The Fastest Path to Thriving--Meal Timing
When any professional brings up eating, or not eating, in any specific way, you’re sure to receive opposition. The easy path is to ignore any insight and just go with your own opinion based on your own experiences. But what if you’re in a spot and not feeling well? Most people will ask their friends, some will go to their doctors or trainers or dietitians, some read books and some do nothing. Don’t do the latter, as there will always be something we can improve with our foods.
2. Meal Timing
I have two, year-long certificates from the leading nutrition coaching company in the world, 32 years of experience personal training and teaching, 10 nationally recognized certificates in exercise specialties and a master’s degree in exercise physiology. And yet, the information I’ve learned in the last 3 months has entirely upgraded the way I think about food and fitness. How can that be?
One of my dear friends, who also happens to be a dietitian, once told me that one of the reasons she loves working in that field is because nutrition is always changing. That is partially true, but I would also add that WE change. We go along doing what we do until something changes around us that forces us to change. There are very few people who just decide to take on new habits just for the sake of growing.
We change, especially our habits around food, when something stops working. Either your weight, energy, sleep, stress or maybe even a relative, goes in the wrong direction. This was part of my experience that helped me look deeper than all those years of training and experience and schooling and studying. And what I discovered was something I realized while in graduate school…everything about our metabolism, and therefore our energy, stress, hunger, cravings (you name it)…is chemistry. You may try to convince yourself that you can behavior-change your way out of whatever problem you’re in, but if you ignore the chemistry, you’ll only end up frustrated, and probably hANGRY.
There are many books written on this subject, so for the sake of time and space, here are some main headlines:
Some people need some foods more than others so this is an experiment we can all participate in willingly.
Because almost 90% of us are insulin resistance, more on that here, which leads to practically every chronic disease in some way, the most helpful goal around food should be to decrease the amount of insulin we require when we eat (low sugar, starch and seed oils), and also when we’re not eating.
All foods except fat increase insulin levels, which is normal and good. What isn’t normal are high insulin levels after we’ve eaten that don’t decrease much or take a long time to decrease, only for us to eat again and the cycle continues, leading to chronically high insulin levels in our blood. This translates to chronic inflammation that can eventually lead to disease.
Part of the problem, or maybe the solution, is that insulin resistance takes a long time to develop, so a few infrequent high carb meals don’t put us into an inflammatory state. But because there’s not a faster outcome, sometimes decades later, we think we can eat what we want. Instead we’re slowly building up yuck in our circulation and then diabetes, or worse, kicks in.
This takes us to eating foods with lower to no amounts of crappy ingredients. ALL dietary advise will agree that eating crap makes us feel like crap. So whether you believe that a lower carbohydrate style of eating is “healthier” than another, we can all agree that eating lots of chemicals, seed oils and fake syrupy sugar will not get or keep us well. It’s the processing of foods until the nutrient value is depleted that is the biggest problem, not exactly carbohydrates, especially fruits and vegetables, which will remain a constant in almost every eating plan for longevity and disease prevention.
To keep insulin lower when we aren’t eating, we would do well to extend the time between meals (yes, that means intermittent fasting is a real thing). According to a 2016 published overview of research regarding women’s health and fasting, the authors concluded, “Fasting is a non-pharmacological intervention practiced since ancient times by various medical disciplines for broad spectrum of diseases…Fasting has shown to improve reproductive, metabolic and mental health. It also prevents as well as ameliorates cancers and musculoskeletal disorders which are common in middle-aged and elderly women.”
We would even do well if we only decreased the amount of times we ate during the day from 5-6 back down to 3, which was the average for adults before obesity became such a thriving disease after 1977. This means stop the snacking.😬
Can you think of any intervention that has the history and success of fasting? Me either.
So where do we start? Like with any physical change, be sure to clear your status with your health care professional, you’re not pregnant, nursing or planning to be, or have a personal history of eating disorders.
Here are two great articles to increase your knowledge on fasting and ways to maximize the benefits of fasting.
There are many ways to begin a fasting lifestyle. Here are some great resources to begin your study. Dr. Mindy Pelz, Dr. Ben Bikman, Dr. Jason Fung and Dr. Jockers.
Anyone who has ever attempted to be healthier, including weight loss or disease prevention, by traditional fitness methods can attest that eating less and exercising more has limited success. This makes sense when we understand the enormous capacity of our physiology to adapt to change. When we address weight loss from physiology instead of only math and physics (by only counting calories), we will find more success. Will it be smooth sailing without any challenge? Of course not, but we will realize greater results by getting to the root cause of weight gain, which is primarily what hormonal pathway is signaled (again…it’s chemistry) when we eat. If insulin is high, energy is stored. If insulin stays low, energy is used and hunger is abated. That is, at the very least, a great place to start.
Up next, the final piece to living a thriving life…exercise!
