How to eat and sleep in sync with your Body Clock

Circadian Rhythm: How to eat and sleep in sync with your Body Clock.

Fully awake at 2am and can’t get back to sleep? Mid-day tiredness slumps and a lack of energy throughout the day can be indicators that you are out of sync with your Sleep and Wake patterns: your Circadian Rhythm.

This 24h body clock is engrained into our bodies throughout evolution. Our daily circadian rhythms allow us to function with optimal health, adjusting our biology to the demands imposed by the day/night cycle.
Understanding the relationship between sleep and our digestive system within this cycle is vital. When we eat can be almost as impactive on our health as what we eat.

What is the Circadian Rhythm?
Our body clocks are designed to release certain hormones over a 24-hour period.

• Our digestive hormones are triggered during the day, prompting an appetite to eat to maintain energy and fuel our activities.
• Releasing digestive juices and stomach acid to properly breakdown the food we eat.
• Maximising the absorption of our nutrients for energy production.
• To tell us when we are full. To stop eating!

This all happens most efficiently during the day.

Sleep hormones rise in response to it getting dark, and our digestive hormones slow down. At night, our body is programmed to detoxify, particularly our brains and guts. Substances such as toxins, hormones and dead cells are flushed out of the body, cleansing and protecting it from the brain down. This is not the natural time for processing and digesting food. This is therefore a biological challenge if you eat big meals for dinner, or snack or drink alcohol late into the evening.

Biological impact of eating against the natural circadian rhythm

Eating out of sync, or ignoring your body clock can take the effect of:

• More sluggish digestion, where food can sit around in the intestines for longer and cause gut symptoms of painful bloating, indigestion and wind. Cases of IBS are high amongst shift workers.
• The cells lining our gut are repaired and replaced when given a break from digesting. A break of 10-12 hours is ideal to restore and heal a gut lining that can easily become inflamed from the daily assault on it from processed foods, bacteria, viruses, high sugar intake, alcohol and stress.
• Imbalanced blood sugar; insulin production slows down at night. Insulin helps to take sugar, or glucose out of our blood and into our cells to produce energy. As metabolism slows at night to encourage rest, excess fuel is more likely to be stored as fat. Weight management can be an issue.

Impact on your Health and Behaviour patterns

Living out of sync with our body clock can disrupt your sleep pattern, slow your digestion, give you gut imbalances and can eventually leave you tired, drained, bloated all day. Prolonged imbalance can put you at greater risk of chronic health conditions – type 2 diabetes, obesity, high blood pressure and cardiovascular disease.
As well as affecting our biology, our behaviour can be affected too. When we are tired, we are more likely to make poorer food choices –to lift our mood. Food that will give an instant energy hit. These may not be the most nutritious choices! We tend to favour high carbohydrate, simple sugar foods, we say these have a high glycaemic value, as they give a quick sugar hit – biscuits, cakes, pastries, confectionary, refined, white floury goods. The problem is, we then experience an energy crash.

Benefits of a Circadian and Dietary Balance

Balancing meals that contain some protein, healthy fats and fibre sustain you better and are a great way of keeping the body and mind nourished and our energy balanced. They keep you fuller for longer than the high glycaemic foods.
Choose these types of food:

• good sources of protein (eggs, chicken, fish, nuts, some red meat, oats),
• healthy fats (eggs, oily fish, nuts, seeds, avocado, natural, organic yoghurt)
• half the plate with an abundant variety of vegetables and fruit at every meal to increase your fibre, vitamin, and mineral intake, better even add seasonal variety

This is beneficial whether you have a regular wake/sleep lifestyle. You are less likely to have peaks and troughs of energy if you balance your plates this way. Furthermore, you are less likely to graze on sugary snacks or look to caffeine to keep you going between meals to stimulate energy.
If you have to eat late into the evening or through the night, opt for plant-based foods that are gentler on the gut to digest. Slow-cooked vegetable casseroles, homemade soups and smoothies, herbal teas are so much more beneficial for you than fizzy drinks and fast fried food, however tempting. See these as occasional treats, rather than the norm.

Here are some dinner options by my favourite nutritionist chefs, with wonderful colourful, fragrant and light dishes, that will nourish your body. Amelia Freer, The Doctor’s Kitchen and   Deliciously Ella.

Understanding the relationship between our natural circadian rhythm and food metabolism is a simple and effective way of rebalancing your long-term health.
Back on Track promotes the philosophy of living in sync with nature. This is illustrated not only in their fundamental ethos of the power of movement and nature on your health, but also as advocates of seasonal rhythms – energy, movement and eating patterns

Guest blog written by Anna Earl from Nutrivival. www.nutrivival.co.uk

We are very grateful for our blog collaboration with Anna, a Nutritional Therapist and founder of Nutrivival. For further advice on rebalancing energy and sleep patterns, or to address ongoing health issues contact Anna to book a nutritional therapy consultation at anna@nutrivival.co.uk or call 07950 917091.

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