Why Eating Frequent, Small Meals May be Damaging to Your Health
By Dr. Ritamarie Loscalzo
A common recommendation for people suffering with blood sugar imbalances and attempting to reduce weight is to eat frequent, small meals throughout the day.
The idea is that eating every couple of hours keeps your blood sugar levels steady without the dips (and severe hunger that accompanies those dips). In theory, you’ll eat less if you never let yourself get hungry enough to overeat.
Recent hormone research tells us that this is actually the worst way to eat for blood sugar balance and weight loss and can actually be damaging to your health.
Understanding Why Frequent Eating is Faulty Advice
Hunger, satiation, and blood sugar balance are all under hormonal control. And we’re not talking about reproductive hormones like estrogen and progesterone. We’re talking about what I refer to as “the survival hormones.”
Eating between means alters powerful hormonal signals, interferes with the mechanism that burns fat as fuel, clogs liver metabolism, and sends calories right to fat stores.
Insulin is a hormone secreted by your pancreas in response to eating. It doesn’t much matter what you eat; insulin will be secreted. The composition of your meal determines just how much insulin is secreted. The more carbohydrates in the meal, the more insulin that’s required to keep your blood sugar regulated.
The most basic concept that you need to understand is that whenever insulin levels rise, fat burning stops.
The Hormone Relationship Between Insulin and Fat Burning
In order to understand why an increase in insulin levels affects your fat burning ability, let’s start by understanding what should happen with hormones in a perfectly balanced body.
- You eat, insulin levels rise, and glucose is moved into your cells to be burned for energy.
- Insulin triggers leptin levels to rise (leptin is the hormone your fat cells secrete after a meal) which signals the brain to turn off your appetite and tells your pancreas to stop making insulin.
- Glucose levels return to normal, insulin decreases, and leptin triggers fat burning.
If your blood sugar begins to drop too much, glucagon is secreted to mobilize stored calories and all is well, until your next meal.
Typically, insulin levels peak at around 30 minutes after you eat and return to normal at about 3 hours. Then leptin gets to go to work and triggers fat burning.
In the ideal situation, insulin sends 60% of the fuel in a meal to the liver for “quick access” storage as glycogen and triggers the uptake of the remaining 40% of the glucose and amino acids into muscle cells and cells of your vital organs, which use the glucose for fuel and the amino acids for growth and repair.
However, if you’re eating every 2 – 3 hours, as some experts advise, your insulin levels never go back to normal and you never go into fat burning mode.
Understanding the Process of Becoming Insulin Resistant
When you eat frequent, small meals throughout the day, insulin levels stay elevated all day, triggering fat storage and leading to insulin resistance. What this means is that your cells no longer hear the cry of insulin to allow fuel in for energy. As result, more fat storage occurs and you feel tired all the time.
If everything is functioning properly, then after a meal there is no need to eat again for 5 or 6 hours.
The hormone glucagon is in charge of keeping your blood sugar steady between meals. Glucagon signals the liver to turn the stored glycogen back into glucose as your sugar levels begin to drop between meals. It also triggers a process called “gluconeogenesis” which triggers the creation of glucose from stored protein and fat.
In a healthy person, insulin and glucagon are good siblings and take turns.
There’s enough carbohydrates stored in the liver in the form of glycogen to last 24 hours, unless you are engaging in extreme exercise like marathons or triathlons, so when things are functioning well, there are no blood sugar dips between meals.
Snacking between meals causes insulin to rise again, even before it’s returned to normal, suppresses glucagon, and raises leptin levels unnaturally, leading to a condition called leptin resistance wherein the brain and pancreas no longer hear the signal from leptin to turn off appetite and reduce insulin secretion.
Constantly elevated levels of insulin, either from snacking between meals, deliberately planning meals close together, or eating foods high in sugar and simple carbohydrates, causes hyperinsulinemia, a condition of too much insulin in your blood. This condition leads to insulin resistance as the cells can no longer take in so much sugar and “close their ears” to the insulin signal.
Insulin resistance leads to weight gain, especially around the middle, stiffening of your arteries, elevated blood pressure, systemic inflammation, and eventually to cardiovascular disease like heart attack and stroke.
The Dangers of Insulin Resistance
Once you understand how the hormones are supposed to work together, you can understand why eating frequent small meals is not just a bad idea for weight loss, it’s outright dangerous.
In addition, eating too frequently can cause your liver to get congested. Remember, ideally, the liver takes 60% of the fuel from each meal and stores it as readily available fuel. When the liver becomes insulin resistant, those calories eaten head directly for fat storage as your liver can no longer accept them without the aid of insulin. Further, eating too often clogs your liver’s fuel storage system, resulting in fatigue and impaired detoxification mechanisms.
