Hypoglycemia and the Myth of Eating Frequent Small Meals
In a previous newsletter and blog post, I wrote an article about the dangers of eating frequent small meals. You can read it here.
Most people believe they need to eat frequently to avoid hypoglycemia. In fact, eating small, frequent meals has never been proven to accelerate weight loss despite what many epxerts claim. In fact, there are many more studies that suggest that less frequent eating promotes more rapid weight reduction.
And further, most people who claim they are hypoglycemic (and attribute feeling uncomfortable if they skip meals) really don’t experience true hypoglycemia. Many of the people I’ve worked with have discovered that their blood sugar is actually up when they experience the out of balance feelings they were misled into believing were symptoms of low blood sugar.
Many people do experience what’s known as “reactive hypoglycemia”, where their blood sugar plummets after being high (triggering too much insulin secretion) then going too low because of the over clearance of sugar from the blood due to high levels of insulin.
Why It’s Best to Space Your Meals 5 – 6 Hours Apart
The first three hours after you eat, your body produces a hormone called insulin. Insulin’s job is to clear the sugar from your blood and pass it on to your muscles and liver so they can do their job.
About an hour after eating, if your insulin level and blood sugar levels are starting to come down as they should, then growth hormone is released. Growth hormone, in the early post-meal stages, triggers the build up of muscle protein, which is enhanced by the presence of insulin.
When insulin is activated, and when your body is functioning normally, your liver and muscles take on as much glycogen (your body’s storage form of sugar) as possible.
While Insulin is Active in Your Bloodstream, Fat Burning is Not Possible
About three hours after you eat a meal, your insulin level should be back down to where it was before your meal, and your liver begins to kick into high gear, mobilizing glycogen into blood sugar.
At that point you begin to burn fats that are in you blood for energy, thus putting to good use fats that would otherwise go into storage as unwanted fat!
More than four hours after eating, growth hormone begins to mobilize fat for fuel. However, this use of fat for fuel only happens when insulin levels are very low.
Why Snacking Between Meals is Self-Sabotage
The period in between meals should be an opportunity for your liver to exercise and clear out glycogen.
If you snack between meals or eat a meal too soon after the previous one, your liver’s exercise routine is blocked, thus setting you up for obesity, insulin resistance, and diabetes. When your liver doesn’t get enough exercise, it can synthesize excessive cholesterol, leading to elevated blood lipids even if the food you eat contains no cholesterol.
If your muscles are well toned, they will use up fat between meals much faster than untrained muscles. In fact, muscle tone can provide you the energy that you need to keep going all day long.
When you eat too soon after a previous meal, insulin levels rise too soon, turning off your liver’s exercise routine, inhibiting fat burning, and causing calories to be stored rather than burned. Plus, your energy will plummet and you may suffer from food cravings.
If you consistently eat meals too close together, you’ll cause your pancreas to fatigue, your insulin receptors to become resistant, and you’ll struggle with your weight.
If You’re Hungry Between Meals
Feeling weak or hungry sooner than 5 – 6 hours after eating a meal can be due to:
Not eating enough at the previous meal- Eating too many carbohydrates at the previous meal
- Impaired digestion and absorption
- Being out of shape
- Weak adrenals
- A sluggish and congested liver
- Exhaustion
- Diabetes
- Insulin resistance
- Leptin resistance
As you can see the biochemistry supports eating meals more frequently rather than less frequently. The ideal meal spacing gap appears to be 5 – 6 hours between meals with a 12-hour period between your evening meal and morning breakfast.
Support from Experts
According to Dr. Dennis Clark, author of The Belly Fat Book, “The recommendation of eating six small meals per day, to keep the furnace burning hot, has become dogma in some circles. However, the common advice for frequent meals to keep the body’s furnace burning hot makes no sense physiologically or biochemically.”
In the book Eat Stop Eat, Brad Pilon quotes Dr. Tim Crowe, nutrition specialist at Deakin University in Melbourne, as saying that the six meal per day diet is a “faddish dieting trend, with very little research in support of it.” Crowe notes that some research suggests that playing around with when you eat may actually cause you to put weight on.
According to Pilon, 56 percent of adults eat between two to four times a day, while 37 percent eat five to seven times daily.
