The Great Meal Timing Debate!
Your body is designed to be able to go long periods of time without external sources of food. Elaborate mechanisms are in place to keep your blood sugar steady, involving your brain, your hormones, your stomach and your liver.
If you find yourself cranky and irritable if you miss a meal and have been told to eat more frequent, smaller meals to avoid this, you may have been steered in the wrong direction.
Getting cranky and irritable between meals is a sign that something’s out of balance.
Simply eating more frequently takes care of the symptoms, but not the underlying imbalance.
You never retrain your body to do what it’s supposed to do when you simply avoid the behavior that highlights the imbalance.
Eating Frequent, Small Meals May be Damaging to Your Health
The idea that eating every couple of hours keeps your blood sugar levels steady without the dips (and severe hunger that accompanies those dips) has become popular. 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.
Join me and find out how eating small meals could actually be causing insulin resistance…and leading you to more belly fat.
Click here to listen in to the radio show recording.
The Myths That Keep You From Feeling Miraculous
Registration for my hot new very controversial teleseminar, and video series was unfortunately delayed due to technology gremlins, The videos have been recorded but woefully need to be re-edited so we’ve delayed the launch until February 9, 2012. This series will address the myths and surprising misconceptions around the metabolic and blood sugar issues that have people confused and chronically ill. Even if you participated in last year’s series, you’ll find something new!
I’ve been intently studying blood sugar imbalances and all the hormones and lifestyle factors involved in creating and preventing them so I can bring you the most cutting edge information.
Once the series begins on February 9, the first video will come to you immediately. Then every day or two, another video will be released until right before my myth-busting teleseminar.
http://www.ByeByeBloodSugarImbalance.com
Another Easy Instant Action Step To Bring You into Balance
How did you do with the action step I sent you last week?
Remember, the one from my “Timing is Everything” strategy?
It was about having your last meal no later than three hours before bedtime.
If you found it hard, join the club. It’s difficult for everyone, yet yields phenomenal results when combined with the other strategies.
My new teleseminar and one of the videos will explain why this is so effective.
So this week, try another super effective step for balancing blood sugar. Sprinkle cinnamon liberally on your food. You heard me right. This common, every day spice is incredibly effective at restoring sensitivity of your cells to insulin, so you no longer have rapidly fluctuating blood sugars and the between meal irritability says bye-bye.
The registration page will be here:
http://www.ByeByeBloodSugarImbalance.com
The first 500 to register on February 9 can take advantage of another helpful resource.
The Recipes That Will Bring Your Inner Miracle Worker Back to Life
I’m going to make available a Bonus Recipe Sampler from my B4 Be Gone System for the first 500 people who register for the Bye-Bye B4 Video Series.
If you’re among the first to sign up for the free series on February 9th you can enjoy a taste of my delicious low-glycemic recipes designed to help heal your insulin receptors and restore your blood sugar balance.
You can ensure you receive your notice as soon as possible by registering for the early notification list here:
http://www.ByeByeBloodSugarImbalance.com
Have an awesome week.
I look forward to connecting on the teleseminar.
Tags: B4 Be Gone, B4 Be Gone System, belly fat, blood sugar, blood sugar friendly, blood sugar imbalance, brain fog, Brain Fog and Burnout, burnout, Bye-Bye Belly Fat, Diabetes, diabetes raw food recipes, Dr. Ritamarie, Dr. Ritamarie Loscalzo, eating frequent meals, eating small meals, fatigue, insulin, insulin resistance, low sugar raw food recipes, low-glycemic raw food recipes, meal timing, prediabetes, raw food radio show, raw food recipe sampler, ritamarie loscalzo
Posted in Hormone Imbalance, Reduce Belly Fat, Vibrant Health
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
Thyroid Issues: What’s Really Leaving You Feeling Flabby, Foggy, and Fatigued!
- by Dr. Ritamarie Loscalzo
Thyroid imbalance can leave you feeling flabby, foggy, fatigued and unfocused because your thyroid gland rules your metabolic rate.
Fatigue is a huge part of thyroid imbalance… and not just general fatigue either. Did you know that your organs and glands can suffer from fatigue? Your skin and immune system can too.
When you turn down the internal metabolic furnace and burn your fuel more slowly, the inevitable result is weight gain or the inability to easily shed your extra pounds. Generally, this slow-down is accompanied by a feeling of exhaustion, but not always.
Often the “exhaustion” is at a cellular level. When your skin is tired, you get outbreaks and slow wound healing. When your digestion becomes sluggish, you may experience constipation or indigestion. A fatigued immune system can’t adequately protect you from microbes and starts to attack itself. And a worn out liver is unlikely to be efficient at eliminating toxins.
While fatigue and exhaustion can have many causes, an underactive thyroid is a very common one. And what most people don’t realize is that most hypothyroidism (about 80%) is caused by an autoimmune process. Which, incidentally, means the real cause of your fatigue and weight gain has nothing to do with your thyroid. The thyroid gland is just an innocent bystander in the war that’s raging in your immune system, for it’s your immune system that creates antibodies that attack the thyroid and make it malfuntion. So simply replacing thyroid hormon without fixing your immune system does not solve the problem.
