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You’ve probably heard that skipping meals isn’t the best way to lose weight, but it’s certainly a tempting one. Dramatically dropping daily calories can help you drop pounds quickly, but it also deprives your body of needed calories throughout the day and causes your blood sugar to yo-yo. New research out this week has found that all that mayhem may boost your risk of diabetes while making it more likely that you’ll put on belly fat when you do regain the weight.
What happens to my body when I skip meals?
While food has become plentiful in the modern world, it wasn’t always so easy to get. Humans in the past never really knew when their next meal might be, so the body came up with clever ways of keeping itself going until the next source of food arrived. Your body has a short-term reserve and a long-term reserve of energy. The liver and muscles store a short-term reserve of sugar that gets released into the blood stream when your blood sugar levels start to dip hours after a meal. This sugar is an easier energy source for your body to use, but it also takes up too much space to be stored in large amounts. Once a few hours have passed, you switch over to a long-term source: fat. Fat is a denser source of energy, which allows the body to carry more energy in less space so that you can survive days to weeks without food if need be.
When you skip multiple meals, your body switches over to burning fat. The problem is, it also starts to switch into an energy conservation mode as it prepares for starvation. It lowers metabolism and does whatever it can to drop the amount of energy it uses. While you might lose weight initially, your body goes through great lengths to get it back once you hit your next meal. That’s why you rebound so quickly after an extreme diet.
What did this study examine?
This study wanted to see how skipping meals might affect the way people regain the weight they lose and how it might be affecting their body in other ways. They took two groups of mice and put them on a diet. One group got food throughout the day, but only in small quantities. The second group was given the same number of calories in a massive meal once during the day and then didn’t have access to food for the rest of the day. They did this for five days and then went back to a normal diet. The researchers examined the weight of the mice over time and looked at how their liver, blood, and fat stores responded to the changes in diet.
What did the researchers find?
When the diets switched back, the mice that had gorged on food once a day continued to gorge, even though they now had enough food to eat. They regained the weight, but still ended up lower than the mice that had more regular food access. In spite of that, the mice that skipped meals regained their weight around their midsection as opposed to in other areas of the body and actually had more midsection fat than the other mice.
On top of that, the sporadic meals seemed to affect how the body responded to insulin, a key regulator of blood sugar. In those who binge ate their meals once a day, the body was less sensitive to insulin overall. When insulin was released, the parts of the body that took up sugar from blood became skewed. Both changes are signs of early diabetes.
What does this mean for me?
While the study was only done in mice, it reinforces the idea that sending your body into starvation mode is not the best way to lose weight. Starving your body regularly pushes it to rapidly store fat when food is available and it does so in areas of the body that are dangerous for health, like around your belly. The fluctuation can also affect how your body handles sugar, which could increase your risk for diabetes.
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