The “three meals per day” eating pattern becomes more critical for keeping a low body fat percentage as you age and your metabolism slows down. This slow-down can be partly corrected by regular strenuous exercise.
What To Do if You Have Hypoglycemia
If you think you can’t space your meals because you have hypoglycemia, think again.
Get a blood glucose meter and check your blood sugar between meals.
When hunger comes on too soon, stave it off with water flavored with essential oils or lemonade made with water, lemons, and a pinch of stevia if desired.
Make friends with hunger. It can be your friend.
Hunger indicates that your body is in fat burning mode. If you learn to tolerate a little hunger and gradually increase the space between meals, you’ll be rewarded by weight reduction, hormone balance, and improved blood lipids.
Give it a try. I have had patients who only did the meal spacing when we first started working together and began to release pounds that had, up until then, been stuck for a long time.
When it comes to meal spacing and what’s best, which do you want to believe? Modern day dogma or the science of how your body works?
Comment Below:
How long do you leave between meals?
References
- Bellisle F, et al. Meal Frequency and energy balance. British Journal of Nutrition. 1997; 77:(Suppl. 1) s57-s70.
- Byron, J. Richards, CCN. Mastering Leptin.
- Clark, Dr. Dennis. PhD. Belly Fat Book: 5 Steps to a Slimmer and Healthier You.
- Halberg N, et al. Effect of intermittent fasting and refeeding on insulin action in healthy men. Journal of Applied Physiology 2005; 99:2128-2136.
- Heilbronn LK, et al. Alternate-day fasting in non-obese subjects: effects on body weight, body composition, and energy metabolism. American Journal of Clinical Nutrition. 2005; 81:69-73.
- Moller N, Jorgensen JO. Effects of growth hormone on glucose, lipid and protein metabolism in human subjects. Endocrine Reviews. 2009; 30:152-177.
- Pilon, Brad, MS. Eat, Stop, Eat.
- Verboeket-Van De Venne WPHG, et al. Effect of the pattern of food intake on human energy metabolism. British Journal of Nutrition. 1993; 70:103-115.
- Vogels N, Westerterp-Plantenga MS. Successful Long-term weight Maintenance: A 2-year follow up. Obesity: 15 (5); 2007 1258-1266.
Tags: blood sugar, blood sugar imbalance, Dr. Ritamarie Loscalzo, eating small meals, fat burning, glucose, hunger, hypoglycemia, insulin, meal spacing
Posted in Hormone Imbalance, Insulin Resistance, Natural Hormone Support, Reduce Belly Fat
Hormone Balance and Appetite, Metabolism and Blood Sugar Regulation
When I say hormone balance, you, like most people , probably start thinking about menopause, PMS, loss of libido and other female issues. Yet there is so much more, and often these “female hormone” imbalances are caused by imbalances in what I call the “survival hormones”.
I never really thought of myself as a hormone specialist because I don’t concentrate on female issues. Sure I see my fair share of menopausal women and help them balance their hormones.
I specialize in helping people restore their energy, overcome fatigue and thyroid imbalance get their blood sugars in balance. And, because of my own personal success with cleansing and detoxification, I am really successful with using detoxification with all my patients and clients.
Then one day, it hit me. I do specialize in balancing hormones.
Only it’s not limited to the sex hormones.
Making Friends with your Survival Hormones
When I’m working with someone who is fat, foggy and fatigued and has symptoms of female hormone imbalance, I often start with what I have come to term the”survival” hormones. They are the hormones that are vital to our day to day functions and have daily rhythms. Not to say I don’t deal with the sex hormones, which tend to have a monthly cycle. Those are vital too. And they are intimately related to the day to day hormones.
I’ve observed that there’s a huge misconception when it comes to hormones – what they are and what they do. And there’s especially a lot of confusion about how to bring them into balance.
SO I have planned a series of articles to educate you about your hormones and empower you to nurture them and love them into balance.
In each article you’ll get a “Hormone 101″ look at the hormone of the week – its function, what can go wrong, how to test it and a few tips on how to bring it into balance.
The how to bring it into balance part is a lot more complex than I can can cover fully in a short blog post, so I’ll point you in the direction of where you can find out more – a book, a recording, an in-depth article or a coaching program.