Learn all about thyroid function, testing, and a few tips to restore balance on my video here. It’s best to identify autoimmune thyroid problems early on, before your thyroid is completely destroyed. And the best way to do that is to balance your immune system. We’ll discuss that more in the new 5-part video series Bye-Bye Belly Fat, Brainfog, and Burnout, so be sure to sign-up and follow the series!
Join the program here:
Tags: belly fat, digestion, Exhaustion, fatigue, hormones, immune system balance, thyroid
Posted in Adrenal Fatigue, Brain Fog, Chronic Fatigue, Exhaustion, Fatigue Treatment, Hormone Imbalance, Reduce Belly Fat, Vibrant Health
Explanations and Exclamations for “Belly Fat, Brain Fog, and Burnout!”
If you’ve been following our newsletter or if you subscribe to the blog, then you’ll know we’ve been focusing on helping people fight fat, fog, and fatigue. Dr. Ritamarie’s brand new 5-part FREE Video Series Bye-Bye Belly Fat, Brain Fog, and Burnout was juuuust released on Friday and it’s already receiving an overwhelming response of comments and subscribers.
To see why the buzz has been so exciting, Click HERE!
How to Fix Your Fat, Fog, and Fatigue:
While many people want to change their lifestyle, so many have struggled to find long-term success because the programs they attempt to follow fail to address the underlying conditions that created the weight gain, cloudy thinking, and energy drain in the first place. This series puts a spotlight on the biochemical individual reactions that may be occurring in your body.
Every other day or so, until the final Webinar on September 7th, 2011, a new video in the series will be released including:
- Video #1: 3 NOT-So-Sexy Hormone Imbalances
- Video #2: The Dangers that Lurk Around Your Midline: Balance Your Blood Sugar Naturally
- Video #3: Breaking Through the Fog
- Video #4: Quenching the Fire of Burnout
- Video #5: B4 it’s Too Late!
- Webinar: Mend Your Metabolism and Maximize Your Vitality!
- Including bonuses such as Breakthroughs that Balance and Foods that Flatten Your Belly, Focus your Mind, and Fight Fatigue!
Even though ONLY TWO videos have been released so far, it’s exciting to see the comments and stories that are already being shared:
Comments on Video #1: 3 NOT-So-Sexy Hormone Imbalances:
- I am so thrilled to be hearing what you are sharing about hormones, cortisol, adrenal glands, thyroid, growth hormone and brain fog/belly fat!!! The DC I am seeing recently told me the same thing you reviewed in this video and right now I’m taking natural ways to clear my liver and getting rid of cortisol thru exercise. Your explanation of eating… is something he did not mention, he didn’t go into the growth hormone aspect of it all yet, so I am thankful to have a heads-up on this so I can put this into practice also! What a blessing to learn this, and you put everything into such easy-to-understand terminology…good thing since brain fog can make things a little bit harder to absorb at times LOL! Thank you so much!!! - Stacy
- Dr Ritamarie:
Thank you for all the information. You explain things in a way that is so very easy to understand. I always learn something new when I listen to your classes. As someone who just stopped taking cortisone, what I learn in your Webinars is priceless in helping me regain fantastic health. I am looking forward to the rest of the series.
Muchas gracias, - Beatriz
You can read these and see all the comments when you sign up here and open the link to Video #1!
Video #2 was just released a few hours ago and already we’re receiving feedback.
Comments on The Dangers that Lurk Around Your Midline:
- I was very glad to receive this notice from you for these online courses. My doctor is the standard “eat less, excercise more” type, but with little guidance. I have hypothyroidism, sleep apnea, osteo-arthritis (one hip replacement), Factor V Leiden (genetic blood clotting disorder, overweight… I identify with all the symptoms; I am supposed to have the other hip replaced, but, the doctors want me to lose weight, of course to eliminate a risk factor, understandably. I haven’t felt like myself in many years… I am now 63. I have looked into “raw foods”, but don’t seem to fully get onto it… hunger wins out. BUT, I am open….. still… bring it on. – Sheryl
You can share YOUR comments when you sign up here. You’ll have instant access to both Video #1 and Video #2!
We all know some people are more ready than others for natural lifestyle changes. While excess belly fat, brain fog, and burnout may seem like superficial conditions, they can be symptoms of more serious illness. Dr. Ritamarie recently lost some close family members to conditions that could have been addressed through a better understanding of how the body works and the underlying causes of disease. This 5-part video series is her free gift of education to the world to prevent others from suffering.
We hope you’ll share it with those you know. Let’s help spread education instead of midlines!
Click HERE to watch the free 5-part series, Bye-Bye Belly Fat, Brain Fog, and Burnout!
Tags: belly fat, biochemical individuality, blood sugar, brain fog, burnout, Dr. Ritamarie, Dr. Ritamarie Loscalzo, fatigue, hormones, imbalance, insulin, natural health, nutrition, solutions, strategies, testimonials, video, weight loss
Posted in Adrenal Fatigue, Brain Fog, Health Coach, Hormone Imbalance, Immune System Support, Reduce Belly Fat, Vibrant Health
