What If You Ceased Snacking For 30 Days?

Hello, health champions. Today I'm going to talk about what would happen if you had zero snacks for 30 days. And we need to start by addressing some of the beliefs and the myths that people have about snacking. So, to the very, very basics, food is what gives us energy. No doubt about that. And when we eat some food, first we have to digest it, meaning we have to break it down into smaller pieces. And then we absorb it into the bloodstream. And once it's in the bloodstream, we need to get it into the cell, where it can actually do something. And that's what insulin does. And this is for carbohydrates and for glucose. Once we have it in the blood, it becomes blood glucose. But then we need to get it into the cell. And once it's inside the cell, there's little things called mitochondria there that perform what we call metabolism, which is actually turning food into energy, turning something into something else. And then we get ATP, which is adenosine triphosphate, which is the energy currency. So when we're saying that food turns into energy, it's really all the processes involved that can take this food and turn it into ATP for us. But then the question is, how often do we really have to eat? Because we use energy continuously. So does that mean that we have to eat continuously? Or can we eat intermittently if the body has some way of storing energy for later and retrieving it, then we wouldn't have to eat all the time. And maybe you think I'm being too basic with that question, because of course we can store energy for later. But why then do we have so many beliefs around this that are to the contrary, such as breakfast is the most important meal, that if you don't have breakfast, you're going to perform very poorly, you're going to feel miserable up until lunchtime when you get something to eat. And there's lots and lots of people who don't have breakfast who perform perfectly well. And I'm not saying that nobody should have breakfast, so you can't have breakfast if your metabolism allows that, if you do well with breakfast, then fine, have it. But don't believe that you have to have it, that there's no way for the body to retrieve that energy if you don't eat. And a lot of people say that I feel and you can feel in the blank, I feel lethargic, I feel tired, I feel irritated, and therefore I need to eat. Well, that's not eating to get energy, that's eating to change how you feel, that's emotional eating. And there are people who believe that you should snack every two to three hours to maintain stable blood sugar. They believe that that is the way to stabilize blood sugar is to top it off with food. And the opposite is actually true, that by doing this, you're really teaching your body that you have to do that and you get a lot of ups and downs instead of letting the body retrieve the energy from stores and truly maintain stable energy. And there are people who believe that hunger means you need to eat, that you shouldn't deny your body's signals, which I could buy into if that was true hunger, if that was truly your body looking for nutrients. But most of the time when you say that, then it's not going to be really hunger, but more of a craving again to satisfy some emotional need. So if you believe that we can store energy for later, but you buy into any of these beliefs, then you must also believe that yes, we can store energy, but the body is not able to retrieve it because if you understand that we can retrieve, then these don't make a whole lot of sense. And there's a couple of different types of snacking. The first one is where you eat every two to three hours on purpose because you think that's a good thing to do. You've been told you should have three larger meals and three smaller snacks because that is how you maintain blood sugar. And the other one is the unaware nibbling where you're constantly eating something and you're not really aware of it. It's just kind of there and you're picking at it. And this could be as much as 10 to 20 times per day where you're not really aware of it, but it's just something there so you eat it. And just a few examples could be milk and creamer in your coffee or tea. It could be chewing gum or it could be candy from a bowl. Let's just kind of sitting there at work on the counter or it could be at the checkout counter in a store or even in a doctor's office where there's a bowl there and you don't really think about it, but it's there so you take one or it could even be the chocolate they leave on the pillow in a hotel. And then of course all the people who go around all day with a sippy cup and there's not always just water in there. It could be a soda, it could be tea, it could be one of those coffee drinks that are disguised as sugar bombs. So let's start with the need to top off blood sugar every two to three hours. Is there any validity to that? Well how is blood sugar regulated in the first place? When we leave it alone and it's working, how does it do that? There is one hormone to lower blood sugar, that's called insulin, but then there are four hormones to raise it when we don't eat. So we have glucagon, we have cortisol, growth hormone, and epinephrine or adrenaline. So what this means is that throughout human history we've been very well equipped. It's a very natural process for us to raise blood sugar. It was a rare event when we had to lower blood sugar. There's only one hormone there to do that insulin and it's powerful, it can do it very simply, but we have four hormones because there was a lot of time where we didn't eat, where we couldn't eat so regularly and therefore we need to have lots of tools to bring the blood sugar up. And actually what happens if you eat that often, if you eat every two to three hours, then you are teaching your body away from the natural ways. You're teaching your body to forget about this normal mechanism of raising blood sugar. So eating something every two to three hours is not only unnecessary, it is unnatural. And of course, if you're healthy and you do it once in a while, that's not going to hurt you or kill you or make you sick, but if you believe that's the way we're supposed to do it and you do it every day, year in and year out or for the most part, now you're actually pushing your body