Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: We're wondering why we're not gaining any ground on our health or our weight loss or I just can't get that last 10 or 15 pounds off. I'm only eating one meal a day.
[00:00:10] Speaker B: I'm doing everything. Fasting. I've transitioned to only one meal a.
[00:00:14] Speaker A: Day, and I'm just stuck. Well, maybe it's all. Last week on the podcast, we talked about five hacks to help you through the holiday season and your holiday meals. But today we want to talk about one that might be even more important, that we didn't really even know, and that is the timing of our meals. We found out some new information and it kind of blew our minds, honestly. We're still in the learning process, so you guys can just join us in this. Welcome to the Duster Mud Podcast. I'm Shelly.
[00:00:46] Speaker B: I'm Rich.
[00:00:47] Speaker A: We like to talk about food freedom and farming. Today it's food again because it is the holidays and we're all eating for the next like six weeks, y'.
[00:00:59] Speaker B: All. We've been exercising a low carb lifestyle now for going on seven years.
And this week we heard some information that just as Shelly said, blew our minds really. And it has to do about timing of when we eat and what happens, how our body reacts differently based on when we put food into it.
[00:01:24] Speaker A: Yeah, as it turns out, if we eat late, our insulin goes up.
It stays up all night and all the way into the next morning. And that's pretty much the, the crux of this podcast. And we'll go through several different sections on this podcast and try to break down some of the things that we're, that we're learning and, and the culprit of the whole thing is insulin. While insulin is required in our bodies or we'll die, a type 1 diabetic knows that firsthand. We all know you must have insulin.
But too much insulin in our bloodstream over long periods of time causes a vast amount of damage in our bodies. And the time that our bodies are supposed to kind of repair, clean everything out, take out the garbage, if you will, is while we're sleeping. Yeah, that's the rest time.
And if we're eating late, as it turns out, that can't be done. And we carry that garbage into the next day. So let's dig into this just a little bit and break down the effects of the timing of our food.
[00:02:40] Speaker B: Yeah. Bottom line, late night eating is a metabolic disaster.
And late night being after about 6pm and it really doesn't matter if you're inside and can't see the sunset, or you're inside and can't see the sunrise. Your body has a circadian clock. Your circadian rhythm, I'm sure everybody's heard about. And that rhythm takes effect no matter whether you're seeing the sun or not.
So at about 6pm is when our body starts to transition into its nighttime mode. And if, if we eat after 6pm it really does something different. Especially if you're eating carbs after 6pm right.
[00:03:29] Speaker A: It has to deal with those carbs that you ate all night long, and it's still trying to recover all the way into the morning.
But here's the thing. Our bodies are designed with the circadian rhythm for there's this dawn effect that happens.
Our liver every morning gives us breakfast. Whether we eat or not, we get something through a cortisol. Through cortisol. And our liver gives us a boost of glucose every morning to say, let's do the day. Good morning. And our glucose goes up.
And we've worn some continuous glucose monitors, and we saw that. We're like, whoa.
[00:04:19] Speaker B: It made.
Not being diabetic.
We have never really followed what our blood sugar is doing throughout the day. I erroneously thought that, you know, when I would go once a year and have my, my blood sugars checked, when I would have my flight physical and it would say, like, you know, 95, I thought that then for the next, my blood sugar was just like, 95. Like, ooh, yes, I have good blood sugar. It was 95. I had it checked nine months ago. Right. And putting on the continuous glucose monitors really showed us, man, your body is doing all kinds of crazy things with glucose throughout the day. And one of the weirdest and caused us to really start looking into, researching what your body does with glucose was every morning our blood sugar would just go.
It would go way up. And we hadn't eaten anything. And it was like, what is going on?
Well, that's the dawn effect, or dawn phenomenon. And most diabetics all know that this happens and insulin is required. Well, the reason that's important is because if you eat carbs late at night, your insulin is still up when that dawn phenomenon happens. So your insulin is already high. Then your glucose goes up and your body gives you even more insulin. So you're starting the day being insulin resistant, basically, and then you. That just continues then through the rest of the day.
[00:05:52] Speaker A: It would be really nice if our pancreas knew, hey, there's already insulin. You're good. It's all floating around. But it doesn't.
