It might sound counterintuitive, but when you’re battling insulin resistance, you don’t want to aim to eat like a bird, you want to eat like a horse. Go BIG.
You’re nibbling all day long, desperate to keep your sugar levels stable…. Being insulin resistant, you’re prone to sugar highs and lows …
- The lows leave you feeling flat as a pancake, craving sugar and somewhat aggressive,
- The highs, on the other hand, pose a serious health risk, by making you vulnerable to cardiovascular disease.
Your nibbling strategy does keep small quantities of sugar trickling into your system, throughout the day, but it probably isn’t the best solution. Researchers from the Institute for Clinical & Experimental Medicine in Prague, have discovered diabetics, battling insulin resistance would be better served, by nixing the nibbling.
Dieting options
Anyone who has ever gone on diet, knows when you cut calories you WILL lose weight. The hard part is keeping it off. So when the Prague team put 54 overweight type 2 diabetics on a calorie restricted diet, for 24 weeks, they wanted to find ways to keep the dieting programme interesting. One of the strategies they used, was to mix and match meal frequency.
Nibbles or feasts
The same number of calories, composed of the same ratio of macronutrients , were served up each day. But, the approach to serving the calories varied.
- The traditional “nibbling” approach, required the dieters to eat six small meals throughout the day.
- The feasting approach, restricted the dieters to just two BIG meals a day. A breakfast meal, which was eaten between, 6 and 10 am, and a lunch meal, which was eaten between 12 and 4 pm.
Half of the patients nibbled their way through the first 12 weeks of the programme, while half ate just two meals a day. At the end of the 12 weeks, the groups switched.
Nixing the nibbling
As expected, the calorie cutting left everyone a little skinnier. And draining the fat cells, left all the participants a littler healthier too. But, the two approaches were not equally helpful. When the dieters, ate a big breakfast followed by a big lunch, they showed the greatest improvements in all the parameters measured, which included weight loss, liver fat content, fasting blood glucose and insulin sensitivity. For example, when it came to weight loss
- Nibbling resulted in an average 2.3 kg weight loss, while
- Feasting resulted in an average weight loss of 3.7 kg
That is an extra 1.4 kg. Not too shabby
Eat like a horse
It might sound counterintuitive, but when you’re dieting, you don’t want to aim to eat like a bird, you want to eat like a horse.
Go BIG.
Have a BIG breakfast. Follow it up with a BIG lunch-cum-early dinner, then, STOP EATING. Give your liver the night off. And it will reward you with more pounds off. PS. If your stomach, is not so keen on the BIG BREAKFAST plan – take the plunge, it will eventually come around.
Further reading
 |
 |
 |
| Stop grazing it will stop you packing on the pounds | Stop worrying about fat and start worrying about timing | When to cheat while on diet |
Interested in learning more about the chemistry behind those extra fat layers ?
Subscribe to E-spoons, our free e-zine packed with trips and strategies to help you keep your body chemistry balanced, so you can burn off the extra fat.
NOTE : Privacy & spam policy. Spoonful of Science will not rent, trade or sell the e-mail list to anyone. You can unsubscribe at any time by following the unsubscribe link.