In this blog series, we have been learning about simple, practical steps you can take to balance your blood sugar. In this post, I am going to teach you two more simple steps that can support blood sugar control.
What Do Blood Sugar Swings Look Like?
Listening to your body is key to keeping your blood sugar stable. It’s important to honor your hunger, meaning you should eat when you’re hungry or just starting to feel hungry. Paying attention to these signals helps prevent low blood sugar before meals. If you wait too long to eat, your blood sugar can drop. When blood sugar is low, you may feel weak, dizzy, irritable, or even cold.
When blood sugar drops too low, the brain sends signals that make you crave carbohydrates like bread, pasta, or sugar. This can lead to eating quickly and overeating. If you wait too long to eat, it can cause overeating and a spike in blood sugar. The spike is followed by a blood sugar crash, where your blood sugar drops below normal. This crash can cause low energy and make you crave sugar.
Waiting too long between meals and overeating can make your blood sugar levels unstable. We want to avoid big swings in blood sugar—high highs and low lows. It’s better for your body to have small increases in blood sugar after meals that return to normal within a couple of hours.
Step 5: Honor Your Hunger and Fullness Cues
In addition to supporting healthy blood sugar levels, eating at the right time can help you eat the right amount of food. If you eat when you start to feel hungry, it’s easier to stop eating when you’re about 80% full or satisfied. This simple habit can help you eat about 30% less at meals. That’s a lot!
While it’s important to eat enough food at meals, we also want to avoid overeating. The goal is to eat 3 main meals and maybe 1-2 snacks each day, listening to your body’s cues to stop eating when you’re full.
Eating when you’re not starving helps you slow down and eat more mindfully. Eating slowly gives your brain time to get the signal from your stomach that you’re full and should stop eating. When you eat too quickly, your brain might not get that signal until after you’ve already eaten too much.
Honoring your fullness is especially important at dinner. At night, your body is in an “anabolic” state, which means it wants to build and store energy for later. The food you eat at night is turned into stored energy for the next day. If you eat your largest meal at dinner, your body will save some of that food for tomorrow. This may make it harder to lose weight if you are eating the majority of your food at night.
During the day, your body is more “catabolic,” meaning it’s focused on turning food into energy to fuel your cells. It’s best to eat most of your food during daylight hours.
If the sun is up from 7 a.m. to 5 p.m., it’s a good idea to eat the majority of your food during that time. Eating breakfast by 7 a.m., lunch at 11 a.m., and dinner by 5 p.m. will help support healthy metabolism and give your body time to naturally fast after dinner.
Step 6: Time Your Meals Right
The timing of when you eat is important for blood sugar balance!
As I mentioned earlier, skipping meals or waiting too long to eat can lead to overeating. The best way to avoid this is by paying attention to meal timing. I recommend eating the majority of your food during the day.
Example of How to Time Your Meals
Eat your first meal 60-120 minutes after you wake up, which would be around 7-8 a.m. (I’m basing this on the assumption that you naturally wake up around the time the sun rises.)
The next meal should be about 4-5 hours later, around 11 a.m. to 12 p.m.
Dinner can be anywhere from 4-6 p.m. If you eat dinner by 4 p.m., it gives you a longer fasting window overnight.
This strategy can be especially helpful in the winter months when it gets dark earlier, and our bodies naturally need more rest. If you can’t or don’t want to eat dinner that early, it’s perfectly fine to have dinner by 6 p.m. to fit your schedule.
However, if you’re waiting longer than 5 hours to eat dinner, I recommend having a high-protein and fat snack in between. This will help keep your energy steady.
6 Steps to Balance Blood Sugar
Let’s review the steps you can take to balance your blood sugar.
- Eat breakfast within the first hour of waking up.
- Balance your plate with protein, carbohydrates, and fiber.
- Eat energy-dense meals instead of small snacks.
- Snack when necessary.
- Honor your hunger and fullness cues.
- Time your meals right.
By taking these steps to balance your blood sugar, you will start to feel the difference in your health. Not only will you support healthy hormones, but you can also start to lose weight just by following these steps! And you can do all of this while enjoying the foods you love!
How can you incorporate some of these steps with the foods you love?
In Part 4, we are going to learn how the order in which you eat your food can support blood sugar control.