Day 29 - Awake Eating Improves Insulin Sensitivity!

As an adjunct to my post yesterday of, The True Meaning of a Calorie, I was just emailed by a colleague an amazing study that demonstrates the power of relying on our own internal body wisdom rather than external cues (like calories).

It is well known in the health world that dietary restraint (which is what most Americans use as the primary method of altering body composition) actually has a 95-98% failure rate. This means that dieting, counting calories and eliminating and restricting certain types of foods is not working. The researchers in this study wanted to figure out if teaching basic skills about hunger awareness could reap benefits in blood sugar and beyond. Of course I am interested. Awake, intuitive, conscious eating has a power that I have seen bypass any external method or program.

This study, published in the Journal of Nutrition and Metabolism, was designed to assess whether training a group of subjects in the skill of identifying initial hunger would prove effective in regulating eating patterns and improving blood sugar markers. In previous studies it had been shown that waiting for hunger before eating was associated with a significant decrease in energy intake.

The basic criteria was training individuals to understand the feelings of hunger. The subjects were asked to only eat when they could identify true physical signs of hunger. The subjects reported that their hunger came in the form of gastric pangs, sensations of emptiness and hollowness and mental or physical weakness. Through many methods of identifying physical hunger, the subjects at the end of the study were using only the subjective sensation alone of initial hunger as when to begin a meal. 

In the trained subjects, significant decreases were found in insulin sensitivity index, insulin and BG peaks, glycated haemoglobin, mean pre-meal BG, standard deviation of diary BG (BG as recorded by subjects' 7-day diary), energy intake, BMI, and body weight when compared to control subjects. In other words, the subjects trained in listening to their bodies (rather than trained in the diet mentality alone) ended up eating less, losing weight and having a healthier blood sugar and cardiovascular profile over the five month period than those who didn't.

Here is a link to a table showing the effects: http://www.hindawi.com/journals/jnume/2010/286952.tab2.html

The more that we attune to our naturally embedded biological signals of hunger, fullness and satisfaction, the closer we become to our natural, unlimited state of health.

Nat

Mario Ciampolini, David Lovell-Smith, Riccardo Bianchi, et al., “Sustained Self-Regulation of Energy Intake: Initial Hunger Improves Insulin Sensitivity,” Journal of Nutrition and Metabolism, vol. 2010, Article ID 286952, 7 pages, 2010. doi:10.1155/2010/286952