It it is triggered by the glucose in your bloodstream period, and it's going to inject more.
And so you go from high insulin when you wake up to.
Because it has nowhere to go.
And so you have high insulin when you wake up. Your liver says, here's some glucose. You're about to start your day. So now you have even more. So your entire day is sabotaged. You cannot get into any kind of fat burning mode all day long.
[00:06:33] Speaker B: Right.
[00:06:33] Speaker A: You're insulin resistant through the whole day. And when we heard that, we were like, what kind of floored, you know, and because they're learning more and more about the physiology at the cellular level and what's going on, and the more that they learn, the more that we actually, by having this information, we, we now have more control.
[00:07:00] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:07:01] Speaker A: You know, we don't have to just question, oh, my gosh, why is this happening to me? Right?
Because a lot of people who are.
Well, let me back up, let me finish the, the other thought. Whenever you, whenever you wake up with your high insulin, you wake up with cravings.
[00:07:20] Speaker B: That's true.
[00:07:21] Speaker A: You wake up inflamed, right. You wake up hungry because you're, you already have it in your system. That's telling your, your, it's hormone and it's telling you you need to, you need to eat something to take care of the insulin that's running around now. Right.
[00:07:35] Speaker B: And the inflammation. Insulin is a signaling hormone and it signals your cells to open up and take in. And it signals them to take in glucose. Well, when insulin is present, your cells can't get rid of. Right. Like they're in an open mode, not a closed and giving off mode. So that time at night, if there is no insulin in your, in your bloodstream at night, your cells are able then to convert and clean out and get rid of all of the junk that sort of builds up in there during the day. And whenever there's insulin present, they can't do that.
And a lot of times we'll get into a habit of eating late at night, day after day after day, especially carbs, late at night.
So that time for your cells to sort of clean out never happens.
Like, Right. Your body's never able to get rid of that, the, the toxins and all of the gunk that builds up in the cells during the day.
So you're just continuously being inflamed. Like there, it just, the inflammation grows and grows basically.
[00:08:49] Speaker A: Right. And you can oftentimes you see it, you know, in your face and in your eyes and in your Belly, you feel bloated and wow, my pants are tighter today than they were a week ago. Yet again. Or you know, whatever the, the phenomenon is in your life. But where you can tell my, why are my hands so puffy? Why you, why is my ring tight?
That's all just that insulin, day after day after day building up in your system and not, not having anywhere anything to do except just go store yourself. Right.
[00:09:26] Speaker B: Wow. Yeah. It's crazy.
[00:09:28] Speaker A: Okay. But a lot of people that are trying to watch what they're eating or are trying to get into a, a better health pattern are into intermittent fasting.
[00:09:39] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:09:40] Speaker A: Or time restricted eating.
[00:09:42] Speaker B: And we've done that.
[00:09:43] Speaker A: We have done that. And the easiest way to do that is to, once you've eaten in the evening, you don't eat all night. Well, you shouldn't be eating all night. If you're getting up in the middle of the night, you got some insulin problems.
So if, if you stop eating it in the evening and you wait until lunch, that has given you approximately an 18 hour fasting, I guess, period and then eat lunch and dinner.
Intermittent fasting. That's the, that's the, you know, the, the hack, I guess.
[00:10:19] Speaker B: But yeah, that's typically how people teach you to get started is we'll just skip breakfast.
[00:10:24] Speaker A: Right.
[00:10:24] Speaker B: And then you, you eat your normal lunch and dinner and then don't eat again until lunch the next day.
[00:10:31] Speaker A: Yeah, well, you're backloading all of your calories, all of, all of everything on the, on the tail end of your day. And so then we go to, apparently we go to bed and your body's like great.
[00:10:42] Speaker B: Well, a lot of people like, if they continue that, they try to make that fasting period even longer. Right. And so then you transition to one meal a day. A lot of people have heard of that Omad, one meal a day. And they will say, oh well, I'm just going to wait until my evening meal. Because culturally, at least for us here in, in the U.S.
culturally, the dinner meal is the big meal.
[00:11:12] Speaker A: That's the social meal.
