"How to Lose Weight With PCOS: Why the Time of Day You Eat Matters For PCOS Weight Loss

Transcription

1 "How to Lose Weight With PCOS: Why the Time of Day You Eat Matters For PCOS Weight Loss By Dr. Beverly Yates Dr. of Naturopathic Medicine, PCOS Weight Loss Expert & Best Selling Author Table of Contents Introduction... 2 How the Time of Day That You Eat affects Your Ability to Lose Weight... 3 If You Have PCOS is it Ok to Eat Late in the Day... 4 Is it Ok to Skip Breakfast... 5 Timing Meals and How it Affects Your Odds of Success... 6 Does Skipping Breakfast Affect Your Odds of Success... 7 The Risks of Eating Before Bedtime... 9 Late Night Snacking What are the Ideal Meal Times The Most Important Thing When It Comes to the Timing of Your Meals What Happens if You Slip Up and Fall Back Into Old Unhealthful Habits

2 Introduction Hi this is your host Ryan and I am here today with our special guest Dr. Beverly Yates. Dr. Beverly is an expert on weight loss and women s health including PCOS weight loss. She has over 2 decades of clinical experience, she is a caring doctor, and a lifelong athlete as well and in her former career as an MIT educated electrical engineer Dr. Beverly was a problem solver and now as a doctor she continues to use that same problem solving skill to help other women solve their weight loss problems and in today s interview, which is part of Dr. Beverly s PCOS Weight Loss Tips series, we are going to be talking about why the time of day that you eat matters when it comes to PCOS weight loss. Dr. Beverly welcome to the call and thanks so much for being here. Hey always my pleasure. Glad to do it. Cool. 2

3 How the Time of Day That You Eat affects Your Ability to Lose Weight So, let s talk in general terms. Does the time of day that your meals are eaten, if you are a woman who suffers from PCOS, does that affect your ability to lose PCOS affiliated weight? You know what yes, yes it does. It really does matter too in a big way. A lot of folks don t know this. In fact many women who have PCOS and who struggle with weight loss related concerns don t realize this key factor. It gets overlooked a lot. For a woman with PCOS who wants to lose weight if she has a hectic day, she is running around, doing lots of things and winds up missing meals she is likely to eat most of her calories late in the day. It is kind of like trying to play catchup from having not eaten enough earlier in the day and this is not good. What a setup that is for constant failure and continued frustration with losing PCOS pounds. 3

4 If You Have PCOS is it Ok to Eat Late in the Day So, if you are a woman who is looking for success with PCOS weight loss can you eat late in the day like an hour before bedtime or less or do you need to eat earlier than that? Oh goodness no. Eating an hour or less before bedtime is a disaster. It s a huge mistake to make and you know what it is really a common mistake too. It is just a no no. In fact in an online survey I am leading at this time I am talking to women with PCOS from all over and I am surprised at how many women don t know about this but think about it. If you take in most of your calories late in the day do you give your body any time really to burn those calories before you go to bed? The answer is no, not really. Eating late in the day leads to weight gain especially gaining fat. Eating late in the day is how you turn on the weight gain switch. If you want to turn the weight gain switch off then eat most of your calories earlier in the day and not at bed time or excuse me not at dinner time. So in other words there are 2 parts here. Shift the calories to the front end of the day to breakfast, lunch, mid-day that is fine and don t have most of your calories at dinner time. Then you want dinner time to be away from bed time. It seems like, I have this visual in my mind and this may be wrong so correct me if it is wrong but it is almost like a calorie enters your body and during the day you give it 2 choices. One is it can be stored as fat, as weight or it can have the option of being burned but if you eat right before bed there is no option to burn it. So the only option for that calorie is what, to be stored effectively. 4

