Nutrient Timing:

When You Eat Is As Important as What You Eat

"Nutrient timing" is the next major part of natural, permanent, effective weight loss and fat loss. In this lesson I will be going over the concept of "Nutrient timing" as part of any effective natural weight loss plan. Without necessarily meaning to, the healthiest and most fit populations people use this as part of their lifestyle.

This is great for you because timing your nutrition allows you to eat more and lose more!

The metabolism has a unique characteristic of acting like a large series of gears connected to each other.

To understand nutrient timing, you have to understand that the process of your metabolisms chemical processes. With the the available data we have today, there is a very high level of predictability on what stages a chemical will go through as it passes through a body's myriad of chemical reactions.

When one of these gears stops or slows down, it affects every other gear. Sometimes it will make another set of gears work harder. Sometimes it makes it works less.

If one of these gears stops, this causes a chain reaction which ultimately stops every single gear. When that happens we have death. So speed and efficiency of one's metabolism is an index of a person's health.

We will always have varying degrees of inefficiency with these gears. It will never be perfect. For example, when too much refined sugar is placed into the system, the gears that convert carbohydrates to glucose require no effort. However, they are connected to the gears that convert and store glycogen into glucose. And those gears are connected to the gears that produce insulin to counteract excess supplies of glycogen. So that gear now has to get into overdrive and over-produces insulin. That then starts the gears that convert glucose to fat instead of energy. Nutrient timing is using the timing of your nutrients to your cells as a way to speed up your metabolism.

They Are All Connected.

Food, is one of the things that begin the movement of the gears. If you want to lose weight, you want to be eating more frequently. Nutrition and timing both can keep the metabolism moving at a high speed.

Reduced Nutrients = Metabolism Slowdown

So what happens when the supply of nutrients (carbohydrates, proteins, fats, etc) in the system drop? Since all the gears in a metabolic system are there primarily to process nutrients into maintained, repaired and newly generated cell tissue, all the gears will slowdown.

When the demand for production encounters less raw materials, it will slow down production. It has less to work with so therefore it will produce less.

Another way to look at nutrient timing analogy is in the construction of a building. You need steel, cement, bricks, sheet rock, etc. If those supplies become unavailable, then you will have construction workers who have to stop or slowdown their building. They will start to build in areas they have enough materials to build with. But sooner or later, they will need to slow down or stop production because certain areas of the building are dependent on other areas getting built first. If the raw materials stop flowing then building stops.

The same thing happens with your metabolism. As mentioned in previous chapters, the metabolic process is an automatic chemical process. So the process begins with the combination of chemicals in the first place.

Nutrients start the metabolic gears. The amounts and timing of the introduction of nutrients into the metabolism will also determine how long and how fast those gears keep going. Thus the term "Nutrient timing".

The ideal here is that the gears keeping going at a higher rate, unimpeded and for longer periods. If it keeps going 24/7 the body will be doing very well. It is constantly be reaching its optimum state. There will be very little fat, there will be large energy reserves, and your body will be constantly reaching higher states of efficiency.

Remember, metabolism is not a "burning" activity. It is the process of maintaining, repairing and building healthy cell tissue.

This occurs to a greater or lesser degree all the time. The variables are its rate and efficiency. Another way of stating how effective it is, is to say how well are the nutrients being transformed into healthy tissue with as little wasted energy.

If this is occurring, your metabolism will not hold on to fat. It will not need it. Going a diet, and cutting back the amount of food you eat to lose weight is no good. You won't enjoy it and you will feel deprived. Worst of all it can very easily backfire and cause you to rapidly get fat.

Nutrients Get Used Up

"Ok, so I'm not starving myself. I eat 3 square meals a day. Why am I having a hard time losing weight?"

When you consume foods, whether it is good food or proper nutrients, they will get used up. When its levels drop the gears slow down.

So nutrient timing, or keeping a good supply of nutrients flowing through the metabolism keep the gears turning at a higher rate. This is the heart of "nutrient timing".

After a nutritious meal, it takes about 2 - 3 hours before needing to refill. Eating a meal that provides nutrients every 2 to 3 hours will keep the metabolism fueled to keep operating at its optimum and functioning to provide health.