[00:11:13] Speaker B: So if I'm family time, if I'm going to eat one meal a day, it's going to be that, that dinner meal. And so they will wait. And then, you know, by the time you get off work at 5 and get home, let's pretend that you're one of the few families that actually goes home after work and cooks a meal. Now it's 6:30, 7 o', clock, maybe later, by the time you're sitting down to eat that meal and that's your one meal of the day. So you're going to consume all of your daily calories after 6:00pm so your.
[00:11:46] Speaker A: So now you've, we've complet. If we do this, we have completely sabotaged our repair window. Yeah, our repair window is now taken up. It cannot repair. All it can do is basically battle damage on all of the, the food and calories and carbs or whatever it is that we've consumed at six or seven o'clock in the evening.
Apparently this is the absolute worst form of intermittent fasting and that we should be putting the majority of our calories at the beginning of our wake period.
Yeah, because that's when your body is awake and ready to use it and not in repair mode.
[00:12:34] Speaker B: Right. The, the circadian rhythm, everything slows down as far as the, the digestion and the, the clearing the blood sugar, clearing like all of that SL at night starting around 6pm because your body is getting ready to transition itself into that repair mode. So where, you know, if it took a couple of hours to clear the blood sugar that you ate at 8am it might take four, five, six, eight hours to clear that same thing. If you eat that at 8pm Just because the whole process slows down.
So that, that one meal a day being late at means that by the time you wake up the next morning and you get that dawn phenomenon or dawn effect glucose spike from your liver, you haven't cleared the dinner from the night before. And so your insulin is already high. And again, the whole thing is started over just like we talked about, except it's far worse because if you're only eating one meal a day and all of your calories are happening at, you know, seven, eight o' clock at night, the whole thing is just amplified.
[00:13:51] Speaker A: I'm sorry, this is so, it's, it's, it's mind boggling for me.
[00:13:57] Speaker B: And the, and the amplified means when there's insulin present, you're not burning fat.
[00:14:03] Speaker A: No.
[00:14:04] Speaker B: So at all times that insulin is present, your, that hormone is telling your body to store fat.
You are not burning fat if you are storing fat. So the only time you can get into fat burning mode is when there is no insulin circulating around.
So there was insulin all night, there's insulin the next morning, and then the insulin stays throughout the day. So like maybe by late afternoon you're coming down off of that insulin that you know has been in your body all night and you're ramping up to, I'm about to eat my, you know, 1500, 2000 calories whatever it is, and boom, there it goes again.
[00:14:52] Speaker A: So one of the other things that it causes, while your body is trying to deal with all that, your insulin is high, and it's, you know, trying to take care of the calories that you've eaten and what you've done to your blood sugar and everything, and major sleep disruption.
So you're not going to get good sleep because you're in and out of insulin, trying to take care at the cellular level of your. Of your body. And another thing, like, we're not giving our pancreas a rest.
[00:15:26] Speaker B: No, it doesn't get any.
[00:15:27] Speaker A: It doesn't get any kind of rest overnight. Should be when the whole thing. The whole unit is resting, apparently.
[00:15:34] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:15:35] Speaker A: Not just. It's not just your eyes and your brain.
[00:15:37] Speaker B: Right.
[00:15:38] Speaker A: You know, which we often think that's really what's happening, but really we need to give our insulin a break as well.
[00:15:45] Speaker B: Yeah. For sure. Wow.
[00:15:47] Speaker A: I'm. Yeah. So I guess if we're fasting all day long and we're wondering why we're not and maybe eating at night and why we're not gaining any ground on our health or our weight loss or something, or. Man, I just can't get that last 10 or 15 pounds off. I'm only eating one meal a day.
[00:16:08] Speaker B: I'm doing everything fasting. I've transitioned to only one meal a day.
[00:16:12] Speaker A: I'm just stuck. Well, maybe it's all timing.
[00:16:16] Speaker B: Yep.
[00:16:17] Speaker A: When are you eating that meal? And when I say this, I'm. I'm saying it to myself, too.
[00:16:22] Speaker B: Well, yeah, that's why we're talking about it. We're talking about it like, really, this is.
[00:16:27] Speaker A: This is new for us, and this is something that we will be considering and figuring out. How would we implement some of these things into our life? And we'll talk about that in a minute.