Eating too often also triggers your liver to produce excess VLDL, the most dangerous form of cholesterol. As a result, snacking between meals causes cholesterol to rise even more than eating cholesterol rich foods.
A Chain of Collapse
This whole process, a guaranteed “chain that makes you gain,” becomes a vicious, vitality-sabotaging cycle:
- When your liver gets clogged and develops insulin resistance, it’s hard to go 5-6 hours between meals or to sleep through the night because your liver can no longer produce a steady stream of glucose – it needs to comes from outside.
- When there is insulin resistance in your liver, your liver turns calories into fat at an increased rate, leading to excess weight.
The constant high levels of insulin due to eating too frequently result in excess leptin and eventually leptin resistance, which further confuses your liver and turns down the production of glucagon, the hormone that keeps your blood sugar steady between meals by stimulating the release of stored fuel.
- To make matters even worse, the lining of your blood vessels and your nerve cells do not become insulin resistant and are subject to the stiffening effect of excess blood sugar and insulin.
- The net result is stiffening of your arteries and hardening of your nerves, leading to cardiovascular disease and mental decline.
Breaking the “Gain Chain”: Solutions to Restore Your Hormones
So, now that you understand the dangers of eating frequent, small meals and how they affect your hormone balance, what’s the solution?
Timing your meals to optimize hormones is key.
It’s important to remember that fat burning is impossible when insulin levels are elevated. It takes about 3 hours after a meal for insulin levels to return to baseline, even if you just eat a small snack.
Until then, fat burning is impossible.
If you have weight to drop, are fatigued, concerned about family history of heart disease, cancer or diabetes, make use of that critical fat burning time.
At 3 hours after a meal, do some exercise, drink some water with lemon juice and do whatever it takes to hold off the next meal for as long as you comfortably can.
It may only be 3 hours and 15 minutes to start, then 3 hours and 30 minutes, and then eventually, in 15 – 30 minute increments, you’ll be able to gradually move your meal spacing to at least 5 – 6 hours.
As you stretch the time between meals and change the foods you eat to foods that require less insulin, you’ll see the pounds melt away, your energy rise and your mental clarity improve. And maybe, even more importantly, you’ll protect yourself from the top 3 killer diseases in our modern world.
To find out more, register now for the free teleseminar recording, Dr. Ritamarie’s “Hush Hush” List of Hormones and Strategies for Busting Your Holiday Bulge.
Tags: appetite, belly fat, blood sugar, fat burning, glucose, hormones, hunger, insulin, insulin resistance, leptin, meal spacing, metabolism
Posted in Holistic Nutrition, Hormone Imbalance, Reduce Belly Fat
Leptin and Ghrelin: Two Powerful Hormones to Heat Up Your Holiday Fat Burning Furnace
Have you ever wondered what goes on behind the scenes when you get hungry?
What gives the signal that you’re full?
Have you ever eaten beyond full and felt uncomfortable?
With Thanksgiving coming up in just a couple of weeks followed by the winter holidays – Christmas, Hanukkah and New Year’s – holidays focused around food, you may have thoughts of getting out your “eatin’ pants” to avoid the painful dig and pinch of a waistline that often becomes too tight this time of year.
You’ll need those pants, unless you learn to make friends with leptin and ghrelin and the powerful effects you can have on fat burning when you understand how to make them work for you.
The Fat Burning Benefits of Ghrelin
Neither ghrelin nor leptin has a gland the way that estrogen, thyroid, cortisol, and insulin do. Ghrelin is secreted by your stomach and leptin by your fat cells.
Your stomach secretes ghrelin when it’s empty, signaling the hypothalamus to turn on your appetite. As a society, we’ve come to fear hunger and avoid it like the plague. As soon as we feel hungry, we look for ways to satisfy our desire for food.
But what if you could make friends with hunger and actually learn to enjoy the feeling?
There are benefits to prolonging eating and staying hungry for a while. You see, ghrelin is a potent stimulator of growth hormone, and growth hormone has profound effect on fat burning and building lean muscle. It is often considered an anti-aging hormone.
So the next time you get hungry, remember that the longer you hold out (within reason) the more you rev up your fat-burning furnace.
The Appetite Attacking Benefits of Leptin
Did you know it is now believed that eating many small meals actually contributes to increased fat rather than decreased?