At this point I want to clarify that I did not say to feed the body every 2 - 3 hours. I said to provide it with nutrients. So eating Oreo's and Cheetos will not keep your metabolism humming along.

The 3 square meals leaves too much time where the cells of your body are not fed. This is a poor form of nutrient timing.

A Way To Measure Metabolism

There are several ways to measure the metabolism. All of them are very arbitrary. You need several measurements because your metabolism is multi-faceted. It consists of many things so there can be no single measure of your metabolism.

However, there is one extremely helpful measure of the strength of your metabolism at a given time.

After eating a nutritious meal the body has the ability to produce more energy. This can be measured in terms of electricity. If a body is included in a closed electrical circuit with a meter to measure the electrical current from the body to the source of electricity, you can measure the amount of energy the body adds to the current or takes away from it.

So for example, you can take a small battery, connect one end with a wire that is connected to one part of the body and connect the other end of the battery to another part of the body. The current will flow from one end of the battery through the body to the other end of the battery. Then you can place a meter to measure the electrical current flowing from the body to the battery.

After taking a breath, the inhaled oxygen creates a chemical reaction with other chemicals in the body to create increased stored potential energy. You can see this energy as a surge of electrical current flowing from the body to the battery. The meter will measure this surge of electricity. This is energy in the form of electricity the body adds to the already existing electrical current. This can be measured.

You can even experiment with different foods to see what effect they have on producing electrical energy.

After 2 -3 hours of eating you can measure this current and find that the amount of added electrical energy diminishes to a very small amount. So to apply nutrient timing, you need to be looking at eating every 2 to 3 hours. And this is why other diets do not work. They don't focus on nutrition and they don't focus on nutrient timing.

If poor food is eaten that does not provide nutrients, the length of time where energy creation stops comes much sooner. So, nutrient timing is used to increase your energy levels and your basal metabolism.

Very Large Meals and Metabolism
The energy generated from a meal increases and decreases a similar amount with a big meal as with a smaller meal.

Your metabolism can only utilize a certain amount at a given time. It can also store a certain amount at any given time. And it will store or waste the rest. If you change the meal size the amount of utilization does not change much. So eating more at one time does not provide more nutrients.

Even worse, eating larger meals that leave a lot of the food unutilized causes a lot of waste, then toxicity, acidity and excess fat.

Instead of eating a big meal to cover a longer period of time, divide the meal in two and eat two smaller meals and spread them out 2 - 3 hours apart.

You will have less waste, less tiredness, a faster metabolism over the long run and get more nutrients over time. So increasing the size of the meal does not help nutrient timing or serve as a way to bypass nutrient timing. Don't worry, I won't be asking you to starve. Far from it. You want to eat more frequently.

Nutrient Timing: "Prime" Eating Times

There is another aspect of nutrient timing - Eating after fasting and after exercise.

After you go to bed and wakes up, your body has fasted. It has also recuperated its energy stores so there is more energy contained in the muscle cells of your body. But your body has also gone through a period of time where it has not eaten.

This is a unique situation where there has been no food eaten but there is a lot of energy and the metabolism is moving faster due to the excess of energy. What you eat at these times has a major effect on the speed, and efficiency of your metabolism.

When you are awake, fasting will cause a metabolic lock down in about 4 hours. Blood-sugar in the blood and muscle tissue will drop through the floor. Specifically, nutrients begin to be held in organs such as the liver and kidneys rather than the blood and muscle cells.

The effect of homeostasis kicks in and all your bodily systems begin preparing for a lower level of nutrients. Most prevalent is the storage of glucose. After fasting, the glucose levels in blood and muscle tissue drop but the glucose levels in the liver rise during fasting.

Breakfast - The Magical Meal

What all this is leading to is that when you sleep at night, you are fasting. The word breakfast actually means to "Break" the "Fast". When we sleep there is very little stress on your nervous system and on your energy demand (as opposed to fasting when you are awake). So this creates a "primed" condition for your metabolism. High levels of stored energy and high levels of Glucose in the liver ready to be secreted if needed. This is one of the times your metabolism is at its most efficient state. Therefore with regard to nutrient timing, this is an important time for your metabolism.

What you do after a fast has a great effect on your metabolism. It starts a process that lasts many hours afterwards.

By providing high-quality nutrition at the highest point of metabolic efficiency, as in waking up in the morning, your metabolism stays high and creates large reserves of nutrients for the rest of the day.

