My author copies of The Glycemic Load Diet Cookbook are here! And they look great. They'll be in the bookstores and at Amazon at the end of the month.

So having explained the difference between the glycemic index and the glycemic load recently, let me explain The Glycemic Load Diet.

When you look at the charts of glycemic indexes, they're all over the map -- some vegetables look high, some grain products look pretty low, the whole thing is confusing. But Dr. Rob Thompson realized that when he looked at charts of glycemic loads the picture suddenly came into focus. Just a couple of food groups dominated the top of the glycemic load charts: Starches and sugary beverages. Knock the starches -- grains and anything made from them, like breads, pasta, and cereals; potatoes, rice, and sugary beverages (including juices) out of the diet, and the glycemic load plummets. Why? Because regardless of glycemic index, these foods are far and away the most concentrated source of carbohydrates in the diet.

Hence, The Glycemic Load Diet has just two simple rules, and can be summed up in five words: No Starches, No Sugary Beverages. Dr. Thompson's biggest concern has been treating diabetics, and he has found that for most of his patients, forgoing those two groups, plus twenty minutes of walking every other day, is all it takes to stabilize blood sugar, improve blood fats, and lose weight.

Will it work for everyone? No. I know of nothing that works for everyone. Will it work for a lot of people? Oh, you bet.

The Glycemic Load Diet has the tremendous advantage of being simple. No measuring, no weighing, no writing things down, no adding things up, no keeping track of a darned thing, no worrying about every single thing you put in your mouth. Just skip the starches, and don't drink anything sweet that doesn't say "sugar-free" on the label. (Another way to put it is "don't drink anything that leaves your glass sticky.") And take at least a 20 minute walk at least every other day, to improve your insulin uptake. That's it.

You may have noticed that these rules do not completely ban sugar. Can you have sugar on The Glycemic Load Diet? Yes, a bit. On The Glycemic Load Diet you don't worry much about incidental sugar -- a little in salad dressing, say, or ketchup. Furthermore, you can actually have modest quantities of sweets, so long as the sugar is not combined with starch. No cookies, cakes, donuts, pie crust, that sort of thing, because you can't have starch. But you can have a few squares of dark chocolate, or chocolate-dipped strawberries, or a dozen or so jelly beans, that sort of thing, after dinner.

Accordingly, the recipes in The Glycemic Load Diet Cookbook are not as stringently sugar-free as those in my previous cookbooks. Often I've given a choice of sweeteners -- sugar or Splenda, or often Sucanat or Splenda.

("What the heck is Sucanat?," I hear you cry. Sucanat is unrefined sugar cane juice that has been dried and ground to a coarse powder. It tastes a lot like brown sugar, though it's not sticky like brown sugar. More importantly, it contains all the vitamins and minerals that are usually removed from sugar. It's high carb -- very high carb -- but it's nutritionally superior to sugar. I still have a hard time getting myself to use or recommend sugar.)

Too, I have to warn you that it is still quite possible to rack up a high glycemic load with sugar. The fact that a few squares of chocolate are allowed does not mean that you can eat three or four candy bars a day. If you do, you're fooling yourself, but you will not fool your body, and you will derive no benefit from the diet. Got that?

Dr. Rob points out that studies indicate that sugar you taste suppresses appetite, at least in clinical studies, while sugar infused directly into the stomach, by tube, bypassing the tongue, does not. What does this have to do with it? Starch is sugar you cannot taste. Non-starchy sweets are sugars you can taste. As a result, there tends to be little limit to how much starch people can eat -- we've all gone through a whole bag of potato chips, right? People are less likely to eat unlimited quantities of sugar divorced from starch.

"But wait a minute," I hear you cry. "What do you mean starch is sugar I can't taste? I can taste potato chips! I can taste spaghetti!" Not the starchy portion of them, you can't. Your tongue has receptors for salty, bitter, sour, and sweet tastes (plus one called "umami" or savoriness -- which turns out to be related to glutamate content, and is the reason MSG makes things taste better. But that's another story.) Your tongue does not have a single taste bud for starch. When you "taste" starchy foods, you're tasting other ingredients -- salt, sugar, fat, whatever -- or, if you chew them long enough, a teeny bit of the starch that turns to sugar right in your mouth. But the starch itself? Nope, no flavor. Doubt it? Go put a pinch of plain white flour or cornstarch on your tongue. Nuthin', huh?

If you can have sugar, why no sugary beverages? Because they're the single biggest source of sugar in the American diet (and I'm betting world-wide), that's why. Cut out the soda, juices, sports drinks, sugared coffee beverages, flavored teas, etc, etc, etc, and there goes most of the sugar in your diet. And because studies show that just as sugar infused directly into the stomach doesn't reduce hunger, neither does sugar consumed in the form of beverages reduce hunger. There seems to be no limit on how much sugar-water people can swill down.

On the other hand, there's no restriction on fruit on The Glycemic Load Diet, because it's tough to eat enough whole, fresh fruit to really screw up your blood sugar. A lot of people will find the increase in fruit appealing.

Of course, like all carb-restricted diets, The Glycemic Load Diet focuses on protein and vegetables, nuts and seeds, healthy fats, and other real foods that are naturally low in carbs, and that, for the very most part, is what the recipes in The Glycemic Load Diet Cookbook consist of. Truly, if you like my other cookbooks, you'll like this one, too.

Here's a sample recipe for you, just right for the chilly autumn days coming in:

Curried Coconut Cream of Chicken Soup

6 cups chicken broth
12 ounces boneless, skinless chicken breast
3 tablespoons curry powder
2 teaspoons chicken bouillon concentrate
1/3 cup sliced almonds
1/2 tablespoon butter
1 can, 13 1/2 fluid ounces, coconut milk
guar or xanthan -- optional

Put your broth in a big saucepan over medium-high heat, and let it start warming as you dice the chicken breast. When the chicken is in cubes, and the broth is getting warm, stir the chicken into the broth. (If you just dump it in, it will sit in the bottom of the pan and congeal back into a big lump.) Stir in the curry powder and bouillon concentrate, too. Let the whole thing continue to cook while you...

Over medium heat, melt your butter in a small skillet. Add the almonds, and stir them in the butter until they're a nice golden color. Remove from the heat.

Stir the coconut milk into the soup. Let the whole thing cook another minute or two. Thicken the whole thing a bit with your guar or xanthan shaker, if you like.

Serve with the toasted almonds on top.

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5 servings, each with 394 Calories; 30g Fat (; 25g Protein; 10g Carbohydrate; 4g Dietary Fiber