Honey Diet - A spoonful of honey before bed will help burn off fat while you sleep

[ArabMuscle]

An old article I came across. No idea if it's true.

Sweet dreams of a new slimline start to the year









A spoonful of honey before bed will help burn off fat while you sleep.
Published Date: 10 January 2005

http://news.scotsman.com/atkinsdiet/...new.2593781.jp



By RUTH ARMSTRONG
HEALTH REPORTER

IT advocates the two things that most dieters avoid - eating at bedtime and ducking the gym.
But the hibernation diet promises to help people lose weight while they sleep.

The strategy, developed by an Edinburgh pharmacist and sports nutritionist, is said to be used by champion boxer Alex Arthur and endorsed by Olympic gold-winning cyclist Chris Hoy.

The diet, hailed as the new Atkins, advises eating a couple of teaspoons of honey before bedtime and training with weights instead of gruelling aerobic workouts.

While Mike McInnes and his son Stuart were helping athletes with nutrition, they discovered that eating fructose-rich food such as honey, helped burn fat and increase stamina.

They also found that the best time to burn fat is while you are asleep - you burn more fat sleeping than doing anything else, including exercising.

When you eat fructose, it is converted to glucose in the liver. This stabilises blood sugar levels and allows the body to activate recovery hormones which rebuild muscle and skin cells.

These hormones are fuelled by fat, so rather than working to regulate blood sugar, when you eat honey before going to bed the body burns more fat.

Mr McInnes, who runs health shop Iso Active in South Clerk Street, said: "The key time for fat burning is in the first four hours of sleep when we go into slow-wave sleep.

"This switches on the pituitary gland and out of that comes a series of hormones that break down and use fat as fuel.

"Take your liver to bed empty, and your body can’t get to work with those hormones because it’s desperately trying to sort out your blood glucose levels.

"So stabilising your blood glucose at night by fuelling up your liver - honey is the key - allows that recovery to take place as it should.

"We also discovered that athletes who were using our liver fuelling strategy were reporting that their appetite was controlled much better."

A good night’s sleep is important to allow the hormones to get to work, so the diet advocates sleeping in total darkness, getting rid of electronic lights and thin curtains.

You can also increase the amount of fat you burn by doing what is known as resistance exercise.

But instead of having to spend hours on the treadmill and in aerobics classes, this can be done with 15-minute weights sessions three times a week, according to the diet.

With resistance work you stress a muscle, you damage it and then the body repairs it while you are sleeping by mobilising fat.

Unlike aerobic exercise, it only requires 15 minutes weight training a session to reap the benefits, Mr McInnes claims.

He is currently working on two books - one aimed at athletes and one which will detail the "Hibernation Diet".

Chris Hoy goes to Mr McInnes for nutrition advice and started using fructose drinks to increase his endurance.

He will endorse the sports book when it is published, while boxer Alex Arthur uses the liver-fuelling strategy to improve his stamina.

Mr McInnes believes low blood sugar led to Paula Radcliffe crashing out of the Olympic marathon - because she didn’t fuel up with fructose.

He said: "We know it’s revolutionary because we see the results we have had for athletes. It is a whole new approach as the liver is the organ that all the sports literature misses out. The sports establishment don’t like us because we are coming at it from an angle they haven’t thought of."

Last Updated: 10 January 2005 1:23 PM

• Source: Edinburgh Evening News
• Location: Edinburgh
• Related Topics: Atkins diet , Obesity

[ArabMuscle]

Hibernation Diet Links Sleep and Obesity

The recent revolutionary Hibernation Diet created by a British pharmacist and a nutrition expert caught my attention by making a powerful connection between poor sleep and obesity. It advocates incorporating mild resistance exercise and a healthy, balanced, and wholesome diet void of highly refined, processed foods such as white bread, pizza, burgers, chocolates, beer and sugar, and suggests taking a generous spoonful or two of honey at night, either as a warm drink, a smoothie or straight from the jar.



This fascinating honey hibernation diet promises to help us sleep and lose weight at the same time by using our biology and working with our bodies, rather than against them – “recovery biology”. A new approach to fat metabolism, it requires no straining from aerobics exercise, no wearing out on a treadmill and no pounding it out in the gym.

