Do you follow the virtually prehistoric nutritional recommendations of having 3 square meals per day? Why? Maybe its because you don’t know that eating 3-6 meals daily causes hormonal harm and weight gain while it shortens your life span, and this isn’t just a theory. There is research to support it.

After reviewing more than 50 nutritional journals, I can find NO EVIDENCE OF BENEFIT for eating 3 meals (breakfast, lunch, and dinner) with snacks in between. If anything, the science shows it’s only leading to misery, sickness, and disease in your body.

Snacking was invented by the snack food companies, just like the phrase, “breakfast is the most important meal of the day,” was invented by the breakfast people (cereal giants Kellogg, General Mills, Post, etc.).

Each time you snack you raise your blood glucose and insulin levels in between meals. The real issue here is that blood glucose lowers after eating faster than insulin. This means that by the time your next meal or snack comes around, insulin has not returned to its baseline and gets bumped up again with the next feeding, only to end the day much higher than baseline and will slowly START to truly come down as you sleep….not good.

Our insulin response is stronger at night naturally, at least post-sunset. However, when compiling severe amounts of continuous insulin spikes throughout the day, with multiple meals and snacks, you build an exponential increase in your body’s insulin amounts. Over time, this creates insulin resistance. After all, why should the body listen to insulin when it’s being spiked every few hours?

Insulin is more than just your “sugar hormone.” That is only one of its primary functions in the human body. In fact, let’s take a look at exactly what insulin does within your body

1. Regulates the entry of sugar into every cell of your body, including muscle, bone and nerve cells
2. Stimulates the liver to store sugar in the form of fat for future use
3. Promotes breakdown and distribution of fatty acids and cholesterol throughout the body
4. Inhibits the breakdown of fats from adipose tissue and promotes storage of fat in adipose tissue
5. Stimulates the absorption and uptake of protein from diet
6. Increases the flow of potassium into cells and regulates cellular minerals
7. Activates cellular age and death cycles
8. Inhibits circadian rhythms and alters natural sleep cycle

So the next time you eat, think of how the spike in insulin may affect your body. If nothing, let’s focus on #4. As insulin levels climb, your body literally pushes all cellular fuels into the fat cells to promote fat storage and prevent fat burning. This is why we call some people “Sugar Burners” instead of “Fat Burners.”

If you’re someone who keeps tossing and turning and has difficulty getting deep, restful sleep, consider that your nightly insulin levels are also associated with your body’s ability to sleep. Maybe you’re one to have tried all the “natural” sleep remedies, from lavender oil to passionflower tea to even herbal sleep aids, to no avail.

Let’s put an end to elevating daily insulin the natural way – STOP BELIEVING WHAT YOU WERE TOLD. The human body is meant to go several hours, even days, between meals and has the ability to heal itself faster when fasting (notice the coincidence?).

So what can I do?

Minimal Change: Skip a meal 1-2 times a week (breakfast is the recommended meal to skip).

Intermediate Change: Skip a meal 3-5 times a week, again focusing on breakfast.

Advanced Change: Skip a meal 6+ times a week, now considering both breakfast and lunch.

Going to the next level:

• Randomly throughout every month, set a 1-day fast (smoothies, vegetable juice or lemon water only)
• Consider doing a 4 day broth fast
• Consider the ketogenic diet of 65% fats and 35% proteins with 0% carbs for a week (or 2, or 3).

Once hormones and insulin/weight are in a better place and your body has healed itself, then you will find your diet can be more forgiving, loaded with fun and desserts too (now we’re talking!).