After fasting, eating the wrong foods that do not provide nutrients can be worse than not eating at all. Very high concentration of refined sugar and simple carbohydrates (foods that convert to glucose very fast) in the morning will set off a reaction that affects your physical and mental energy for the whole day. This reaction is set off to handle this imbalance of too much sugar. Your liver will release excessive amounts of insulin to prevent the excess glucose from entering the muscle cells. The sugar level in the cells then drops so low that not eating anything in the first place would cause a higher blood sugar level for the individual than eating a lot of sugar after fasting.

The excess insulin prevents your muscle cells from creating energy to work. Thus, the excess glucose that started this process now is not used and chemically converts to fat. So there is a double effect in your body: 1) the muscles have less energy so they work less and when they work less, they don't use fat for fuel. 2) when excess glucose is not used, it converts to fat.

In short, what you eat for breakfast can totally change your energy levels at night!

Suffice it to say that an appropriate level of nutrients in breakfast will do more for your metabolism than any other meal and that is the reason. This is another tool to speed up your metabolism and it is a very powerful one. You will lose fat with this! Eating within an hour of waking up is an extremely important part of nutrient timing.

 

Post-Exercise: The Other Magical Meal

The other time where what you eat makes a very big difference. That is after exercise. After a strenuous episode of cardiovascular or anaerobic exercise the body has some similar conditions to fasting.

Namely, after fasting there is a low supply of nutrients because a long period of time had passed with out supplying food to the body. Exercise, uses nutrients very rapidly so it creates a similar deficiency in nutrients as in fasting.

In addition to that, exercise floods oxygen through your body by getting blood flowing to greater areas of your body. This increase of oxygen creates more chemical reactions by reaching more areas of your body that would otherwise not be reached. This creates another condition of the metabolism being "primed" to receive nutrients and process them at the highest efficiency. The hour after exercise is the other time when your metabolism is most efficient.

Just like breakfast, the effect of what you eat here lasts many hours after the exercise.

Your body is flooded with oxygen when you perform aerobic exercise. Areas that were not receiving much oxygen in relation to others, now got flooded with it. The nutrients you consume mix with oxygen to give your metabolism what it needs to perform its functions - create new cells and move your body towards higher physical levels of health.

With exercise, certain nutrients are utilized more than others so your meal after exercise should replenish those specific nutrients more. This is the subject of "sports nutrition". But for the subject of weight loss and fat loss, giving your metabolism what it needs to operate as efficiently as possible is the key. This is the second most important time with regard to nutrient timing.

Nutrient Timing: What To Learn From This Lesson

Nutrient timing is more important than the size of your meals. Eat smaller meals more frequently over the course of the day and you will lose weight.

DO NOT EAT VERY LARGE MEALS. The amount you absorb use from each meal does not change much if you eat a larger meal. Your metabolism and digestive system can only use and assimilate a certain amount at one time. By stuffing it with more food, the metabolism begins to slow down. It slows down because it needs to spend more energy processing the waste build up of the excess food. You will gain weight and gain fat.

THE ONLY EXCEPTION TO THE ABOVE RULE IS WITH RAW FOOD. YOU CAN EAT GREEN, PURPLE AND YELLOW COLLORED RAW FOOD WITHOUT REGARD TO AMOUNT. What is interesting is that you will get less hungry with eating raw foods because they directly provide what your cells need. And you will lose weight very fast.

The same rule applies with eating after exercising as eating when waking up. They are both important and both times when your metabolism is most efficient in utilizing and processing nutrients. The food you eat after sleep and exercise change the metabolism for a longer period of time than meals at other times. Provide the highest quality nutrients at these times. Your energy levels will remain stable for longer periods, your metabolism will stay at a high rate. You metabolism and your nervous system will be routing all nutrients to your muscles instead of converting it to fat. And your metabolism and nervous system will be using your body fat for energy by converting it to glucose for your muscles. You will feed the muscles and other cells quicker. You will lose weight. Nutrient timing is so powerful that you can lose fat but doing this alone!

One thing my clients keep telling me is "I'M EATING MORE AND I'M LOSING MORE!"

Each one almost always is a bit surprised at how much I tell them to eat. But the inches fall of and so does the fat.