Hormones in this series
- insulin – blood sugar balance
- adrenaline – quick burst of energy in fight/flight situations
- cortisol- sustained support of fight/flight situations
- DHEA- growth and repair, immune system support and recovery from illness
- pregnenalone – precursor for all other steroid hormones
- thyroid – metabolic rate
- leptin – appetite and fat burning
- ghrellin – appetite
- growth hormone – stimulates fat burning and lean muscle growth, repair
- melatonin – promotes deep sleep
- progesterone – promotes growth of uterine lining in reparation for pregnancy, inhibits tumor growth
- testosterone – promotes male features – muscle strength, facial and body hair
- estrogen – promotes female features, supports ovulation and regulation of female cycle
These are just one liners on the function of each hormone. They are oversimplifications and generalizations. just to give you a idea of how they work together.
My goal is not to turn you an endocrinologist but to put you in charge of your own body so you understand how your day to day choices effect how you feel and how your hormones dance with each other.
A few highlights on what this series will cover:
- How when you’re stressed, your adrenals secrete the hormone cortisol goes up and DHEA goes down, leading to increased insulin production and fat accumulation around your waist
- how very low calorie diets inhibit the enzyme that converts the thyroid hormone T4 to the active form, T3, thus decreasing your metabolism and causing you to gain weight rather than lose it.
- As men age, the hormone testosterone decreases and more of their testosterone gets converted to estrogen, which naturally slows fat burning ,
- How estrogen slows fat burning and increases fat storage as a part of facilitating fat storage in preparation for fertility, birth and lactation.
- how high levels of insulin, released when you eat sugar and many high carbohydrate foods, suppresses growth hormone and leads to increased fat storage.
- How eating close to bedtime suppresses your natural growth hormone surge at night, leading to increased fat storage.
There are lots more gems to be shared, including information about leptin and ghrellin, gluten intolerance and autoimmune diseases and their effect on your hormones
Please Post a Comment Below and let me know what hormones you’d most like to learn about.
Love, Health and Joy,
Dr. Ritamarie
Tags: achieving your ideal weight, DrRitamarie, gluten intolerance, growth hormone, hormone balance, hormone cortisol, immune system, insulin production, leptin, testosterone levels, thyroid hormone, ways to lose weight, weight management
Posted in Adrenal Fatigue, Gluten Free Diet, Hormone Imbalance, Insulin Resistance
5 Cutting Edge Strategies to Balance Your Blood Sugar So You Can Melt Your Midline, Sharpen Your Focus, and Recharge Your Energy!
Do you find yourself wishing you could hit the snooze button instead of jumping out of bed feeling refreshed each morning?
Do you crave sugar, caffeine, or a NAP around 3 – 4 pm?
Have you been carrying around excess fat around your middle that won’t budge in spite of starving yourself and slaving away at the gym?
Whether you’re a busy professional or a professional mom, you need to stay focused and organized all day long and still have enough energy to say yes to enticing social events rather than falling into a heap because you can hardly keep your eyes open after working all day.
Watch this video to get the secret to more energy!
Register here!
Tags: 5 Cutting Edge Strategies, B4 Be Gone, B4 Be Gone System, Balance Your Blood Sugar, belly fat, blood sugar, blood sugar friendly, blood sugar imbalance, brain fog, Brain Fog and Burnout, burnout, Bye Bye Video Series, Bye-Bye B4, Bye-Bye Belly Fat, Bye-Bye Belly Fat Brain Fog and Burnout, Diabetes, diabetes raw food recipes, Dr. Ritamarie, Dr. Ritamarie Loscalzo, energy recharge, fatigue, insulin, insulin resistance, lose weight, low sugar raw food recipes, low-glycemic raw food recipes, meal timing, Melt Your Midline, mental clarity, prediabetes, raw food recipe sampler, Recharge Your Energy, ritamarie loscalzo, Sharpen Your Focus, weight loss
Posted in Brain Fog, Chronic Fatigue, Cleansing Programs, Exhaustion, Fatigue Treatment, Hormone Imbalance, Immune System Support, Reduce Belly Fat
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