But it doesn't. It's not. It's not the same exact. For everybody. Now, if you're younger and like our daughters, they're in their 20s for the most part, that it's probably going to affect them a little bit less because your body can handle things a little better if you haven't heard it to this point. Right.
But when you're 52, our bodies don't handle. They don't handle it quite the same as the young people.
[00:17:13] Speaker B: Yeah. At age 40 is what they consider getting older from a metabolic perspective. So 40 plus, you're starting to get older, and all of the processes just slow down your mitochondria, which are the Little energy production at the cellular level, they are less effective. Your body is more insulin resistant, it is less insulin sensitive like the, the whole everything.
[00:17:39] Speaker A: Less muscle mass. Probably a lot of, especially, especially women, we have less muscle mass so we have less ability to take in the glucose and then transform it in glycogen I think. Right, yeah.
So we have, we, we don't have, we don't have the storage. It's just not all working quite as, as smoothly as it once did. So we have to be a little bit more careful as we get older about when we consume our, all of our calories, what kind matters as well. Yeah, right.
[00:18:16] Speaker B: Yeah. So like you could, we could sit down with our 20something daughter and do exactly the same thing and her body would recover quicker than our bodies would. Like the same exact meal would do something different in our 50 plus bodies than it does in her 20 year old body.
[00:18:39] Speaker A: Well, you know, if you're older and you stay up late watching TV or you go out and you're having Christmas party and stuff and maybe you stay out later than you normally go to bed and you wake up the next day, you're just tired. Right. Well, maybe when you were younger you could wake on up and get going with your day and you were a lot tougher and things are just harder when you're. Because your body is not able to repair and as responsive as it once was. And so we have to be a little bit more cognizant of what our cells can do.
[00:19:18] Speaker B: Yeah. Everybody's body is less insulin sensitive in the evenings.
So that's what I said earlier.
[00:19:25] Speaker A: Right.
[00:19:25] Speaker B: Like as the, as the body is getting ready for rest, everybody's body gets less sensitive to the insulin. The older you are, the more that is magnified.
[00:19:37] Speaker A: So it's not like the rule changes when you get older, it's just amplified.
[00:19:44] Speaker B: That's right.
[00:19:45] Speaker A: It's the it, it's if, if we're, if we break that rule, the ramifications just might be faster and worse.
[00:19:54] Speaker B: Yeah.
And that leads us to high insulin.
Actually makes you feel older.
[00:20:08] Speaker A: Huh.
Okay, interesting.
[00:20:13] Speaker B: And so when we get into this routine of eating late at night, especially if you're eating carbs late at night, then the insulin is up. It stays up throughout the night. You get a glucose shot from your liver in the morning, it goes up higher and then it stays up through the day. About the time it's getting ready to come down, you eat that big meal again.
Especially if you eat lunch like it's never even had a chance.
If you're eating carbs at lunch. Up it goes again.
[00:20:47] Speaker A: It. Well, one thing that it's doing and it just, and the cycle, one thing that it's doing because I used to eat a lot of carbohydrates and I would want to eat every couple of hours because that, your, your blood sugar gets high, you, you've injecting insulin constantly, you have these crashes, you got to bring it back up. So you wake up with the craving and all you do is basically manage the cravings all day long. Because we never allow any kind of. Just reset.
Clear it out. Yeah, because, because we're afraid we're going to get hungry. We are going to get hungry. We're going to have cravings and those can be painful and uncomfortable. But, but when that's happening, it's actually our system is kind of has the opportunity to go, oh well, if I'm not going to get anymore, maybe I'll start clear, clearing some of this out.
[00:21:41] Speaker B: Yeah. So when, when you don't go into that clearing mode and the inflammation starts to build, that's when you get all of the symptoms of. I don't know, I'm just, I feel old these days. Right. You've got brain fog, fatigue, joint pain, thicker skin and skin tags even start happening with consistently high insulin. Poor sleep, weight gain, obviously, obviously cognitive decline. I don't know, I just can't think as well as I used to. That's all. Because your cells aren't being able to clear.
[00:22:17] Speaker A: They are. Science is starting to show that Alzheimer's disease, they're calling it type 3 diabetes because it is driven by insulin resistance. The brain can no longer take in glucose, which is energy that the brain can use. Now it can also use ketones.
