When to eat.

As well as focusing on what you eat, establishing healthy habits around when you eat is a powerful way to improve your health.

These 5 steps help to limit blood sugar spikes and keep insulin low. They work best when combined with a real-food, low carb lifestyle.

How often you eat.

You might have heard that eating lots of small meals, or snacking between meals, is important to boost metabolism or energy levels. This is not true.

Eating increases insulin. Snacks high in sugar or refined carbohydrates (most snacks) can cause large spikes in insulin which may take several hours to return to lower. If we eat again during that time, insulin goes back up before it’s had the chance to normalise.

After counting regular meals, morning tea, afternoon snacks, sweet drinks and evening treats - many people eat 6-7 times, with insulin remaining high all day. This leads to insulin resistence, weight gain and chronic disease.

Rather than snacking, when you feel hungry make a low carb meal full of protein and healthy fats and eat until you feel satisfied. This will keep you full for longer resulting in larger gaps between meals, giving insulin more time to fall.

Hunger, cravings or emotions?

If you feel like eating, but you don’t feel like a meal — it may be cravings rather than true hunger. For example, you may fancy something sweet, but don’t want something savoury.

Other common reasons for eating without hunger include feeling bored, stressed, tired or low (i.e emotional eating).

Choosing to avoid sugar and processed carbs can help you feel more in control of cravings and emotional triggers.

Where you eat.

Lives are busy, and so it’s become acceptable to eat anywhere — standing up, on the couch, in the car, or while working at a desk. We often eat with our hands or using one hand while we scroll through our phones.

However, studies show that if people eat while multitasking, distracted, or in a hurry they will usually eat more than they need to, and feel hungry again sooner.

Sitting down to eat at a table, with cutlery, helps people to slow down, enjoy and focus on their food, reducing the risk of overeating.

What time you eat.

The period of time that you eat during the day is called the eating window. The remaining hours (when no calories are consumed) is the fasting period.

When we stop eating, insulin levels fall, and the body enters a rest and repair phase — this is essential to good health. If we eat all day, this rest only happens overnight during sleep.

Reducing our eating window extends the time insulin is low, and gives the body and gut more time to recover. This is also known as time-restricted eating (TRE).

Popular eating windows are 10 hours (i.e. eating between 8am and 6pm) and 8 hours (10am - 6pm) - the start/finish time can be adjusted to best suit your lifestyle.

Once people start eating low carb, they usually report feeling less hungry. By eating based on hunger cues, people often find they no longer need 3 meals every day. Preparing less meals also helps save time and money.

If you’re not hungry at a meal time it’s ok to skip it. You might choose your eating window to fit around when you first feel hungry in the morning.

Breakfast isn’t essential.

Some people don’t feel hungry when they wake up, so they reduce their eating window by skipping breakfast or eating it later. Unless you take certain medications to lower blood sugar, this is very safe and healthy to do.

The phrase “breakfast is the most important meal of the day” was nothing more than a clever marketing slogan from the creator of Kelloggs to sell more of his cereal (which worked really well by the way!).

If you do eat breakfast, starting the day with a savory low carb meal (like eggs) helps to maintain low insulin levels through the morning. This will keep you full for longer, with steady energy levels and reduced cravings.

Food Order

When eaten on an empty stomach, sugary foods, including many fruits, are absorbed quickly into the blood, which can spike blood sugar levels.

Eating sweet foods at the end of a meal, allows the fats, protein and fibre from the other food to slow down the absorption of the sugar, blunting the blood sugar spike. This is also true if you choose to include carbohydrates in your meal (e.g. if you’re having a roast dinner with potato - eat the potato last!)

It also helps to eat fruit at the same time as healthy fats and protein, like apple slices with peanut butter or berries with fresh whipped cream.

After you eat.

Moving after meals is a very effective way to control blood sugar and insulin.

Moving muscles take up excess sugar from the blood and burn it for fuel. This reduces blood sugar levels so that less insulin is needed to bring them back to normal after a meal.

It doesn’t have to be much - a brisk walk after a meal is a great way to help lower your insulin.

Carb heavy meals can cause bloating and lethargy making it hard to resist lying on the couch after dinner. Following a low carb meal, people usually feel more energetic and motivated to move after meals.