Meal Timing For Weight Loss & Reducing Insulin Resistance
Are you having trouble with weight gain or insulin resistance? Consider this: when you eat a meal or snack or drink a caloric beverage, it has effects on your metabolism and determines how your body uses OR stores nutrients. So basically, if you’re a “grazer”, you’re always in digest-and-store mode and you have higher chances of storing what you eat as fat (depending on quantity and quality). You also have higher chances of excess insulin in your bloodstream which could lead to resistance. Soooooo…..if you want to take your weight loss to the next level or you want to reverse blood glucose issues you have, you’re going to want to read the follow. Let’s break this down:
Let’s first talk about what happens in the “fed state” vs the “fasted state”
FED STATE:
This is just after you’ve eaten food or a had a drink with calories. Your body senses that you’ve eaten and so it releases hormones to help with digestion. Insulin is a hormone and is released in order to help store glucose in cells to be later used for energy. When you have too much glucose in the bloodstream (which comes from a high carb diet & insulin resistance) plus depending on your genetic pre-disposition to glucose metabolism plus the state of your health - you might be prone to storing a lot of fat, easily ☹️. Excess glucose that can’t go in to cells floats around the bloodstream and causes high blood sugar levels, inflammation, elevated cholesterol levels, fat storage, etc.
If we hang out in the fed state all day long, meaning <4-ish hour breaks between meals, then we’re constantly releasing insulin and building fat. FYI, the fed state isn’t bad or anything, it’s just not good to constantly be in it!
FASTED STATE:
This officially begins about 2 hours after a meal and you are no longer eating or drinking anything with calories. Insulin levels decrease as blood glucose levels decrease. Your body will turn to alternative fuels to burn, one of them is fat, YAY! In an extended fast your body will break down fat into fatty acids, then your liver will take those fatty acids and turn them in to ketones which is used for fuel. Even though you eat food while being in ketosis, it’s sort of a “fake out” to your body - like it thinks you’re fasting - and you still burn fat for fuel since there’s no glucose.
Understanding the above information helps us understand that grazing all day and night, even if within your calorie and macro limits, causes a constant release of insulin which supports weight gain and in the long term, insulin resistance.
Lesson: It’s important to go periods of time without eating to give your body a break from digesting so it can detox and lean down.
If you’re not able to go more than a few hours between meals, for any number of reasons, you need to look at the previous meal you had and consider that maybe these are possible factors:
You didn’t consume enough protein
You didn’t consume enough fat
You didn’t consume enough calories
Maybe you’re not in ketosis
Tracking every single thing you eat accurately can help you understand what you need to change! If you’re doing the ketogenic diet but you’re not sure if you’re doing it right, you definitely need to download my free keto diet instructions now! CLICK HERE. They’ll tell you how to set your macros up right, and that’s step one to making sure you’re not over- or under-eating.
Meal timing options to promote weight loss and increasing insulin sensitivity
I love the way Dr. Cate Shanahan talks about meal timing by saying that it’s so important, it’s like “it’s a 4th macronutrient”. What she means enforces what was written above; if you’re eating all day long you don’t give your body a chance to do any housekeeping like it wants and needs to do! Again, if you feel badly going without food, you need to find a functional or integrative health care professional that can help you get to the root cause of what might be a bigger issue.
If you want to get started on fasting, the handout I’m offering can be downloaded below for free. It will give you 3 easy options for what fasting can look like, including what you can drink during a fast. If you have any questions about any of this, please reach out to me at lisamislevyrd@yahoo.com. -♥️ Lisa