Master your metabolism

Hormone homework: When you first start to eat every four hours, believe it or not, you might find that you're not very hungry when the four hours are up. But that's the idea—we don't want you to be famished. You want to head off extreme hunger, which is a signal that your blood sugar has dipped too low,  a surefire recipe for cravings and overeating.

Rule 3: Don't eat after nine P.M.—especially carbs
One of the biggest risks of skipping meals during the day is that you then overeat at night. Your body uses calories throughout the day, but any big surplus gets stored as fat. One study in the journal Metabolism found that people who skipped meals during the day and ate a big meal between four p.m. and eight p.m. ended up with some very ominous measurements:

• Higher fasting blood glucose in the morning
• Higher blood sugar overall
• Higher levels of ghrelin
• Impaired insulin response (an indicator of insulin resistance)

Scary, right? Yet so many people I've worked with have done this – work hard all day, ignoring their need for food because they're "too busy to eat." And then, at the end of a long day, they "reward" themselves with a nice, relaxing, diabetes-inducing meal.

Your levels of fat-storage hormone cortisol dip after breakfast and lunch, but not after dinner or evening snacks. Eating more calories during the evening will pack more fat around your belly, where you have more cortisol receptors than other places in your body. Eating the bulk of your calories after dark also sends your bad LDL up and good HDL down.

The rate at which food will leave your stomach—also known as your gastric emptying rate – slows down at night. Plus, your ability to process glucose gets weaker as the day goes on. If you eat a carb-heavy meal at eight p.m., your body reacts much differently than if you eat a carb-heavy meal at eight a.m. The old adage, "eat like a king at breakfast, a prince at lunch, a pauper at dinner" is right on the money—although I'd stick another pauper in there somewhere.

Why you should never eat before bed
The most important thing is not to eat before bed. Muscle-glycogen stores fill during the day's meals. By the end of the day, all the spots in the glycogen stores are filled up. You're not going to be burning any extra calories, or drawing on those glycogen stores, for the better part of seven or eight hours, so any remaining calories you eat now will turn straight into fat.

This part is by far the most important: About one hour after you fall asleep—at about midnight for most people—your body releases its largest pulse of growth hormone for the day. Insulin inhibits growth hormone production, so the last thing you want to do is eat any carbs that will drive up your insulin and interfere with this precious fat-burning growth hormone supply.

Hormone homework: As soon as you have your evening meal, shut the kitchen down and don't head there anymore. Try to make that last meal tilt more toward proteins than carbs, to keep insulin levels down and allow for maximum growth hormone release at night.

Page 3 of 3 -- Jillian shares a shocking statistic on the importance of eating a healthy breakfast. Find out on page 1.

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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.