Anybody else notice this? My energy levels are tanked and my daily productivity is way worse if I have breakfast or lunch. The only way I can stay energized is if I have a single meal at dinner with zero feeding during the daytime.
Is this because of insulin spiking? It happens even when I’m doing keto
Have been eating one meal in the evening for over 10 years for exactly that reason.I’m so much more productive.
1 Liter of Green Tea in the morning. 2-3 Liters of water throughout the day. Then the meal once all work is finished.
Wow, I was just going to talk about insulin, but I read your last line.
I’m stumped. I would have guessed it doesn’t happen on keto. About the only suggestion I have is see if you can narrow it down to specific foods, or see if certain foods are worse than others for you.
There’s two things going on. One is exactly insulin - but not because of it spiking, but when you run out of glycogen after it spiked. Glycogen is very easy to be converted to energy, so that’s why you feel a “sugar rush” after eating sweets and what not. But after the storages in your liver are depleted, it takes a while for your body to reduce insulin levels and start using fat reserves instead.
Another thing that is happening is that digestion is actually a very intense process. When you fast for 16ish hours, your body has nothing else to digest, and this is not something that we are used to (we have been feeding ourselves every 3 hours for a lifetime). This is true with keto especially - digesting fats and protein heavy meals is particularly tough, so your body spends a lot of energy doing it.
Thermic effect of feeding: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31021710/
Depending on what you eat your body needs to put in energy to digest. The bigger the meal, the more energy required.
There could also be insulin sensitivity and metabolic syndrome at play.