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It’s 3:00 and you think you need a little something. Maybe a latté, an energy bar, a cookie, or that 100-calorie pack of whatever. Or maybe, it’s just a habit that you made or told to make way back–”to keep your metabolism high.” But here’s the thing, snacking (and or grazing) isn’t making your metabolism run faster, and it’s usually not eating to satiety. In fact, it’s often something you ate because you were bored, or tired, or stressed out and in that case, that little snack might actually make you hungrier later. It may also prevent you from burning fat and keep your blood sugar dangerously high.
Snacking and grazing may actually be making you fatter, setting you up for diabetes, and causing you unnecessary pain and discomfort.
When we eat full meals that include a mix of whole food protein, carbohydrates and fats, we turn off hunger hormones, level out our blood sugar, and nourish our bodies on the cellular level. This is satiety. You’re sending signals to your body that it’s finished eating and can go through the (long) process of digestion to turn the nutrients into whatever our beautiful body needs.
Eating when we’re truly hungry every four to six hours as opposed to craving (and grazing) is the goal of having a healthy eating pattern that allows your body to function efficiently, burn fat, and maintain a healthy blood sugar level.
According to the latest studies in endocrine science, eating every two, three or four hours actually sets us up for not only exhaustion and premature aging but also less fat burning. Here’s why.
Digestion is very taxing–a process that takes a lot of time and energy. To fully digest a well balanced meal, it takes our body six or more hours. Snacking disrupts this process, rebooting the system. What happens to that first meal that hasn’t gone through the digestive process? It gets stored…as fat. And your body’s energy can’t be used for other important functions like repairing and rebuilding cells. This interruption also doesn’t allow your body to get to the final stage of digestion – fat burning mode.
Most snacks that we grab are full of simple carbohydrates – sugar in our system, causing the release of insulin. If we eat unbalanced, quick meals, our blood sugar quickly rises and falls within three hours resulting in low blood sugar causing us to crave more carbohydrates. Each time this happens, our insulin is released.
Insulin’s job is to move glucose (blood sugar) from your bloodstream into your cells (your nervous system, muscles, and other tissues and organs). Insulin can remain in your bloodstream for six to eight hours, preventing the fat-burning process (that’s its job as a “storage” hormone). By nature, insulin lowers your blood sugar, leaving you to crave whatever it takes to bring your blood sugar back up—more carbohydrate snacks.
But there’s an even better argument for not snacking.
Metabolically, our bodies are either in a fasting state or a fed state. As we said earlier, after eating, the digestive process takes a lot of time and energy. This is a very metabolically active time for your body. What most people don’t realize is that it is also a time of immune system activity. When we eat, we trigger our immune system to produce a transient inflammatory response.
Inflammation isn’t always a problem.
In fact, inflammation is a normal response of the body to infection and injury. It signals other parts of our body to come in to repair and heal. This is necessary, of course. However, we get temporarily inflamed by other normal activities like exercising and eating. Yes, eating! When we eat, it causes a degree of physiological stress on the immune system telling our body to send in what it needs to metabolize and assimilate the nutrients. It takes around four hours after each meal for our gut microbes and other components to leak into our bloodstream triggering inflammation by the immune system. When the job is done, the inflammatory state goes away. But, for people snacking around the clock, their bodies can often end up in a near constant inflammatory state.
Chronic inflammation is a problem.
By keeping our bodies in a state of low-grade inflammation by feeding it constantly, it can cause damage on our body that is extremely detrimental to our health over time. Studies are linking this chronic low-grade inflammation to many lifestyle-related diseases including heart disease and type 2 diabetes.
Stop snacking.
Though it’s scary, we are not trying to force your habits by instilling fear. We see too much unnecessary suffering from our clients who are often trying their best to live healthier lifestyles. This simple shift (simple–not easy) can make a world of difference in your health goals. Snacking and grazing not only increases your likelihood of elevated inflammatory markers, but it also halts your fat burning process, may make you hungrier and may cause elevated blood sugar and insulin resistance leaving you hungrier the following day. Eating late has also been linked to elevated cholesterol.