5 Is it Ok to Skip Breakfast So what happens if you are not hungry when you wake up in the morning because I know a lot of women in my life, my wife and my mother we talk about this all the time, I am someone who eats a big breakfast but they are not hungry in the morning. Is it ok to skip breakfast or is that bad? That is bad and for a lot of folks when they first wake up they are not hungry and they go that means I don t need to eat and that is just a big mistake. Its common but it s a problem and it s not ok as a result of a skipped breakfast. The word breakfast is break-fast right because when you haven t eaten over night that is an essential fast for the body. So to break your fast, to have breakfast gets the metabolism going and says hey we are in calorie burn mode we have to fuel our day. You don t need to feel bad about it. It s ok if you are not hungry when you first wake up. If your habit is to eat late in the day though, shortly before going to bed then of course you are going to wake up not feeling very hungry. That is much more likely but once you shift your habits and start eating most of your calories in the earlier part of the day its quite likely that you will start to wake up feeling hungry. Your fast will have been extended for a longer period of time. So the bottom line is this, it is not ok to skip breakfast. This is one of the most common mistakes that all people looking to lose weight make including women with PCOS related weight issues. Skipping breakfast leaves your body without the fuel it needs for the day s activities and it puts your metabolism, which is your ability to burn calories for energy, it puts it behind even as your day begins. You have already started out going backwards if you will. It s the wrong way to start out your day. So I say to folks look, eat breakfast. Prepare it the night before if you have time pressure. Have a clear plan for breakfast and make sure you eat your breakfast you don t skip it if you want PCOS weight loss success. Very interesting. 5

6 Timing Meals and How it Affects Your Odds of Success Now Beverly, I know when you and I have talked in the past you mentioned to me that you get asked a question a lot by the women who are looking to lose weight, suffering from PCOS and that is when they eat late in the day they aren t usually hungry when they wake up. So what happens if they just ignore all the principles you have been talking about timing the meals does it affect their odds of success with PCOS weight loss? Yes indeed it does affect their odds of success. You know PCOS weight loss is tough enough. Why put yourself in further jeopardy of not being able to be successful right. So with that if you ignore those principles you really risk what you are doing. So if you eat late in the day you are probably not going to awaken feeling hungry and that is a typical concept when you are eating late in the day. If you ignore these principals entirely about the timing of your meals you do so at your own peril. You risk continued failure at PCOS weight loss. You may be cheating yourself out of the opportunity to experience success with PCOS weight loss. Such wonderful success. It could be something as straight forward as the simple suggestion that finally makes a difference in losing weight. This is especially true if you are over the age of 38 years old. The thing over the years that I have told people this is the one thing they are like wow now I am finally having some success. It didn t occur to them they couldn t go to bed right after eating a heavy meal and then lose weight right. What a disaster. It doesn t work. Right. It s hard to if you have been used to operating a certain way for years and it just kind of becomes a habit that is ingrained and sometimes the key is you have to find a way to break that habit. Yeah. 6

7 Does Skipping Breakfast Affect Your Odds of Success What about skipping breakfast. Does skipping breakfast affect your odds of success with PCOS weight loss? Oh yeah. That is a great question Ryan. Thanks for asking it. I am a big breakfast eater too and have been for a very long time and yeah skipping breakfast definitely affects your odds of success with PCOS weight loss. Again from the online survey results that I am having and talking to women from all over and working with PCOS sufferers over the years I have learned that quite a number of women with PCOS make this mistake of thinking that following basic weight loss rules that work for most folks will of course, unfortunately based on their experience, not work for them since so much of what goes with having PCOS means that the body has an abnormal response to what usually works for most people right, their strategies for losing weight. So they think this piece doesn t apply. That is a mistake. Skipping breakfast even if you have PCOS weight problems really is a problem. It s important to start your day with energy and eating your breakfast engages your metabolism when it is ready to burn the foods you eat as fuel. Eating breakfast makes it more likely that your metabolism is not, I repeat not, as likely to be in fat storage mode early in the day. Similarly eating late in the day is when your metabolism is likely to be in fat storage mode. That is why you don t want to eat most of your calories late in the day. Doing that is part of the recipe for gaining weight and increasing body fat. Specific herbs and supplements along with some certain nutrition and diet choices, good sleep habits, like we have talked about and will continue to talk about in this pod case series, and other life style elements can help make a PCOS sufferer to really take charge of the weight loss results and make it much more likely if she is going to experience success. Welldeserved success I might add. PCOS weight loss folks work so hard. It is good to be able to get what you are coming for when you want results you know. So I have put together a 7

