There’s a few variations on the Montignac method that have developed over the years.
This is our interpretation – and it seems to have worked, and allows us to eat tasty, healthy food, and loose weight. With this way of eating and a combination of Slim XL (a natural dietary aid which I will write a post on in the near future) I’ve easily lost 10kg (22lbs – about 1.5 stone) with much less exercise that I previously did.
Our understanding of the concept is this.
Don’t eat high GI carbs with fats, particularly saturated ones like butter and fried meat.
You can eat fats, but try and stick to things like olive oil and fish oil, and not at the same time as eating carbs.
I.e. wait approximately 2 hours between eating high GI carbs and eating fats, don’t eat them together.
Simple!
It throws the typical British meat and two veg meal system out of the window though. And even our favourite Indian adopted meal, the curry!
A typical dish eaten by the average European, or American, and in fact, many nationalities, would consist of something like meat, potatoes/rice/pasta/bread, and some other vegetable or fruit.
The problem with that is you’re combining the high GI ‘bad’ carbs (potatoes/rice/pasta/bread) with fat; especially if your ‘meat’ portion is a battered fish, a chicken kiev or BBQ chicken (with skin), a beef burger, a creamy lamb curry etc.
And often people will follow immediately with a sugary dessert.
Eating a lean portion of oven baked chicken breast with the ‘bad’ carbs and skipping any sauces or sides of butter will be fine – high GI carbs + no fats is not an issue – at least in terms of this diet; high GI carbs may still increase your blood sugar level so diabetics be careful! However, most people will opt to eat a baked chicken with it’s skin still on, or a greasy burger, or breadcrumb – or even worse – battered fish; all of which have a high fat content. High GI carbs + fats is bad, or so the Montignac theory goes.
Similarly, a fatty chicken or fatty creamy lamb curry isn’t so bad if you skip the potatoes or rice – fat + no GI carbs is fine.
Chips are the worst – potatoes have a very high GI and you’re absolutely soaking them in fat, and a saturated one at that!
But don’t panic – you can still eat tasty food, and still fill yourself up.
Instead of having steak, potatoes and tomatoes, why not have steak, a poached egg and tomatoes?
You’ve replaced the high GI offender with an egg, which is just fat and proteins.
And the egg should fill you up just as much as a few potatoes. Tomatoes have some carbs, but they have a low GI value.
Throughout this, I’ve neglected to mention proteins.
Let’s bring these fellas into the discussion.
For the sake of our argument and this method, let’s say that food basically consists of carbs, fats and/or proteins.
Protein performs many roles in the human body, including muscle repair and growth. Human hair is essentially used up protein.
The important factor here though is that protein fills you up.
That’s a very important factor when choosing any diet. If you feel hungry, you’re likely to snack, usually on whatever food you can get your hands on at the time – which tends not to be healthy food. Montignac was aware of this and is happy for you to eat between meals, as long as you’re still following the rules.
Getting plenty of protein in your day will fill you up for longer. If you’re full up for longer, you’re going to eat less in the day, which ultimately is going to help with weight loss.
Foods with high protein content include nuts, legumes (beans, lentils etc), fish, or one of my favourites, eggs.
But aren’t eggs bad for you??
There’s been many debates about eggs and cholesterol levels, but the evidence seems to show that eggs do not cause high cholesterol levels. The old rule of 3 eggs a week is out the window. 3 eggs a day is perfectly fine. There are plenty of athletes and body builders who eat several eggs every day and do not have any cholesterol issues.
Ok, fried eggs aren’t so good, as eggs contain a fair bit of fat anyway, and frying them in something like vegetable oil is a big no no. Poach your egg. Too fiddly? Ok, boil it. Scrambled eggs are great, especially with a dash of salt (not too much mind!) and black pepper.
If you eat 3 (non-fried) eggs a day and you’re not taking in significant fat elsewhere in the day then you’re eating a reasonable amount of fat (more on this later – don’t eat JUST fat!!).
What about calories?