Sounds too easy, too miraculous or too far-fetched to be believable?
Natural honey when taken prior to bed is believed to be able to fuel the liver, speed up fat-burning metabolism, ease stress hormones and help us get a better night's sleep. This oldest natural sweetener also contains a wide variety of vitamins, including vitamins B6, B1, B2 and B5, and minerals such as calcium, copper, iron, magnesium, manganese, phosphorous, potassium, sodium and zinc, anti-oxidants and amino acids, the building blocks of proteins.
This is what I learnt about the Hibernation Diet: due to its 1:1 ratio of fructose to glucose, honey is the most ideal food that can provide a fuelling mechanism for the body at night, keeping blood sugar levels balanced and letting your recovery hormones get on with burning fat stores. This proposition that honey reduces blood glucose level was published in the Journal of Medicinal Food in April 2004. However, to most people, eating before bedtime, in this case eating sugars seems to defy common sense. Moreover, eating late at night is often discouraged by many people who believe that during bedtime, metabolic rate is low and the body cannot burn calories and would easily put on weight. Being a honey enthusiast, I naturally wanted to know more about how the hibernation diet works scientifically for the good of the body.
I read that when sugars are absorbed from the gut into the blood they are first absorbed by the liver, which is the only organ in the human body with the fructose enzyme to process this sugar. In the liver the fructose is converted into glucose, stored as liver glycogen or human starch, and released only if and when blood glucose falls.
Fructose also triggers the glucose enzyme in the liver allowing the liver to take in as much glucose as it requires. This has been referred to as the Fructose Paradox. In other words, fructose lowers the Glycemic Index of glucose; fructose enters the liver and opens the gate for glucose entry preventing a rapid rise in blood glucose. This natural blood glucose regulator found in fruits, vegetables and honey, regulate blood glucose levels and stabilize blood glucose to maintain a regular supply of glucose to the brain.


Some simple questions that the hibernation diet expert asks to check if the liver has fuelled up well for the night:

- Do you wake regularly during the night?
- Do you have night sweats?
- Do you experience acid reflux during the night?
- Do you get up to go to the bathroom during the night?
- Do you feel nauseous in the early morning?
- Do you wake up exhausted?
- Do you have a dry throat in the morning?
- Do you get night cramps?
- Do you feel weak in the early morning?

If “yes” is the answer for any of these questions, it could mean that instead of burning fat and repairing muscles, your body has produced a stream of stress hormones while you've slept.
The hibernation diet also goes on to explain how fructose in honey fuels the brain which is the most energy demanding organ, burning up to 20 times the fuel of any other cell in the body. We become exhausted after having to concentrate for a lengthy period. That’s why we often hear that mental exhaustion is worse than physical exhaustion. The brain needs glucose to survive, however glucose occupies a large amount of storage space and there is no room in the brain. And the liver is the only organ that can both store and release glucose into the circulation. This is why looking after your liver glycogen amount by ensuring that the liver and the brain are well provided for both in the day and at night is so critical. Any fall in blood glucose is detrimental for the brain. The adrenal glands to be activated and the adrenal hormones if overproduced can lead to conditions such as heart disease, osteoporosis, obesity, diabetes, poor immune function, depression and other distressing health problems.

What I find inspiring to read is that we burn an amazing 70% fat during rest, 35% during low level exercise, 20% during moderate exercise, and a low 10% during intense exercise. During sleep we should burn fats. However, if the liver is not fuelled prior to bed, we release stress hormones from the adrenal glands which raise our heart rate and blood pressure. These hormones instead of burning fat, degrade muscle and bone. The liver must deliver 10 grams of glucose every hour -- 6.5 to the brain, 3.5 to the kidneys and red blood cells. As the liver capacity is only 75 grams, most people go to bed with a depleted liver, activating the adrenal glands and do not recover. And if you do not recover you do not burn fats. The hibernation diet essentially aims to encourage people to reap the benefit of your body's own natural recovery system and optimize their recovery biology or fat burning biology, as explicitly termed by the author who believed that this diet is not only to a healthy weight but unlocking energy resources you never know you had. So, if you interested to have a more in-depth account of this honey diet, check out the book "The Hibernation Diet" in which you will find details of the suggested diet plans for breakfast, lunch and dinner, and the different types of resistance exercises described in clear steps.





A Honey Fan Wrote...