8 helpful guide called The Ultimate PCOS Weight Loss Herbs and Supplement Guide which covers some of these issues in depth. To sign up for the list or to buy this guide you can go for more information. Anyone listening to this I definitely highly recommend checking that out because we only have a little bit of time today to cover as much as possible and Beverly goes into so much more depth and detail with some step by step instructions and exactly what to do in detail in that guide. So I can t recommend it highly enough. 8

9 The Risks of Eating Before Bedtime So Beverly, are there any other risks that you need to be worried about when it comes to eating lots of food late in the day like just before bedtime? Yes and it s an interesting question too and it has got a surprising answer. So let s check this out. If you eat late in the day you increase the risk of having the following illnesses and diseases. Heartburn absolutely is related to this phenomenon, that s called GERD. It stands for gastro esophageal reflux disease, certainly it follows that. Type 2 diabetes, for some people eating food late in the day particularly with carbohydrate rich is more likely to make that a risk factor for a number of reasons. We won t cover that in this pod cast, we will get into the cross over between PCOS and type 2 diabetes in a different podcast because that absolutely deserves its own moment. That is for sure. Heart attacks, certainly an increase incidence in that case and of course like we have been discussing here weight gain. Relentless kinds of weight gain too and can lead therefore to obesity which can become severe leading to morbid obesity. I have been surprised how many of the women, although maybe I shouldn t be, but of the women who have been responding to online survey a significant number of them saying that they are 100 or more pounds overweight. So they are morbidly obese and it just tells me that these lifestyle elements are every bit as important as the kind of food and the quality of food. All these pieces have to come together so that they really can heal. Otherwise, this goes on. So that is the risk and there are other health problems but those are the most common ones for eating late in the day and you know it s not worth it. Eat your final meal of the day well before your bed time. Ideally it s at least 3 hours before bedtime, it s best to eat your final food for the day even at 4 to 5 hours before you go to bed. 9

10 If you really want to supercharge your weight loss results and have success don t even make it 3 hours before bedtime. Eat your dinner 4 to 5 hours before you go to bed. This simple habit hugely helps with losing weight and this simple habit of eating your final meal of the day well before bedtime is part of what is critical to the success with maintaining weight loss once you have had some success. This is how you take it off, this is how you keep it off. 10

11 Late Night Snacking What advice do you have for someone who is listening to this and they are saying that makes perfect sense, totally understand it, I am on board, eat 4 hours before going to bed. So if you go to bed at call it 11 o clock at night, you eat at 7, don t eat anything else but what happens when you have a kind of hunger strikes where you have got maybe its 8-8:30 maybe 9 o clock at night and you have that urge to have something as a snack. What advice would you have for someone who maybe struggles with that kind of issue? I would say two things. One is to make sure that their dinner is rich in fiber because fiber is so filling and satisfying. So I would absolutely emphasize the vegetables at dinner. You know like have a salad, have steamed or gently cooked vegetables along with a hearty protein. If they are having hunger pangs and that kind of strategy doesn t work maybe they can have some hot tea or ice tea depending on the time of year and where you live either one but something that is fun, its festive, but isn t packed with calories would be usually a way to work with feeling satisfied. Green tea is great for appetite control. The only problem with green tea and really it s a minor one but if you are sensitive here is the deal. If you have a problem with caffeine you just need to know that green tea does contain some caffeine. So use a decaffeinated green tea. In other words if the caffeine is going to keep you up and the sleep loss is going to affect your weight loss right. You go from one problem to the other. So get a decaf green tea or the herbal green teas but otherwise I think that that can really be helpful if you are having those hunger pangs. Don t, whatever you do, give in to the urge to have chips. There is a whole other phenomenon which we have covered a little bit in some other podcasts that if you stay up late, like our sleep related podcasts and then that mini course in the series. You and I talk about what happens if you don t go to bed on time and you stay up later and your body wants you to eat more and it wants you to eat specifically carbohydrates because now one of your hormones, cortisol, is screaming at you. It wants to be fed. 11

