What if I told you that breakfast being the most important meal of the day was wrong? What if I told you it is more important when you eat than what you eat?
Perhaps much of the nutritional dogma that we've been raised with is now outdated, like snacking all day long and eating many meals. Over the next few minutes, I plan to discuss with you what I believe to be the most profoundly transformational concept and strategy as it pertains to health and aging.
Over the last 20 years, as a nurse practitioner and a functional nutritionist, I've seen tremendous shifts, tremendous shifts in health and wellness: escalating rates of obesity, diabetes and cardiovascular disease, many of which are preventable. The choices we make in terms of nutrition are profoundly impactful on our health, more than most of us realize.
During my training as a nurse practitioner many years ago, the dominant nutritional paradigm was exercise more, eat less. I've found this to be profoundly ineffective for most, if not all, of my female patients.
The concept of "calories-in, calories-out" alone is just not effective. Many of the things that I work with, with my female patients really focus on the connection between our lifestyle choices and how that impacts healthy aging and weight gain.
I do not believe, nor do I support, the limiting belief that women have to accept weight gain as a normal function of aging. The National Health and Nutrition Exam Survey, which looks at data with regard to children and adults in terms of their nutrition and escalating obesity rates, compares what went on in the 1970s, where most Americans consumed three meals a day and no snacks;
fast forward to today, most of what we are doing as Americans is eating three meals a day and snacking all day long. Really.
And so one of the things that starts to happen when healthcare providers are telling our patients that we need to eat all day long - it's wrong. Eating all day long overtaxes our pancreas and our digestive system.
It overtaxes it so much that it cannot work properly. And if it cannot work properly, we cannot absorb our food or the nutrients in that food.
Another really important distinction when it comes to meal frequency, or how frequently we're eating, is the debate over sugar burners versus fat burners. And when we're talking about that, a sugar burner is someone that consumes lots of carbohydrates and taps into glucose as their primary fuel source, which is incredibly inefficient.
