Metabolic Habit #1

June, 2009

by Morella Devost

So many of my clients have come to me with this painful frustration - the weight that won't budge. It's incredibly discouraging when after many efforts, diets, books, programs, support groups... nothing seems to work, or it works only for so long. Then they plateau, or worse, they gain it all back at lightning speed.

There are many unfortunate messages that essentially imply that people are lazy, dense, lack willpower or, because of their "genetics," they're doomed to feel uncomfortable in their bodies.

These are some of the misconceptions and over-simplifications that I seek to dispel for them:

"Eat less, exercise more." There is more to losing weight than simply volume of food and exercise. Many people can have hormone imbalances that make weight-loss difficult, so it's frustrating when they're told they "simply have to exercise more".
"Calories in, calories out:" There is a WHOLE lot more to food than just calories. What you eat is very complex chemistry. The right foods will create ideal chemistry for hormone balance and retrain your body on how to lose weight. Reducing foods to a simple calorie-count completely ignores the importance of different nutrients and the fact that different foods generate a different reaction in your body.
"Eat a little bit of everything, but everything in moderation." If we ate real food, that could be true, but we have gotten very far from eating real food. Most of what people eat nowadays is over-processed non-food.
Accelerating your metabolism is a good thing. Think of your metabolism as the engine of your body. The faster your metabolism burns, the more waste it produces and the quicker it can burn out. You want to run it at the right speed, not too slow, not too fast.

When working with clients in my metabolic optimization program, I start them off by teaching them about six key habits to optimize their metabolism and create long-lasting metabolic health. Over the course of the next six newsletters, we'll be discussing each one of these habits.

Habit #1: Never eat late at night or within three hours of going to bed.

You've probably heard this before or something similar to it. There are several key reasons why this is an important metabolic habit to learn, and they show that eating late is likely to create problems for you in the long run.

Reason #1: your metabolic engine doesn't need that much fuel to keep running while you're sleeping. What you eat late at night is more likely to go into storage as fat than other large meals during the day.
Reason #2: your body thrives on a fasting state at night. If you eat a light dinner at least 3 hours before bed time, you will be going to sleep with the entire meal digested and most of the energy from it (calories) burned. This is important for two reasons:

Your body will be able to spend the night repairing functions instead of digesting.
Your body will naturally switch to burn fat when it runs out of fuel. When you consistently eat late at night, your body often won't need to burn fat for fuel and slowly becomes unaccustomed to switching to fat-burning mode.

Reason #3: your prime fat-burning window begins in the middle of the night, around 4:00am. If you eat late at night you may entirely close this window because before your body has the need to use fat for fuel, you get up and eat breakfast. (Note: skipping breakfast is not the solution either. We'll discuss this in the next newsletter.)

So your first assignment is to work on eating lighter meals at night, ideally no later than 7:00pm. It can be difficult with work schedules and everything that keeps you busy, but if that's the case, explore how you can make your dinners lighter.

We're always happy to support you if you need more help. Check out our programs and definitely stay tuned for Habit #2 in our next newsletter.