12 So if you are listening to this series or if you are thinking about signing up for the series please do. You are going to learn a lot because I really try to explain to people why the carbo, chips, sweets monkey gets on people s back. It is not like you are a bad person or something or you have no willpower. This is actual physiology and biochemistry that is now shifting and you can shift it back but you need to know what is happening. That is part of what I go into in the Herbs and Supplements Guide and why I package it up and made it available as a product so people can actually access it from wherever they are at. Because, once you understand what is going on you can take charge of it. It is hard to take charge of something you don t understand. Yeah, no that is so true. One last little tidbit to mention before we sort of move on here. When you are talking about different teas to try, it is funny I myself am one of these people that struggle with the urge to snack if I am working late at night or something like that and I will tell you what did it for me. What? So anyone listening to this might want to give this a shot. Peppermint tea. Peppermint tea and spearmint tea. Yeah. The reason why is because there is enough flavor in it that it almost fools you that you are having something to eat. It is kind of reminiscent of having like a piece of gum or mints, dessert of some sort. So there is a little bit of flavor to it and for whatever reason that was enough for me to kind of quench that appetite at night and be able to follow Beverly s rules. So it is available usually at the grocery store in the tea section and there is a company out there that sells they call it, I forget the technical term you are going to know this better than me Beverly. It is called, not pharmacological tea but its pharmacopeia quality. There is a certain grade that they describe it. Pharmacopeia, yeah. 12

13 Yeah, pharmacopeia. Exactly. So anyone listening that might be worth a shot. That is a great idea. It s a great idea. 13

14 What are the Ideal Meal Times So, we are talking about ideal meal times. What are the ideal, what is an ideal meal time for eating meals if you want to lose PCOS weight? Yeah let s talk about timing because if you have an idea of what the timing is for eating meals this is another piece of just knowledge that you can then incorporate because it is one thing to know stuff. It s another thing to do stuff. So I want people to know stuff and hopefully motivate them so then they can go do it. So ideally right you are going to get up, you are going to eat your breakfast within about 1 hour of getting up for the day. Now it s ok if you don t eat within 10 minutes of getting up. I don t think that is practical for most people. Some of us are kind of groggy when we first awaken but within 1 hour of getting up is fine. Fuel the day. You want to have a good day, fuel it. Give yourself some energy. So unless you are on a specific exercise plan that requires you to work out just after you wake up and before you eat then the best time is to have that breakfast within the first hour of getting up. For lunch you want to eat that about mid-day. Roughly about 4 to 5 hours after you have eaten your breakfast and by then you should be feeling hungry. That would be normal and make it the most calorie dense meal of the day. It is great for lunch to have the most calories. If you prefer that it is breakfast that is fine. It doesn t have to be lunch but if your lunch tends to be light weight and a lot of people don t, excuse me if your breakfast tends to be light weight and a lot of people don t eat that much at breakfast time make sure you are packing your food calories density into your lunch time. Get it in you then. If you find that eating lunch 4 to 5 hours after eating your breakfast is too long of a stretch for you without eating something and it s going to wreck your plans and now you are going to go and eat ridiculous stuff, it s ok to have a small mid-morning snack. That is fine. Then of course be sure to eat your lunch. Don t skip it. Have a plan for lunch. Then eat your dinner of course like we said before at least 3 hours before bed time but ideally eat dinner 4 to 5 hours before bedtime and this gives your digestive system plenty of time to process your meal before 14

15 you go to sleep. Helps to restore a more normal metabolism that burns your food for energy rather than just stores it as fat and women with PCOS weight loss know how efficient their body is at turning everything they take in into fat. 15

