At some point in the mid-2000s, grazing entered the nutritional lexicon as an agent of weight control. It was intuitive: if you never let your stomach get too full, then you would stop putting on weight. Bulk in the diet, a full stomach, eating to satiety, was fingered as a proximate cause of weight gain. So, eat a little, every few hours.
Don’t eat three big meals, don’t ever allow yourself to feel stuffed full. Stay on three-quarters of a tank, always a little bit empty. The argument: you’ll ingest fewer weight-relevant calories from six small meals spread through the day than from three big meals at concentrated points. Again, it was intuitive: if you eat until you feel full, you are probably going to eat too much. Better never to feel quite full, while eating again and again to avoid feeling too empty.
Intuitive medicine.
Centuries ago, it was intuitive that illness was caused by bad blood, an imbalance of the humours. Treatment was obvious: drain the bad blood from the body. The human body, seeking well-being, would expel the bad blood first if given an opening, a channel by which the bad blood could be removed. From there it was a short step to leeches.
Today we quite rightly regard bloodletting with horror. And the more you know about physiological science, or the deeper your training in medicine, the greater your horror at the thought of deliberately causing blood loss in a patient fighting for survival. Today, instead, we give blood transfusions to the ill and ailing—the exact opposite of what knowledgeable “doctors” recommended less than two centuries ago.
I predict that grazing—constant snacking spread through waking hours, with the goal of weight loss—will one day be regarded with the same scientific horror as bloodletting.
Research on insulin suggests that with each ingestion of food other than pure fat, insulin spikes. Each insulin spike provides means to sweep up any surplus food energy and store it as fat. Worse: unceasing endlessly repeated insulin spikes tend to raise the baseline insulin level (insulin resistance). Sustained higher insulin levels produce more sustained efforts by the body to store available food energy as fat.
Grazing, then, would be the exact opposite of intermittent fasting. The constantly fed body stays on the glucose economy. There is never a need to tap stored fat for energy because new food energy is constantly being delivered as you graze. Since stored fat is never tapped, it can only accumulate.
“Stored fat can only accumulate.” You know what that means.
With intermittent fasts—gaps in eating of twelve, sixteen, twenty-four hours, or more—a long gap in time separates insulin spikes. Insulin resistance decreases or disappears. During the fasting hours readily available glucose is not present; and the body responds as evolution imposed, tapping stored energy resources, since no new energy appears to be arriving.
“Tapping stored energy resources.” You know what that means: stored fat gets burned.
Moral:
You cannot lose weight if you are being constantly fed.
A patient cannot heal if their blood is being drained repeatedly.
Grazing ~ bloodletting
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