Read Online It Starts With Food: Discover the Whole30 and Change Your Life in Unexpected Ways by Melissa Hartwig, Dallas Hartwig - Free Book Online Page B
Authors: Melissa Hartwig, Dallas Hartwig
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lunch. You enjoy a hearty salad (mixed greens, roasted beets, sliced apples, grilled chicken breast, and walnuts) with an olive oil and balsamic dressing. Though you have only 30 minutes for lunch, you relax and enjoy your meal. The digestive and hormonal response to lunch is similar to that of breakfast—a modest, gradual rise in blood sugar, modest insulin response, and a gradual decline in blood sugar over the next few hours. Glucagon continues to allow you to tap into your glycogen and fat stores to keep you on an even keel.
As your afternoon progresses, things start to get crazy at work, and it suddenly looks like this is going to be a long day.
By 5 p.m., your blood sugar has dipped a little too low, which signals cortisol to use glucagon to release some stored energy, keeping blood sugar and energy levels pretty constant. Because you can use dietary fats (and body fat) as primary fuel and your insulin levels aren’t elevated, you are able to access your fat stores to keep your energy up.
You finally arrive home at 6:30. You’re hungry, but not cranky, light-headed, or lethargic. You dig into the stew (grass-fed beef with chunks of carrot, onion, and tomato) that’s been in your slow cooker all day. This nutritious meal triggers the secretion of satiety hormones like leptin and insulin, leaving you full and satisfied after dinner. The moderate insulin response, as well as a glucagon response stimulated by the protein from the beef, ensure stable energy levels over the coming hours.
By 7:30, your cortisol levels are quite low (even though they were temporarily elevated earlier because of your stressful afternoon). Multiple satiety hormones (including leptin) are elevated, which help you remain satisfied after dinner.
At 8, you prepare your lunch for the next day, grab a good book and a cup of herbal tea and start to wind down before you head to bed around 9:30. You fall asleep quickly and sleep well through the night, facilitated by appropriately low cortisol and stable blood sugar levels.
_________________
Does this experience sound like your typical day?
Most likely not, we suspect.
Let’s examine a more common scenario. It starts with the same early morning, but that morning is very different from the one we just described.
NOT SO HEALTHY HORMONES: A BAD DAY
At this point, thanks largely to your eating habits, you’re a few pounds overweight, leptin resistant and somewhat insulin resistant, and your lifestyle and eating habits have disrupted your normal cortisol levels and daily rhythm.
Your alarm goes off at 7 a.m., and again at 7:09, and 7:18, at which point you head straight to the kitchen, ready for that first cup of coffee. Your cortisol levels are abnormally low in the morning (a dysfunctional situation created by an overly stressful life and worsened by unhealthy eating habits), which means you’re not feeling very bright or perky. You grab a low-fat blueberry muffin, a banana, and some orange juice on your way out the door, and stop at your favorite coffee shop for a large soy latte.
Since your breakfast is almost exclusively fast-digesting carbohydrate (and sugar!), it quickly raises your blood sugar and insulin, aggressively driving energy into your liver and muscles. The high levels of blood sugar give you a kick-start, but by 10 a.m. lots of insulin has pulled too much sugar out of your bloodstream—which means you’re now experiencing the crash that often follows a sugar spike when you’re insulin resistant. This stressful blood sugar crash prompts a cortisol response, which uses glucagon to get your blood sugar back to normal. Glucagon breaks down liver glycogen and increases blood sugar, but since you’re metabolically overreliant on glucose for energy, you can’t use fat efficiently for fuel.
Your brain translates these events as, “Need energy now!”—so you have another cup of coffee, plus half a bagel with peanut butter. Since you’re generally sedentary, your liver and
As your afternoon progresses, things start to get crazy at work, and it suddenly looks like this is going to be a long day.
By 5 p.m., your blood sugar has dipped a little too low, which signals cortisol to use glucagon to release some stored energy, keeping blood sugar and energy levels pretty constant. Because you can use dietary fats (and body fat) as primary fuel and your insulin levels aren’t elevated, you are able to access your fat stores to keep your energy up.
You finally arrive home at 6:30. You’re hungry, but not cranky, light-headed, or lethargic. You dig into the stew (grass-fed beef with chunks of carrot, onion, and tomato) that’s been in your slow cooker all day. This nutritious meal triggers the secretion of satiety hormones like leptin and insulin, leaving you full and satisfied after dinner. The moderate insulin response, as well as a glucagon response stimulated by the protein from the beef, ensure stable energy levels over the coming hours.
By 7:30, your cortisol levels are quite low (even though they were temporarily elevated earlier because of your stressful afternoon). Multiple satiety hormones (including leptin) are elevated, which help you remain satisfied after dinner.
At 8, you prepare your lunch for the next day, grab a good book and a cup of herbal tea and start to wind down before you head to bed around 9:30. You fall asleep quickly and sleep well through the night, facilitated by appropriately low cortisol and stable blood sugar levels.
_________________
Does this experience sound like your typical day?
Most likely not, we suspect.
Let’s examine a more common scenario. It starts with the same early morning, but that morning is very different from the one we just described.
NOT SO HEALTHY HORMONES: A BAD DAY
At this point, thanks largely to your eating habits, you’re a few pounds overweight, leptin resistant and somewhat insulin resistant, and your lifestyle and eating habits have disrupted your normal cortisol levels and daily rhythm.
Your alarm goes off at 7 a.m., and again at 7:09, and 7:18, at which point you head straight to the kitchen, ready for that first cup of coffee. Your cortisol levels are abnormally low in the morning (a dysfunctional situation created by an overly stressful life and worsened by unhealthy eating habits), which means you’re not feeling very bright or perky. You grab a low-fat blueberry muffin, a banana, and some orange juice on your way out the door, and stop at your favorite coffee shop for a large soy latte.
Since your breakfast is almost exclusively fast-digesting carbohydrate (and sugar!), it quickly raises your blood sugar and insulin, aggressively driving energy into your liver and muscles. The high levels of blood sugar give you a kick-start, but by 10 a.m. lots of insulin has pulled too much sugar out of your bloodstream—which means you’re now experiencing the crash that often follows a sugar spike when you’re insulin resistant. This stressful blood sugar crash prompts a cortisol response, which uses glucagon to get your blood sugar back to normal. Glucagon breaks down liver glycogen and increases blood sugar, but since you’re metabolically overreliant on glucose for energy, you can’t use fat efficiently for fuel.
Your brain translates these events as, “Need energy now!”—so you have another cup of coffee, plus half a bagel with peanut butter. Since you’re generally sedentary, your liver and
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