16 The Most Important Thing When It Comes to the Timing of Your Meals So, if we talked for a moment specifically for women and girls that are dealing with PCOS weight issues what is the number one thing that they need to know when it comes to the timing of their meals? Sure. Let s join the real world here with this. I am well aware as a naturopathic doctor that lifestyle elements are huge and that changing habits takes time. It s really true. Changing habits takes time. If you know that you struggle with eating dinner earlier in your day you are going to need to make some changes in order to set yourself up for success. So you are going to consciously have to set yourself up for success rather than accepting failure with this. So if you have a really full crazy day ahead of you bring your dinner with you when you leave your home. That way if work or school or other obligations take longer then you expect you can still eat your dinner 3 to 5 hours before bedtime. There is a traffic jam, whatever is going on. Even if you are not at home at that time. It also helps you to avoid grabbing whatever food is available specifically it is going to be fast easy food late in the day and its likely to be fast food or junk food which will definitely interfere with and probably sabotage your hard won PCOS weight loss goals. So sit down, you write out a week s worth of dinner meal plans for yourself. Do any prep work for your dinner meal the night before so all you have to do is put it together in order to make dinner the next day and just like we discussed be sure to finish eating all of your food for the day by 3 to 5 hours before your bedtime. On the frontend of your day if you know you struggle with eating breakfast, same idea. You want to set yourself up for success. Start by eating 3 to 5 hours before bedtime the night before so that you are more likely to awaken ready to eat. So as I am saying you are preparing for breakfast by making sure you got your dinner in you early enough so that you are hungry for the breakfast. Then you sit down you write out a week s worth of breakfast meal plans for yourself, you do any prep work for breakfast meals the night before so that all you have to do is put it together the next day, that morning in order to make your breakfast happen and if this is making 16

17 sense to you to cook or otherwise prepare your food the night before. So all you have to do is eat it when you wake up great. Now you see the connection between setting in motion the good habits that will make the difference for success. Some breakfasts are pretty simple, you probably don t need to prep them in advance. Others you might need to do that. So making sure if you are going to have eggs as part of your breakfast that you have enough eggs. You are not scrambling around trying to find the eggs. If you want to have chopped onions and parsley and scallions and chives and fennel and other things in your omelet great but do all that topping and prep work the night before so all you have to do is assemble it and put it in your pan and you are good to go. It s so true and the one other thing that you made me think of. It s sort of like the advice that you get when it comes to shopping for groceries. You never want to shop for groceries on an empty stomach because you will buy a whole bunch of junk food but if you shop on a full stomach you will tend to make healthier choices. For me personally I found the same thing to be true with meal preparation that if you prepare tomorrow s meals on a full stomach after dinner or whatever then you are not compelled to go for the quick fix type chips in a bag type thing because your brain isn t thinking like that. So I think the advice that you are giving here is really fantastic. Yeah its calming and if the person listening to this if you are a woman who suffers with anxiety I am telling you this simple set of maneuvers simple, its powerful because now your body, your mind, your spirit knows you got a plan. There is a part of you that relaxes. When you are relaxed you are going to make better food choices then when you are freaked out not knowing what you are doing. Really it makes a difference. You would be surprised. 17

18 What Happens if You Slip Up and Fall Back Into Old Unhealthful Habits So what happens when you kind of, you made some changes in your life, you are on the straight and narrow and then you slip up and you fall back into those old unhealthful habits like whatever it is skipping breakfast or eating dinner late what advice do you have? Well number one right, first here. Forgive yourself, really it s alright. Everyone makes mistakes and we all have different kinds of mistakes we make but all of us make them that is just a given as part of the reality of being a human. Now that you know better though you have to choose to do better. To get right back into the healthful, helpful habits of eating this way so that you can get the results that you so richly deserve. Of course you want to lose excess PCOS related weight and this can really help you if you do it day after day. It s your daily habits that in part help determine your health results. So you take charge of this aspect of PCOS weight loss but make sure you are eating in a way that honors and respects your health needs. You are absolutely worth it. So true. So true. Beverly this was as always fantastic, jam packed with so many useful tips and information. Thank you so much for being here. Oh you are welcome. My pleasure. To learn more about Dr. Beverly Yates and her programs and to get a complimentary free report containing free weight loss tips and secrets all specifically geared for women with PCOS visit pcosweightlosstips.com. Once again that is pcosweightlosstips.com. Thanks so much for being with us here today. Take care. 18