Eating Every Few Hours Keeps Your Insulin Levels Elevated Which Tells Your Body to Store Fat
This outdated nutrition advice might be keeping you stuck with an inefficient metabolism & be blocking fat burning! (Literally the opposite of what they tell you it would do).
When you eat (especially snacks), your blood sugar rises and so does your insulin. Insulin’s job is to put the sugar in the cells of the body for use or storage.
When insulin is in the blood, the message the body gets is “store fat.”
If we are eating all day, we are constantly raising our insulin levels and keeping our body in a fat STORAGE mode.
You can’t burn fat and store it at the same time so this is how snacking actually blocks your fat burning.
Hot tip: Stop snacking!
Tip for getting started with this: Have your snacks right at the end of your meal instead of a few hours later.
Note: If you can’t make it to the next meal, try adding more fat and protein to your meals. If you’re getting shaky, hangry, anxious, fatigued, dizzy, or having any other sign of a blood sugar...
Hungry Between Meals? You Probably Didn't Have Enough Fat or Protein at Your Last Meal
Yesterday I talked about the benefits of NOT SNACKING. As a refresher, it allows insulin levels to come down to reduce risk of insulin resistance, and it allows you the opportunity to burn your own body fat for fuel and become metabolically flexible.
It doesn’t happen overnight thought. So since I recommend cutting out snacks, I know many of you are gonna say, “But Dani, I get too hungry.”
The easy fix for this is eating bigger meals. And that especially means more fat and protein at each meal.
Protein is the most satiating macronutrient. And fat is like a big log in the fire . It burns low and slow unlike carbs which are more like kindling that burn hot and fast.
If your meals are carb heavy with just a little fat and protein, you won’t make it more than a few hours and certainly not 5 or 6 hours until your next meal.
If you’re used to eating small meals and can’t eat a lot at one time, make this change gradually. Also start by adding just a few more...
Signs You're a Sugar Burner or Sign You're Metabolically Flexible
Are you a sugar burner, metabolically flexible or somewhere in between??
Becoming metabolically flexible (able to burn both glucose AND fat for fuel) was the biggest game changer in my health journey.
When I had no ability to tap into stored body fat for fuel, every few hours, I had to eat or I would feel shaky, lightheaded, hangry and anxious. I had no metabolic flexibility. i intuitively snacked and grazed to prevent these feelings.
This is called reactive hypoglycemia. It goes hand in hand with #InsulinResistance.
Now I can easily skip meals, sometimes I literally forget to eat (I used to think people who said that were making it up!), and I never feel INTENSE hunger.
My energy is stable throughout the day, I stopped having acne, I lost weight, and wouldn’t you know it, I no longer have Insulin Resistance, PCOS or PMS!
Unhealthy Hunger vs Healthy Hunger
If your huger is accompanied by the symptoms on the left, your hunger is really signaling an ENERGY crisis!!
If you have metabolic flexibility, or a metabolism that can easily and efficiently burn fat for fuel, you will have access to energy all the time (stored body fat).
But, if you have insulin resistance and a damaged (sugar burning) metabolism, you will be subject to those energy crashes when the fuel from your last meal runs out.
This keeps you tethered to your purse granola bars. In other words, you’ll need to eat very often and your hunger will feel urgent and accompanied by signs of blood sugar drops/hypoglycemia.
