energy
Eating For Vitality: Metabolic Typing
I have spoken before about the importance of maintaining good blood sugar to feel our best each day. We can take this question one step further, however, and think about how to eat to feel good for the long-term. One of the most common questions we get at the clinic is :"What is the BEST diet?" Well, just as each of us are individuals with different personalities, each of us also has individual nutritional needs. So, while it is good to strive for eating high quality, seasonal, locally produced whole foods, we can also look further into what is best for each of us as individuals.
Metabolic typing is a type of testing that does just that. This in-office test looks at a variety of factors, including blood sugar, urine, saliva, and blood pressure, to determine how your body individually responds to the food you put in it. We also look at an array of subjective factors to determine what eating style helps you feel your best. After the testing is complete, we compare all this information to how you currently eat and come up with an individualized plan to meet your long-term nutritional and health needs.
Feel free to ask Dr. Rosen for more information!
Balancing Blood Sugar to Feel Your Best
It's a common story: "I wake up early for work feeling tired so I have a cup (or three) of coffee with milk and sugar to wake up, and a bagel or a donut for breakfast. Work is busy so I don't stop for a break until 1pm, and then I have some chinese takeout or a piece of pizza for lunch. At 3pm I'm falling asleep at my desk so I have a diet soda and grab a couple pieces of candy out of the jar at work. I go home and make something quick for dinner and watch some TV, then go to bed. By 2am I wake up and can't fall back to sleep until 4am so I wake up exhausted the next day and start over..."
For many of us, this cycle of stress, fatigue, and compensation for the two with marginal food choices becomes a self-perpetuating cycle. When we're tired, we often go for caffeine, sugar, and refined carbohydrates (like those in bagels, pizza, and noodles) to boost our blood sugar for a temporary feeling of increased energy. The down side is that when we spike our blood sugar quickly, it will not be maintained and will crash again a few hours later, resulting in greater fatigue. Also, when we eat infrequently the blood sugar will crash and again we will feel exhausted. Additionally, when we eat early in the evening, by the middle of the night many people will wake because they are hungry and not be aware of it, which can keep us up for a couple of hours and make us more fatigued the next day.
The simplest way to combat this cycle and improve energy throughout the day and stay asleep at night are to follow a few easy rules:
1. Eat protein and fiber with every meal. This slows the rate at which food enters the bloodstream which prevents the blood sugar from getting too high or too low.
2. Eat Frequently, preferably every 2 to 3 hours throughout the day. You do not need to increase overall caloric consumption, sometimes breaking up a meal in to two separate snacks works great.
Staying Energetic Through the Inward Pulls of Autumn
By recognizing our patterns ahead of time, we have the ability to prevent falling into those cycles that cause us to feel exhausted.
Heading into the new school year is a good time to set our intentions for how we want to live in the months ahead. Especially here in Alaska , summertime leads us to focus on the outside world. Our energy goes towards producing and gathering food, enjoying the sunshine, and keeping the body active. As the seasons shift towards fall, however, that energy moves inward. As the light fades, our focus shifts towards school, work, and interpersonal relationships. Stresses may increase as work hours augment, schoolwork piles up, and we suddenly have to juggle more activities into a busy schedule.
Each of us has a pattern of how we act and react to stress, and these patterns can cause the body to get out of balance. Stress is of critical importance to our survival. From an evolutionary standpoint, exposure to stressors enforces that we are perpetuating the strongest and most fit members of our community. On a less philosophical level, moderate levels of stress keep us motivated and engaged, and the body is built to perform optimally when there is a balance of stressors and relaxation. However, our cultural standard is focused on rewarding productivity, and often relaxation is viewed as laziness. In this context, that balance can be easily discarded or lost.
We all know what it means to feel out of balance, but what is actually happening physiologically? Depending on your pattern, there are a number of ways that imbalance can manifest itself in the body:
The body’s first reaction in a stressful situation is to produce the hormones that have historically allowed us to survive. This means that when our ancestors ran into the bear, their bodies released hormones (epinephrine and cortisol) that allowed them to run fast, jump high, and see well. Epinephrine, or adrenalin, increases the heart rate, brings blood to our muscles, dilates our pupils, and opens our airways to bring in plenty of oxygen. Cortisol quickly mobilizes our fat stores and turns them into glucose to feed the brain and muscles. These hormones are very important for surviving the run from the bear; however, these are released with any stressor. This means that if we become angry with a coworker, feel pressed for a deadline, are running late for a meeting, or are too tired from lack of sleep, our adrenals will produce epinephrine and cortisol.
