How an Eating Rhythm Fuels Your Body! – Eating Rhythm Series – Episode 165

Hola amigos! Welcome to One Small Bite!

Did you know that you have an eating rhythm? Do you know what it is, and how it helps you live a nourished life?

I woke up in the middle of the night last night and it took me a while to go back to sleep. In my midnight slumber I started imagining how my lack of sleep affects my eating rhythm. Actually, how it affects my hormones like insulin, and ghrelin.

Allow me to explain what I mean, and what exactly is an eating rhythm.

In this episode I discuss…

• what an eating rhythm is
• how important it is for our health
• how it impacts our body’s systems
• how it affects our metabolism and energy levels
• it’s intricate connection to our sleep rhythm
• One Small Bite approach to create an adequate rhythm for a nourished life

Episode Show Notes:

Your eating rhythm is the cadence of meals and snacks that your body needs on a daily basis that helps maintain an adequate energy and nutrient level. Yea, still a little confusing, right? Let me put it another way, when you eat an adequate amount of food, not just calories, but food groups, nutrients, and foods you enjoy, you provide your body with sustainable nourishment for the next four to five hours.

Four to five hours is about the average emptying time your stomach needs to empty a mix of foods in a meal out into your small intestine. This is what helps maintain the physiological, biological, and digestive rhythm of your body. Even from the moment you see your plate of food your body begins to release a whole host of hormones to prepare body for what it needs to function like maintaining your heart rate (a rhythm), your digestive movement (poop), your hormonal production like estrogen, progesterone, testosterone, and others that help us develop, grow, and live a healthy life.

Eating in rhythm is extremely important in maintaining your metabolism as well. When we get energy from food your body doesn’t have to take more than it has to from your liver, muscle, and lean tissue like your organs. This is important for a variety of reasons. For example, the energy and nutrients that keep your metabolism running adequately helps keep the other body functions running adequately.

It’s all interconnected!

What that means is that your metabolism helps fuel your body. It’s essentially the engine or motor that keeps all the other body functions I mentioned earlier going. As the four or five hours come to an end, the hunger cues, or hunger hormones like ghrelin are released to stimulate you to eat again. If you look at this from a time standpoint, if your first meal is at 7 am, and the meal contains a variety of food groups, you enjoy it, and it satisfies you, then by 12 pm (five hours later), your body is ready for the next meal. Once you have that next meal, let’s just call it lunch, then the next four or five hour clock starts again, so your body is ready for the next meal around 5 pm.

Now let’s say you’re really busy at work. You have some last minute emails or meetings to attend and you just won’t get home at 5 pm. Who really has dinner at 5 pm these days anyway? That’s ok, your body can manage a little delay, and in fact if you need a little more energy, which most of actually do, that’s probably why we eat a snack. Or, at least that’s when a snack might be a good idea.

Snacks can help tie us over until the next meal. It can provide a little energy and nutrients that will help keep the clock going until you get to dinner. It can also help us get food groups we might not have gotten earlier in the day, like fruit, protein, veggies, or dairy. A snack around 3-5 could help us need to eat a little less when we get home, or help us be productive in case we have to stay a little later at work.

Then we have dinner, and again if this is a mix of food groups that satisfies you, then it should carry you into bedtime…about three to five hours later.

Hence an eating rhythm.

Now, what’s very important to know is that research doesn’t show that there’s any one perfect rhythm, only that a rhythm helps us with everything I just mentioned above. In fact, a rhythm of eating also helps us maintain a better circadian rhythm.

That’s your nighttime sleep rhythm.

In fact, did you know that about 60% of your body’s energy is used while you sleep. We are busy little beavers throughout the night. This is when your body repairs itself. When the body heals and optimizes its biological functions like repairing damaged tissues, cells, and organs. And sleep is what helps us most with our cerebral functions like memory, analysis, logic, empathy, creativity, and productivity.
And yes, one can say that a rhythm of eating is how the body maintains homeostasis. Oh boy, do I have some more info to come on the effects of an eating rhythm and the circadian rhythm…stay tuned!

So what’s your eating rhythm? Or are you skipping meals? Are you avoiding food groups, or using coffee for energy, and alcohol for relaxation instead? It is incredibly common for so many of my clients to deprioritize this basic human need…eating. Some of us see it as a distraction, a nuisance, or unimportant.

But eating is what connects us. Eating is the most common way we socialize, and humans are social creatures. Maintaining a rhythm of eating is the heart beat of life. It is the way we nourish our lives, and I would argue, is the way we live a long and fulfilling life. Stay tuned for a full episode on this one.

What’s your eating rhythm?

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Chop the diet mentality; Fuel Your Body; and Nourish Your Soul!