If you had to boil down today’s obesity epidemic to one thing, it would be this: There is too much insulin in the bloodstream. When insulin is in the bloodstream, you cannot access fat for fuel.
The job of insulin is to deliver glucose from the bloodstream to the muscles for storage as fat. This fat storage is beneficial to the body if we later use that stored fat for fuel, which is what it was designed for–yay this is your body working correctly! But when we eat foods that unnaturally increase insulin, eat large quantities of food, and eat so often that insulin is nearly always present in the blood, this prevents the body from accessing stored fat as fuel.
There are a couple other hormones that are also affected by and affect insulin–leptin and ghrelin. Ghrelin is responsible for letting us know when we are hungry and it’s produced by the stomach. Ghrelin is interesting because it can also be released by the body around the same time everyday. Do you always feel hungry about 5 minutes prior to your standard scheduled lunch break? That’s ghrelin doing its job. It also helps us to know when we are full. Unfortunately, ghrelin doesn’t measure the calories or energy brought on by the body–it predominantly works on volume. This means when we eat a 250 calorie bag of candy, it takes up very little room in the stomach and ghrelin doesn’t signal fullness. Compare that with 250 calories of green beans. The volume there would be about 8 cups of raw green beans! I’m not sure you could even eat that amount in one sitting! Part of that it the shear size of your stomach, but part is the ghrelin signaling hey stop eating!! We’re all full down here. Ghrelin can be negatively affected (read: doesn’t work right!) when there is too much insulin in the body.
Third we have leptin. Leptin is similar to ghrelin in that it lets us know we’re full. It also lets us know it’s time to move. Like ghrelin, it’s blocked by an excess of insulin. You can also develop leptin resistance, which is why many times you don’t recognize you’ve eaten enough.
Since both ghrelin and leptin depend on insulin being balanced, the key is to reduce the amount of insulin in our body. Once insulin is reduced and balanced, ghrelin and leptin will naturally follow suit. How is that done?
There are two ways to reduce insulin: 1) eating fewer carbohydrates (boo!) and 2) eating less often and in reduced quantities (yay!). No food is off limits for my clients–even carbs. But by eating what you choose less often and in reasonable quantities, you can successfully balance your insulin. Incidentally, this will naturally result in a reduction in carbohydrates coming into the body as well–as we start to eat less and have fewer second helpings. You will also notice what fuels your body best and what gives you an abundance of energy and that’s not always an abundance of simple carbohydrates. In addition, in order to eat less often, you’ll want to complement your protein and healthy fat with complex carbohydrates such as sweet potatoes, green veggies, fruits and whole grains, rather than sugary snacks.
Eating less often sounds a lot like restriction, but this is how your body was designed to process food. Eat. Stop. Eat. Give your body time for the insulin to reduce out of your bloodstream, feel a little physical hunger and then let your body learn to use the fat stored in the body as fuel before we immediately run to the kitchen at the first stomach gurgle. As you let your body feel a little physical hunger (check up on the hunger scale blog here to see how much), you will start to realize it’s not the emergency you’ve previously thought and there is no need for managing 6 small meals a day! Talk about thinking about food all day! That’s just not necessary.
Eating less often is actually food freedom. It’s not about eating whatever you want whenever you want. It’s about eating what feels amazing in your body in the quantity that feels amazing. Think about a day when you ate foods that feel good in your body, in the amounts that felt perfect. This feels like being able to get up from the table and go on a short walk, going back to your desk and feeling alert and energized, not sluggish and bloated, or being perfectly satisfied for hours at a time, and then feeling some physical hunger prior to the next meal. This also feels like going to bed not overly full, but not with major hunger pains–I like to be at a 0 on the hunger scale at bedtime, which means I don’t overeat at dinner. Balancing your hunger hormones results in days like this every day. Hunger is never an emergency. Hangry is a thing of the past. You eat what your family is eating–no special foods required. But you are totally in control of the quantity and the timing. This my friends, is what food freedom feels like.
I want you to always always take responsibility for your eating–but your hormones do play a major role in your emotional eating habits. When you get your hormones balanced, you will feel so much less compulsion to eat and your cravings will take a drastic downturn. Let’s get you on this path! Schedule a free chat with me and we can take a look at how your current eating habits are affecting those hormones.
