazines, websites and daily newspapers. She lives in Southern California with her husband and son.

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