out of balance. But there are a lot more beliefs around why we need to eat every two to three hours and one of the most powerful misconceptions is that it is a brain food and it is not the primary fuel. It becomes the primary fuel only when glucose is available and abundant such as in a high carb diet. And now what happens is with a high carb diet, we tend to frequently push blood sugar too high and now blood sugar, blood glucose must be used first. However, if we're not on a high carb diet, if we don't eat every two to three days, like our ancestors, they probably had a pretty good mix between glucose and ketones for brain fuel. And ketones is what allowed us to build the largest most powerful brain of any animal relative to body weight. Because the brain uses so much energy, we could not rely on glucose because if we went without food for a couple of days and we didn't have any food for the brain, if it only relied on glucose, then humans would never have survived. And one more reason, one more misconception that is so common, you've probably heard it, is that snacking helps your metabolism. That by eating frequently, you keep your metabolism up. You burn more calories that way. So this is not true and what they're talking about is probably the thermic effect of food. And what this means is that when you eat something, a portion of the energy in that food is used up to break the food down. So if you eat protein, for example, then if you eat 100 calories of protein, then 20 to 30 calories are used to break down the protein and that generates some heat. And protein is by far the hardest thing to break down. So for the others, stuff it's much less. So carbs, we have 5 to 10 percent and fat is very easy to break down 0 to 3 percent. And here's where people get so confused about this because they believe that because it burns some calories in breaking down food, then that must be a good thing. That means I'm using up calories, I'm generating heat, but it does not actually raise your metabolism. It does not create a lasting effect on your metabolism. It is simply a cost of breaking down and processing the food. And much more important in relative to that belief is that it has nothing to do with frequency. It only has to do with a percentage of the food that you eat. And let's touch on the nibbling throughout the day as well because this is probably emotional reasons. Whether it's undisciplined or unaware or a combination of both, we're doing it because we're bored or we just want something or because it's there. An advertising has a big part in this because advertising for all these snack products, they make you feel like you're not fun or you could have more fun or you could be more popular because the people in these commercials, they're always having so much fun and they're always so popular. But there's also these trends in our society and in marketing where the companies feel like they have to offer something. They have to put that bowl of candy there to do the extra thing, to stand out. And by doing that, they feel like they're improving the customer experience. And then of course, if you're unaware or undisciplined, it becomes very, very easy just dip your hand in there and not really think about it. So now that we understand that snacks are totally unnecessary and usually for all the wrong reasons, let's talk about the benefits of cutting them out for 30 days. So there's some tremendous metabolic benefits. By not snacking, you will actually tap into your body's wisdom and you will start restoring the system of actually regulating blood sugar and truly creating stable blood glucose. And in doing that, you create stable energy and mood. There is also some good potential for weight loss if you cut out the snacks because first you're eating less, you're not eating those unnecessary small meals. So if you're eating three meals instead of three meals plus snacks, now you can start creating a shorter feeding window of 12 hours of eating and 12 hours of not eating, of course, most of that is while you're asleep. But I would strongly recommend that while you do this and while you cut out the snacks, you also go down to two meals a day. And you don't have to do all of this at once. You could cut out the snacks first and then a week later, you'll go down to two meals because now what's happening is it's very, very easy to have a fasting, a non-eating window that is much longer and it's not difficult at all. So if you eat twice a day, eight hours apart, then there's 16 hours that you don't eat. And what that allows you to do is to start creating some growth hormone to increase some growth hormone. You'll also be dropping insulin very powerfully and now you're getting into a fat burning and a rejuvenating state. And with fewer meals, you're going to have fewer insulin spikes. If you have two meals a day, then that's two insulin spikes instead of six. And what happens now, anytime you don't eat insulin is allowed to drop. So you will be reducing and reversing insulin resistance. And by lowering insulin resistance, now you will reduce inflammation. You can lower blood pressure if that's been elevated. And you reduce the incidence or the risk of developing type two diabetes, cardiovascular disease, stroke, and even dementia. By not snacking, you're very likely to improve your gut health. And basically, you're giving it a break and some time to heal. It is hard work for the gut for your digestive tract to process food every time you throw something down there. So if you do that six times a day, the gut never gets a break. If it does get a break, now you can start healing. And one of the main things people have problems with that can heal is a leaky gut. And if you have a leaky gut, you have typically a lot more allergies and sensitivities. So if you can improve that, you have less allergies and sensitivities. And of course, because they create inflammation, now you're going to have much less inflammation in the gut and system wide. And when you give it a break and you give it some time to rebalance, now you will often find an improvement in the bacterial balance between the pathogenic and the beneficial bacteria. And then you will also see another reason for reduction in inflammation. And because the gut is so important for your immune