By delaying eating and spacing your meals 5 – 6 hours apart, you profoundly affect leptin levels. Leptin is the hormone your fat cells secrete after a meal to tell your hypothalamus to turn off your appetite.
Leptin levels are optimized when you space your meals 5 – 6 hours apart, avoid snacking, stop eating within 3 hours of bedtime, avoid high carb breakfasts and instead include protein at breakfast, and avoid overeating.
“Whoa!” You might be thinking, “That sounds hard AND it flies in the face of what I’ve been taught. I thought it wasn’t a goodidea to let myself get too hungry because that’s a sure-fire trigger for overeating.”
Yes, indeed. Getting too hungry can cause you to eat everything in sight. That’s why I recommend a gradual approach, so you can retrain your conscious brain as well as your hormones.
Eating small meals may keep you from getting hungry and overeating at your next meal, but generally the results for weight loss are short lived. When you eat all day, you keep your insulin and leptin levels elevated all day. Insulin puts you into fat storing mode, which is the exact opposite of what you want.
Elevated leptin does indeed turn off your appetite, which is a good thing, but chronically elevated leptin results in leptin resistance, wherein your hypothalamus doesn’t hear the cry of leptin any more and it shifts your metabolism into starvation mode. You’re constantlyhungry and your metabolism is so low that every morsel you eat gets protectively stored away around your waist like an energy insurance policy.
In my B4 Be Gone program, I share my Snack Attack Strategy for dealing with the desire for food that creeps up on you in between meals as you move towards spacing your meals.
Part of the trick is to eat enough at each meal to hold you for 5 hours. Many of my B4 Be Gone members are finding that they can’t even finish the meals I’ve laid out for them because they get too full, so they’re not hungry again for many hours.
When retraining yourself, it’s important to start with choosing snacks that are nutrient dense and calorie and carbohydrate sparse to prevent insulin spikes.
Things like green smoothies and juices, vegetable sticks with delicious omega-3 fat-rich dips, steamed or raw vegetables, and chia seed drinks or porridges are the most helpful here.
Ghrelin and Leptin Optimization Strategy for the Holidays
To keep the extra weight from creeping in this holiday season, follow these guidelines:
- Start your day with a low to moderate carbohydrate meal that includes ample protein. You can include choices that will stabilize your glucose, insulin, and leptin levels and keep you satisfied for hours if you include more:
- green smoothies made with low-glycemic fruits like berries and green apples
- green juices
- shakes made with powdered greens and veggie protein powder for when you’re in a hurry
- chia-rich meals like shakes or porridge
- Do a 30-second burst of high intensity exercise every couple of hours to increase fat burning.
- Be prepared. Make a variety of delicious vegetable dishes and dips to satisfy the nibbles when everyone else is eating the low-nutrient, high-calorie hors d’oeuvres and hoarding away the extra pounds. If you’re looking for ideas, click here.
Learn delicious alternatives for traditional dishes. There are all sorts of great book resources for Thanksgiving and winter holiday ideas. You can also find videos and recipe guides.
- Satisfy your sweet tooth healthfully. While sweet desserts, even the healthy, gluten-free raw kind are not the best for daily consumption when you have a few extra pounds, they are welcome and delicious alternatives to traditional apple pie, pumpkin pie, cookies and truffles. All you need are some mouth-watering recipes and some guidance on how to recreate some sweet treats.
- Pace yourself. Eat slowly, give thanks for every bite and truly enjoy. Then stop when you get the signal you’ve had enough.
- Wait to be really hungry before you eat your next meal. Remember, ghrelin, the appetite stimulating hormone, is your friend. You burn more fat when you’re hungry than when you’re full. Spacing your meals allows for the normal ebb and flow of leptin so you can retrain your brain to turn off your appetite when you’ve had enough.
Above all, learn to eat with an attitude of gratitude, fully conscious of the effects the food has in your body. You are what you eat, digest, and absorb. Keep that in mind as you eat.
Do I want this to become a part of my cell structure? What you put in and on your body becomes your body, so choose wisely.
Tags: belly fat, cortisol, ghrelin, Healthy Holiday, holiday diet, hormone health, hormone imbalances, leptin
Posted in Healthy Holiday, Holistic Nutrition, Hormone Imbalance, Natural Hormone Support, Reduce Belly Fat, Sleep for Vibrant Health
How a Lack of Sufficient Sleep Makes You Fat
The subject is SLEEP: how lack of sufficient sleep disrupts your hormones, your immune system, and your ability to think clearly. The average person in our modern world gets between 5 and 6 hours of sleep each night. And that’s just not enough.
