Master your metabolism

Hormone homework: Eat as early as is feasible, no more than an hour after waking up. Grab a quick bowl of high-fiber cereal or an apple with a handful of raw almonds before your workout. The sole exception to breakfast within an hour might be those taking thyroid medication—some kinds must be taken on an empty stomach, others after breakfast. Check with your doctor about the best timing for your medication and meals.

Rule 2: Eat every four hours
Let me rephrase: You must eat every four hours. I planned the diet this way not only because eating often makes me happy but because I know it makes my metabolism happy, too. You not only don't have to live with a rumbling stomach—you shouldn't!

When you eat meals spaced four hours apart, your body doesn't get a chance to miss food, so it doesn't develop a scarcity mentality. If you feed your body every four hours, you'll prevent the massive fat storage that comes from feast-or-famine eating. The act of eating and digesting accounts for 10 per cent of your body's metabolic rate. Starve yourself for any portion of the day and you cheat yourself out of a good portion of this bump. The most important part of eating regularly is that it stabilizes your blood sugar and your hormones: Your blood sugar remains steady throughout the day, and because your meals are smaller, your insulin does not spike as dramatically. The body trusts that there's more where that came from, so it happily burns your meal for energy, confident that you'll feed it more later.

Additionally, by eating every four hours you keep your hunger hormone ghrelin in check and keep your leptin levels stable. These two hormones are to blame when you skip meals, become ravenous, and are much more likely to over eat. In fact, ghrelin does its job so well that when it's surging in your blood stream, it can actually make food taste up to 20 per cent better.

On the other hand, the popular concept of six small meals throughout the day is also less than ideal. You don't need your insulin surging on a constant basis by eating nonstop. Body builders developed this style of eating to squeeze thousands upon thousands of calories into their day. (How it became a weight-loss trend is beyond me.) Many of them developed type 2 diabetes later on in life. Coincidence? I think not. Eating every four hours is a perfect formula for hormone balance – it keeps insulin stable, but doesn't spike hunger hormones, either.

Page 2 of 3 -- On page 3, Jill outlines "Hormone homework" that will prevent cravings and overeating.

---

Excerpted from Master Your Metabolism, copyright 2009 by Jillian Michaels and Mariska van Aalst. Used by permission of Random House. All Rights Reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced except with permission in writing from the publisher.