A regular visitor of Benefit of Honey wrote to me and shared about his positive experience in using the hibernation diet and I am excited to post it here for all(with his permission of course!):

"I have been practising the hibernation diet for twenty months, and I'm still getting a wonderful effect on weight loss. All I exactly have to do is to consume honey one hour before bed as well as to have healthy meals everyday. I usually take two tablespoonful of honey or three and literally "it works while I sleep". I weighed 85.6kg at the beginning of November in 2006 when I began this diet. After twenty months, my weight hovers around 70kg these days. I lost about 16kg without doing any exercises in only twenty months! It's amazing! In addition it helps me get up immediately in next morning by taking honey before bed. Fueling the liver with honey before bed is really beneficial. Also, I happened to take a blood test half a year before I started the diet, the amount of triglyceride or neutral fat in the blood was 585mg/dL. It was a shocking value. And recently I took a blood test again. The result showed that the amount of neutral fat has drastically dropped to 157mg/dL in only two years! I believe it is an effect of the hibernation diet.
When it comes to the meals, I usually have a slice of toast, a vegetable salad, and of course honey as a toast spread almost every morning. And for dinner I often have the Japanese style meal, which may somewhat be traditional, mainly rice, vegetables, fish, tofu and so on.
Among other benefits, I was able to integrate this diet very easily and comfortably as part of my lifestlye and the best thing is I could actually continue with the diet for so long. What I do to lose weight and stay healthy is to just consume honey before bed!"

Fumi, Japan

[Triple-H_2005]

Horse shit.

Only thing that would be more entertaining than this "science" would be a Vince Goodrum Bee Pollen advertisement.

This is not directed at the OP, just the educated idiot that originally penned this drivel.

[ArabMuscle]

Horse shit.

Only thing that would be more entertaining than this "science" would be a Vince Goodrum Bee Pollen advertisement.

This is not directed at the OP, just the educated idiot that originally penned this drivel.

No offense bro, my thoughts exactly. Couldn't find any legit and recent studies on the claims above.

[jtg987]

ill stick with my acv

[Justin198922]

We need Dave'sconfirmation to be 100% sure, but I'm agreeing with u fellas.

[retwa]

We need Dave'sconfirmation to be 100% sure, but I'm agreeing with u fellas.

You're incapable of thinking for yourself? How do you know what to wear each morning without e-mailing Dave first?

[doubleogordo]

you never know...

[MITM]

you never know...

I'm no scientist .. but isn't honey loaded with sugars? Why would anyone want to take a massive carbhit before going to bed? Wouldn't that only turn into fat by morning-time?

I mean it's bad enough we're catabolic during the night, but the risk of fat-gain seems like adding insult to injury.

I wish Jumbo Palumbo would weigh in on the honey-before-bed argument, but he's friggin busy as hell -- so prolly not.

[ArabMuscle]

I'm no scientist .. but isn't honey loaded with sugars? Why would anyone want to take a massive carbhit before going to bed? Wouldn't that only turn into fat by morning-time?

I mean it's bad enough we're catabolic during the night, but the risk of fat-gain seems like adding insult to injury.

I wish Jumbo Palumbo would weigh in on the honey-before-bed argument, but he's friggin busy as hell -- so prolly not.

Agreed. Nonetheless, I couldn't find any recent studies on this. I mean, this says what it wants us to hear it says, yet it seems too much of a risk.

[doubleogordo]

I'm no scientist .. but isn't honey loaded with sugars? Why would anyone want to take a massive carbhit before going to bed? Wouldn't that only turn into fat by morning-time?

I mean it's bad enough we're catabolic during the night, but the risk of fat-gain seems like adding insult to injury.

I wish Jumbo Palumbo would weigh in on the honey-before-bed argument, but he's friggin busy as hell -- so prolly not.

did you read the above article? a tablespoon or two is not a "massive carbhit."

[Yolo]

Take your liver to bed empty, and your body can’t get to work with those hormones because it’s desperately trying to sort out your blood glucose levels.

lol @ this

[Pheedno]

been using a tablespoon of honey a day for years to prevent allergies(has to be local honey)

didn't read the article but I'd lend to say it's not going to catch on anytime soon

[KeepGoing]

I'm sure spiking blood sugar before going to bed will do wonders...

[PJ BRAUN]

There is nothing wrong with Taking honey for bed. In fact I use a tbs with my greek yogurt at night all the time. Honey is a unique food that does alot of positives in the body...it has powerful anti allergy affects as Pheedno stated as well as many other benefits. Its definitely not going to negatively effect you in any way. Now would I do it few weeks before a show...NO.