Ever wonder why you can’t diet or exercise your weight down to where you’d like it? Or, have you ever thought about why you have a spare tire around your midline, even though the scale says you’re not overweight?
Resistant weight loss and belly fat are intimately related to your hormones, and your hormone balance can be severely disrupted by chronic sleep disruption.
Did you know that your sleep habits are just as important as what you put on your fork when it comes to releasing weight? (especially the extra padding around your middle!) Research shows that shift workers are, on average, heavier than those who work day jobs! And it has to do with disruption to the hormone dance that happens while you sleep.
The hormones affected by sleep control your appetite, the growth of lean muscle and your fat, and carbohydrate metabolism.
How Insufficient Sleep Affects Your Weight:
Decreased serotonin and dopamine production, which leads to cravings for sugary foods to bring the levels back up.- Increased ghrelin (a hormone that makes you feel hungry even if your body has enough food) and decreased leptin (makes you feel full and satisfied after eating) – the result means sugar cravings and continued hunger even after you’ve eaten a full meal.
- Decreased growth hormone, leading to decreased ability to burn fat and lay down lean muscle.
- Increased cortisol, “the stress hormone” which triggers the breakdown of muscle stores, increased blood sugar, and increased insulin. This leads to the deposition of fat, mainly around your waist.
Module 3 of my new program, B4 Be Gone, is called The Hormone Dance. In it, I outline the exact steps to take to determine how much sleep you need and what to do to get your hormones in balance so you burn rather than store fat at night.
Sleep Your Way Slim
My video, The NOT-So-Sexy Hormone Imbalances That Keep You Flabby, Foggy and Fatigued goes into a lot more detail more about the hormone imbalances and offers you a couple of steps to take right away to turn your bed into a super charged fat burning monster. On that video, I bust the myth of eating small frequent meals, which plays havoc on your hormone balance.
It’s not just important for your appearance that you get a good night’s sleep. These same hormone imbalances can have long term, dangerous consequences on your heart, increase inflammation and pain put you at a higher risk for cancer.
The loss of my parents, then my sister, a couple of friends and cousins, and most recently my brother-in-law and father-in-law has made me fiercely determined to stop the madness. I know their deaths could have been prevented had they just known what to do and had a guide to take them through every step of the way.
Turning Loss into Life
I created the B4 Be Gone Program to offer just that step by step guidance that so many need. Within 30 days, most people have lost their cravings and reset much of the faulty metabolism by bringing into balance five key elements: diet, stress, exercise, sleep and TIMING.
All the sleep research has me really taking a look at my own choices. I push the envelope with sleep because I feel fine even when I don’t sleep. But that’s on the outside. I know enough to realize that what’s going on inside as a result of my lack of sleep could come back and bite me in the you-know-what. Indeed, I have noticed that I’ve been extra hungry during the day these past few sleep-deprived weeks.
I am looking forward to doing the 30-day metabolic reset with the group and committing to getting enough sleep.
It’s All About Balance.
Balance is the key. It’s not enough to just drink green smoothies or just exercise daily or just get lots of sleep. The balance among stress, sleep, exercise and diet are key.
And on top of that, Timing is EVERYTHING.
You can do all the right things, but if it’s out of sync with your bio-rhythms, your belly will stay flabby — no matter how many sit-ups you do or green drinks you drink.
If you’re feeling flabby and frustrated, my advice to you is to sleep on it and then join us in the next B4 Be Gone Journey.
Tags: belly fat, cortisol, cravings, dopamine, Exhaustion, fat, fatiuge, ghrelin, growth hormone, hormones, lack of sleep, leptin, serotonin, sleep, stress, weightloss
Posted in Chronic Fatigue, Exhaustion, Fatigue Treatment, Holistic Nutrition, Reduce Belly Fat, Sleep for Vibrant Health
Thyroid Health: Assessment and Care for Hasimoto’s Thyroiditis and Low Thyroid Function
Thyroid problems leave you feeling tired and unmotivated. Learn to assess yourself and balance your nutrition for better health. Jumpstart your energy with our free 7-day e-course!
http://www.JumpstartYourEnergy.com
Tags: autoimmune disease, Dr. Ritamarie Loscalzo, Gluten Free Diet, Hashimoto's, hypothyroid, natural health, nutrition, thyroditis, thyroid
Posted in Chronic Fatigue, Exhaustion, Holistic Nutrition, Hormone Imbalance, Natural Hormone Support, Vibrant Health
Making Friends with Hunger: How to Nourish (Not Just Fill) Your Body
- by Dr. Ritamarie Loscalzo
I am really hungry as I write this. I’m participating in The Raw Divas juice cleanse for the next 10 days and I am on day 2 now. While I love the feeling of lightness and the flatter belly that has resulted from just one day on all juice, I do need to get used to the hunger.