Ok, this diet doesn’t really consider calories. It’s more concerned about your carb, fat and protein intake, and more importantly, the combinations in which they are eaten. But bear this in mind: the same amount of fat has more than twice as much calories as protein and carbs:
1 gram of protein or carbs – 4kcal
1 gram of fat – 9 kcal
I.e. if you’re trying to keep your calories down, keep the fats down!
Back to the allowed combinations. To summarise, possible options are:
High GI carbs + fat = bad
Low GI carbs + fat = ok
High GI carbs on their own = ok
Fats on their own = ok
(assuming you are eating the High GI carbs and fats separately with a gap of approximately 2 hours)
You can add proteins in to any of these, it doesn’t change the results:
High GI carbs + fat + protein = bad
Low GI carbs + fat + protein = ok
High GI carbs + protein = ok
Fat + protein = ok
The proteins will fill you up longer though – so try and get these in there to keep you full and happy, and ultimately you will eat less. In this case, less is definitely more!
Don’t forgot my rule: Everything in moderation. You can still treat yourself from time to time. Still fancy that sugary dessert? It’s not bad every now and then… but try and wait an hour or two after the main course. You may even find you not hungry later anyway.
You should also consider how much of each food group you are eating in a day. This will not only affect your weight loss, but other factors, such as heart health – you don’t want to be eating too much fat. Just because fat on it’s own without the high GI carbs is classed as ‘ok’ in the sense of this diet, it’s not ok to just eat fat all day long!
For someone of my age and height (36, 5ft 10in/178cm), you should eat around 50g of fat, 100-150g of carbs (the less the better to loose weight) and aim for around 100-150g of protein – if you only managed 50g of proteins thats fine but try and eat more to fill you up longer (note that these are just guidelines and not ‘hard and fast’ rules).
Hang on.
This sounds like a lot of effort!
How do I work all this out?
How do I know if a food has a high or low GI value? How do I add up how much fat, protein, and carbs I’m eating in a day?
Don’t worry (‘be happy… dunka dunka’ to loosely quote Bob Marley).
It’s up to you how much effort you put in.
You can browse the web to find GI values and create a spreadsheet to work out what the best replacement low GI carbs or proteins are for you, and colour code it to work out ideal combinations. That’s what I did. Yes, it was a lot of effort at first, but it was worth it, and now I just ‘know’ what are good and bad combos.
Once you start doing something regularly, it becauses automatic, a habit. There’s a great book on this, The Power of Habit (will add a link in a bit) , which also covers willpower – I will probably write another post about this later.
Or you can just reduce the high carb GIs in your meals. Get rid of the spuds. Swap the egg fried rice for a low GI long grain basmati or brown rice; replace with more meat/fish or a protein replacement if you’re not being filled up enough.
Or reduce the fat you’re eating with those carbs – you can still have a jacket potato, but replace the butter for baked beans (watch out for the high sugar or salt content though in most tinned baked beans, you can buy reduced salt/sugar versions). Don’t put butter (or even marge – see my post Fats: Butter vs Marge) on your sandwich; do you really need it? A few slices of cucumber or tomato is usually enough to moisten the bread. Skip the mayonnaise: yoghurt is a healthier alternative.
Or you can look at a few of the meals I will suggest in future posts.
Or you could buy Montignac’s excellent book (well, 15 million people bought it so it can’t be bad!) Eat Yourself Slim: The World’s BEST Method 
full of delicious but healthy French and Mediterranean recipes.
I’m also planning (possibly, in the future) to create an online calculator which will allow you to enter a days worth of the food you ate, which will then highlight the bad points and suggest an alternative. It’s just an idea at the moment and I would need to look into the technical difficulties and costs, I may need to charge a small fee to cover this… who would be interested?
I just want to point out again that I am not a nutritionist, a dietician or a doctor. I’m a computer scientist! So this is just my take on things… but it’s worked well for me and my girlfriend. When dieting you should always seek professional help if in doubt.
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