Should Women Eat Before Morning Exercise? Cortisol Spike Explained

thinking about fueling and I think this is a really important part and you also talk about ear early cortisol spikes and that it's really important for women to eat something. Now if you're exercising first thing in the morning that becomes super easy. — Yeah. Not it's a little bit more complicated. So can we start by talking about the cortisol spike? — The difference between waking up and exercising versus waking up and not exercising and a cortisol. I think your advice that I understand is that early in the morning our cortisol goes up which is not great because cortisol is something that is going to help us put on abdominal fat and in order to counterbalance that we want to eat something. But then other people say yeah but you don't want to be eating first thing in the morning because that's when we're more sensitive to glucose. And a lot of other people as well say oh but I feel really sick in the morning. My point is if you feel really sick is that's probably your cortisol levels that are really high because that's what happens when your cortisol levels are really high. — Exactly. Yeah. We have a as natural cortisol awakening response. So if we are looking at what's happening a half an hour before we naturally wake, cortisol starts to come up and then it peaks a half an hour after we're awake. So what happens with that? There's an interplay between our appetite hormones primarily isolated gerolin which is our hunger hormone and peptide y which is a satiation hormone right so if we are not eating then we have a little bit of a disregulation of that so many women say I'm not hungry first thing in the morning I don't want to eat first thing in the mornings once you start having something small then you're able to polarize those appetite hormones your body's like hey great I'm working with my circadian rhythm I'm awake. I need to fuel. Okay, I'm going to be able to pull fuel in. I'm more sensitive to glucose because I've been sleeping all night and I need it. My insulin resistance isn't as high as it is in the afternoon. So, let's have some carbohydrate. Let's have a little bit of protein. Let's go. What we see when people don't eat is we have a little bit of that disconnect of our peptide y and isolated gerolin and it perturbs the hypothalamus. So, we start to get into more of a kind of a lucid state, I guess, is the best way to say, with your appetite, where you're not really hungry, but you feel a bit flat. And we see this leads into the wall lean in the afternoon in women where we tend to be really hungry for simple carbohydrates. We don't move as much during the day. We tend to lean more on things in the afternoon because we don't have as much energy to stay up. And then in the evening when dinner time comes, it's I'm so hungry. I'm going to eat everything. So if we're backing it up and looking at circadian rhythm, we want to work with our circadian rhythm. And ours is different than men's where we see we have our cortisol that comes up. We have our hormones that pulse throughout the day, including cortisol. So if we're working with that, we have appetite hormone control. If control through the hypothalamus, then we also end up with less stress and less inflammation. And these are really critical factors for women's bodies as we get older and lose estrogen. We need to do whatever we can to drop that systemic inflammation in order to get the signal to let's build lean mass and bone and drop body fat. — And am I right in understanding as well that if we don't eat first thing in the morning, essentially we start using our muscle as a bit of an energy source, which is really counterintuitive. — Exactly. Yeah. Because our body is okay. There's no fuel coming in. I'm awake. I'm ready to go. I'm gonna start using or tapping into the most energy hungry tissue and that's lean mass. — And I guess for people who aren't sleeping very well, this creates a problem because your cortisol level is high at nighttime, but you don't really want to be getting up and having a snack in the middle of the night. So, — no. No, you don't. So, there's two things here with the poor sleep. We see a lot of women who are trying to lose weight end up with lots of hypoglycemic responses at night. And these are small awakenings through the night. So if you're someone who's I'm trying to lose weight, I'm doing calorie a little bit of a calorie deficit, but I'm having really poor sleep, then let's go with 150 mil of non-fat Greek yogurt before bed and see if that improves your sleep. Why? Because it has protein, both whey and casein. It has potassium. It has magnesium. It has a whole bunch of things that help you sleep and it's really easy to digest. So, it won't interfere with that rest or digest. If you still have lots of awakenings even with that, then we know that it's not hypoglycemia. We have to look at sleep hygiene and how are we going to improve parasympathetic responses. So, we want a cool room. We want to do all the things that we're we learn about, right? No phones in the room, no screens, trying to reduce blue light, reducing stress, but also looking at using things like eltheanine because this in works with

the brain's GABA system to improve parasympathetic response. So there are things that we can take that's going to help us sleep. The other thing that we see with sleep deprivation is a lot of attention span deficits in the day, the next day. And we're seeing in the literature that's when the brain is actually doing its cleansing that it normally would do while you're sleeping. So if we're like I'm having a lot of attention span deficits, my quality of sleep wasn't great. Then we need to look at what is our sleep hygiene. Maybe it is a case where sleep is so interrupted you're not having any kind of metabolic control your quality of life is out the window. Then maybe you are going to look at using some menopause hormone therapy to help with the sleep. So there's so many things around sleep that's so important that I tell people you need to nail sleep first to get any other kind of change. — Another thing is the community involvement, right? Because we know isolation is a killer. And one of the aspects of isolationism is that you don't sleep well — because you haven't had the queue in or any kind of dopamine release from being with your friends or out in nature. So it's community and sleep so important. — Perfect. And so in terms of fueling before we exercise, we want a little bit of protein and carbohydrates. Correct? Not a massive meal. You don't have to worry about having a massive meal. Like I think my protein coffee thing went viral because people asked what I did. Like I put in double espresso and some almond milk and good to go with some protein powder. It's my protein and carb and then I'll have real breakfast when I get home. Some people will have half a banana because that's all they can handle. Some people will have a little bit of a protein shake and then other people are like, I'm having a whole piece of toast and a boiled egg. So, it depends on what you can stomach. But, as long as you're having a little bit of food coming in, help drop the cortisol, help with appetite, hormone regulation, you're good to go. — Perfect. And is that the same for So, for me, I do my hardcore exercise in the morning, but then I will easily go for a 30hour walk later on in the afternoon, and I don't consider that to be exercise. And then I think, should I be fueling that? It doesn't really feel like exercise. It just feels like moving my body. — Yeah. So, when we're looking at first thing in the morning, and most of us who are time crunch will get up and do things first thing in the morning, that's the critical factor. If you've been sleeping or you haven't had food all night, and you're pretty low in all your stores, you need to eat something before and after exercise, especially if it's hardcore. And then you go through your day and you're like, "Okay, I had breakfast, I had morning tea, I had lunch, and now I'm going to go for an afternoon walk. " You don't have to fuel for that because you've had food throughout the day. If you do your hardcore exercise and you only have a little bit of food afterwards and you have this big hole in the middle of the day and then you go for your walk, you're going to become hypoglycemic during your walk and it's going to be counterintuitive. So, you do want to have something before. So it's not necessarily exercise from a training perspective, but it is using fuel to move your body. So it's a little bit of a nuance. For most people, having that regular food after their exercise and eating normally throughout the day, going for a walk in the afternoon isn't just a whatever. It's just let go. If walking is your primary form of exercise, you're going to be pushing hard and you're doing that in the afternoon, then yeah, you probably will need to snack before. — Perfect. And I think from my understanding of the literature and what you say, what we really want to be doing is having a big breakfast after exercise if that's when we've done our exercise, then a reasonably big lunch and then a light supper and then ideally resting before we go to sleep. Resting our gut Unless you're not sleeping well, then you can have your low-fat Greek yogurt. — Yes. Exactly. Because that's also how our circadian rhythm works. And we're looking at when our body's most sensitive to carbohydrate. Yes. first thing in the morning because their body is going, I need to get some glucose into my cells. And then as the day goes on, we become a little bit more insulin resistant. So, we want protein at every meal. We want to eat at regular intervals, but we do want to make sure that we're not having food 2 to three hours before bed, unless you're having problems sleeping.