I’m participating in the program as both a juice cleanser and a juice mentor. I contributed 9 recipes to the menu planner, shared lots of expert advice on how the cleanse should be put together, and I have been interviewed and available for questions and answers about juicing on two calls so far.
On Monday evening’s call, Tera Warner and I discussed how important it is to make friends with hunger. Being on a juice cleanse really brings hunger to the foreground and knowing how to handle hunger in this context provides excellent preparation for making good choices in the face of hunger during your everyday life.
What is Real Hunger?
Hunger is, after all, just a sensation - a biological urge that needs to get satisfied in the proper time and place. We don’t always get to satisfy our biological urge to eliminate or have sex just as soon as they make themselves known, do we?
Instead, we live with the sensation until the proper time and place is available to us. It’s quite a laughing matter to imagine what the world would be like if we didn’t exercise restraint in the face of the urge to eliminate or procreate, isn’t it?
Learning to feel hunger and defer acting on it until the time and place are ideal, meaning that health promoting food is available, is a very valuable skill to learn. All too often I hear from people I’m coaching that they were doing great on their healthier diet until…
- They were travelling and got hungry on the road and stopped for fast food (really the ultimate fast food on the road is buying produce at the supermarket!!)
- They were visiting someone who served a meal and when they found that “just plain salad” was not filling enough, they indulged in the French fries and potato salad to “fill themselves up”.
- They were out running errands and got hungry so they grabbed whatever they could find… usually some sort of health depleting snacks.
These are just a few of the excuses you may have when you find it hard to make choices that promote your health rather than deplete it. I’m sure you can think of many more!!!
Why is it Important to Address Hunger?
Despite how you may feel at first, hunger is not an obstacle on your path to wellness. If you want to reduce your midline, clarify and focus your thoughts, and keep your blood sugar humming along at the optimal level, you just need the right strategies for overcoming the barriers. Your solutions depend on a number of factors including:
- learning to live with hunger and to appreciate it for what it is: your body’s desire to be fueled with nourishment (not filler).
- preparing in advance for meals on the run and knowing how to make quick and healthy recipes.
Did you know that blood sugar irregularity is one of the top causes of excess belly fat? Even slender people sometimes have excess fat around the middle! Contrary to popular belief, eating LESS frequently is better for your waistline than eating every couple of hours.
I’ll share some of the latest research on blood sugar, belly fat and brain fog in an free webinar on August 18, 2011. Details will be available and registration will open at the end of the week, so stay tuned. On the webinar, I’ll share a few of my top strategies for making friends with hunger and keeping your blood sugar nice and steady so you can decrease your risk for developing diabetes and heart disease, the most serious side effects of blood sugar imbalances.
I just made myself another juice and my tummy feels satisfied and my brain feels recharged. While it’s not so easy to do, juice cleansing is worth the effort. I’ve already dropped 3 pounds and it’s only the second day. The only thing that will deter me from completion is feeling like I’ve dropped too much weight or feeling that I am too weak to continue my daily tasks. Neither are likely to happen, as long as I continue to drink enough.
How to Become Friends with Hunger and Start Nourishing Your Body:
I can deal with the hunger. It’s just another sensation. While juicing, I KNOW my body is getting all the nutrition it needs, so I can learn to deter the desire to eat and chew until the cleanse is over in 8 days.
If you’re afraid of hunger, here’s a 3-step strategy you can do to help you make friends with hunger:
Tomorrow morning, instead of immediately making yourself breakfast when you get out of bed, do something else. Start by drinking a tall glass of water. - Add a few drops of essential oil to it so it seems luxurious. My favorites are peppermint, lemon, ginger, cinnamon and basil. I have fun with my water throughout the day by making it taste good.
- Often the experience you perceive as hunger is actually thirst. Drink first, wait a half hour and if still hungry, eat then.
You’ll notice the best results if, rather than being afraid of hunger, you shift your attitude and thank your hunger for its reminder to replenish your nutrient stores.
This exercise will help you to make friends with your hunger so it doesn’t control you.
You’ll be surprised at how much happier you feel when hunger is your friend.
Tags: belly fat, blood sugar, brain fog, Diabetes, heart disease, hunger, juice cleanse
Posted in Brain Fog, Cleansing Programs, Health Coach, Holistic Nutrition, Raw Foods, Reduce Belly Fat, Vibrant Health