But whenever you are a glucose, a glucose driven system and you've been doing that to your brain and it has now become insulin resistant and it cannot take up any energy.
It stops working. And so now they're just calling Alzheimer's type 3 diabetes. Yep. Because of the glucose abuse.
[00:22:57] Speaker B: So we generally think of age feeling old as just age related. Like, well, yeah, I'm feeling old, I'm getting old. Right. But in, in reality it has a whole lot to do with insulin and whether or not you're allowing your body to clean out all of the gunk that's, that's built up.
[00:23:21] Speaker A: Here we are at the holidays though, you know, and we are going to have parties and snacks and treats and cookies and you know, grandma made something and Nana made something else and you know, we just love the peanut brittle and you go to the, have the cocktails at the cocktail party with the office or whatever it is.
Um, if we are aware when we're planning our meals or our parties, maybe if like I know on Thursday, which is Thanksgiving, we will be having a Thanksgiving lunch, which is good because we're going to eat a big meal probably around noon and then that'll probably be it, right for the day. Yep, I would think.
But if, if you can try to plan, if you're in charge of it, if you can try to plan to have it prior to 6 o' clock in the day, if you can stop eating by around 3, that would be even better and it would allow your system the opportunity to do some clearing.
[00:24:29] Speaker B: Yeah. So what are some things that we can do?
If you have to eat after 6pm make it as low carb as you possibly can all the way down to zero and make it a, a smaller meal, moderate protein meal, somewhere around 20 grams, 25 grams of protein.
Fat isn't going to cause your insulin to go up at all. Protein can, but as low carb as possible. Like if it's a, I'm going to sit down with my family and I'm going to eat when, when it's ready and that's going to be at 7pm I totally understand that. Try to make it as close to zero carbs as you can and limit the protein. Put your big meal earlier in the day. If you're going to do intermittent fasting or time restricted eating. If you can skip that evening meal and, and let the lunch meal be your last meal of the day.
[00:25:26] Speaker A: And then I said, I said we would talk about some of that, but we get it right that it is practically speaking how do we make that work?
We don't have the answers for that because everyone's life, career, family, time of day that they eat is or, or even have food available to them because of whatever their life situation is, is different. It really is. But it gives at least this information, gives us the opportunity to think about it and figure out is there a way that we could implement some of these strategies to have a healthier body.
Well, we don't have the answers for the practicalities because we were talking about it like dude, what do people do? Because he used to be in the Pentagon and he said if I left the Pentagon at 6pm which would be a really amazing time at 6pm you or oh no, let's just say you actually got off work at 5 and it took him an hour and 20 minutes. To get home, he would be walking in the door at 6:20.
And if I had supper ready, that's assuming there's someone there to have a supper ready. If I had the supper ready and we sat right down an 8, it'd probably be 6:30. You're done eating at around 7. How do you. How is that logistically doable? I don't know.
I don't. The best thing I could say is eat a lot more of your carbs, more of your calories earlier in the day. Maybe take a bigger lunch. I used to send you with. With you like a. A pound of hamburger when. When we really started going low carb. But just keep. I get what you were just saying. If you got to eat, then keep it low as you can so that you're not needing as much insulin overnight while you're sleeping. But just some. Just things to think about, you know, can you implement some of these tricks?
I guess the bottom line in what we're learning is we need to give insulin a break and put our food to the front side of the day.
[00:27:34] Speaker B: Yeah.
And especially those of us that feel like we're doing it right by doing intermittent fasting and, you know, skipping breakfast and wait until later in the day to eat that.
Not saying intermittent fasting is bad, just the timing of the whole thing may be off and when.
When. And if you can control the. The timing of your meals, make the majority of your food intake be earlier in the day. And from the research we've done, the earlier the better, actually.
Yeah.
[00:28:11] Speaker A: Well, that. That's kind of what we're learning. And as we learn more and it goes, you know, we're always happy to share what we're doing and what we're going through. We think it's all very interesting. We hope you find it valuable. If you have. We would love it if you would hit the up. We love a. Like, it really does tell us, you know, how things are going. And until next time, happy Thanksgiving and bye, y'. All.
[00:28:35] Speaker B: Bye, y'. All.
