What to Eat When summary

Eat too much and you’ll get fat, right? Well, the science of obesity isn’t quite that simple.

The first thing you need to understand is the blood sugar problem, meaning when you eat too many simple carbohydrates so that your blood sugar spikes suddenly. In response, your body generates a lot of glucose – so much, in fact, that it isn’t able to burn it all as fuel, so it releases a substance called insulin.

Maybe you’ve used the term circadian rhythm in relation to sleeping or fertility, but chances are you’ve never applied it to deciding when to devour an omelet. Well, you should! Aligning your eating with the natural rhythm of your body gets your food working for you rather than against you.

Your biological clock is constantly telling you what to do. It tells you when to sleep and when to eat on a natural 24-hour cycle – that’s the circadian rhythm. At night, for example, your biological clock encourages you to sleep by triggering a small drop in your body’s temperature and an increase in the chemical melatonin, which results in you feeling drowsy.

All too often, we just don’t seem to have time for breakfast in the morning. We wake up, hit the snooze button a few times, check social media, shower and dash out the door. But all the evidence shows that eating more of our calories earlier in the day – ideally, at breakfast or lunch – is a great way to be healthier.

A number of studies show just how damaging it is when we back-load our calories onto the end of the day. One looked at the eating habits of a group of overweight women and found that subjects who ate more at breakfast lost more weight over the course of the study than those who ate more late in the day. Eating more of the day’s calories at breakfast also led to reductions in glucose, insulin and ghrelin, a hormone related to hunger.

Maybe you’re thinking: but how can I make breakfast the biggest meal of the day? There’s only so much toast and granola I can eat!

The answer to that conundrum lies in abandoning the assumptions you hold about food.

All of us need a little guidance when trying something new. So here’s a practical guide to getting started with your new dietary habits.

The key is to start slowly by purposefully shifting things over the course of a month.

Eating is like breathing – we don’t think about it, we just do it.

But that’s a problem for lots of us. We’ve lost touch with food as a sensory experience; we’re taking bite after bite without consideration for what we’re tasting and digesting. That means we’re losing out on a lot of the joy food has to offer. It also means that we’re unconsciously overeating, because we never stop to think about whether we actually need to keep going.

Now you’ve learned the thinking and theory behind improved eating behaviors. But while knowing the theory of something is all well and good, life sometimes gets in the way of our good intentions and commitments.

That’s particularly true when times are tough. All of us know the feeling: you’re tired, stressed or just feeling a little low, and you turn to food for a boost. So how can you make sure that the next time you’re in a tough spot, you reach for the right food?

When you’re at home or at the office, it’s relatively easy to stick to healthy eating habits. But step outside your regular environment and things suddenly get a whole lot harder.

Even just being on the go is a common reason for losing touch with your healthy eating routine. You’ve been dashing between appointments all day, you’ve only got minutes to spare before your next meeting and your stomach’s growling like a tiger. Grabbing a hot dog or a large soda from a convenience store is, well, convenient. But convenience foods are also a fast-track to diabetes. So what to do?

We all want to lead a long, happy life. But we don’t always behave like we do. So ask yourself, are you eating to protect your future health? Or is your diet damaging it?

According to British charity Cancer Research UK, lifestyle changes like maintaining an ideal weight, eating well, reducing alcohol intake, avoiding smoking and staying active can prevent a full four in ten cancers.