system, you will also probably see an improvement in your overall immune function. And the next one's really interesting because you can get fewer cravings for different reasons. First, you get fewer cravings because you eat fewer meals. Most people don't realize that by eating more meals, you're giving your body the expectation of eating more meals, of eating very frequently. So that's one reason that you would have fewer cravings. You train your body away from it. But the other reason is super interesting because a lot of the cravings that you have may actually be a bacterial imbalance. That if you have too many of the wrong kind of bacteria, what you're feeling is their cravings. They're producing the neurotransmitters that give you the cravings. So if you improve bacterial balance, that's one more reason that you have fewer cravings. But there are even more benefits that a lot of people don't think about. By eating fewer meals, you encourage natural hunger cycles. You're allowing a more natural behavior. And in doing that, you will probably have less hunger overall. But when you do have the hunger, then it's real hunger. It's not an emotional craving. It's real hunger for real food where you want the meat and the potatoes and the salad. You want the solid nutrient dense food. And a lot of people also find psychological freedom. They don't have food, rule them anymore. They don't need that snack. It's a lot of relaxation. It's a rather relief in knowing that you're fine regardless. And if you don't eat all the time, now you're going to have more time for other things. And there's going to be less stress around food. Plus when you do cook, you cook much fewer meals. So now you have more time for those meals to make them quality. And also when you think about it, virtually all snacks are processed foods. And therefore, if you cut them out, your overall quality of food is going to increase dramatically. And then of course, there are some challenges. Not everyone is going to see things the way you do. So there are social habits. We have meetings. We have TV snacks where people expect certain things. And here is one of my biggest pet peeves when people say, "Yeah, yeah, yeah, I get it. I hear what you're saying. I'm going to do it." But my kids still need snacks, right? My kids still need bread. They still need carbohydrate. They still need some of the junk food, right? And then these people said, "Yeah, I'm going to give it a shot." Then they relapse because now there's all this stuff at home. There's the bread and the sugar and the snacks for the kids. But your kids are no different. They need three square meals and they need real quality foods just the way you do more than you do because they're still growing. And unfortunately, a lot of parents feel like they don't want to deprive their kids because they want to have that child experience. And they say, "All their friends eat that junk food. All their friends have that stuff." And sometimes I get a little bit in people's face about this and I'm asking. So you're saying that just because other people hurt their kids, then you need to hurt your kids too. And one of the biggest challenges, of course, is that most snacking is emotional. And it doesn't matter the reason people are bored or they're stressed or they're anxious. They eat to change how they feel. And of course, the eating doesn't fix the problem. It perpetuates the problem. It makes sure that it never goes away. And this isn't easy, but we have to learn to feel good by ourselves without that extra stimulation from food or sugar. And the foundation, of course, is real food. That if you eat real food, if you feel full, if you feel satisfied, if you get your nutrients from the right type of food, that's the foundation. And then if you want the long-term solution to feeling better, to beating, being bored, stressed and anxious, now there are other tools like meditation, like good positive uplifting books and videos. And that is how you start nibbling away at the problem and taking care of it for good. So what can you expect? If you have been eating six times a day, you've had all these snacks and and you decide to cut it out. Well, on the first day, you You may not feel all that great. There could be some challenges like you could have increased cravings because like I said, you taught your body to expect frequent meals and now you cut them out. However, after a few days, now you get the opposite. You get less hunger and you get more stability. On the first day, it's very possible that anytime you change something, your body could react. You may have less energy, but in a few days, you'll probably have more energy. On the first day, you might be a little irritable whereas after a few days, you probably experience a better mood overall. Early on, you might have a little brain fog and later you probably experience a clearer mind. Now, the people who benefit the most from this is people with insulin resistance, with prediabetes or type 2 diabetes because that's all insulin resistance is. Prediabetes is an earlier stage, type 2 diabetes is the full-blown stage. Also people with belly fat or stubborn weight, people with cravings that they constantly give into the only way to get rid of that is to start eating real food at the right time and not so often. Also people who depend on snacks and everyone who says, "I can't do it because you fill in the blank." Because if you cut out the snacks and you sort of conquer that part of yourself, that's when you really stand to benefit. My recommendation is that you go ahead and give it a try. Cut out the snacks for 30 days and start off by telling me how many times you are eating, how many times are you snacking, put it down in the comments. But then I want you to tell me if you take on the challenge and most importantly, if you did, I want you to come back and tell me what happened. Because what happens then is people actually read these comments and this is how you can help me change the paradigm, how people behave and their beliefs about food and health. Because when they see your success, that is when they're going to try it and when they're going to get serious about it. If you enjoyed this video, you're going to love that one. 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