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Hi,

I hate scales. My whole life I’ve weighed more than the people around me. "Big bones," my mum used to say, and big bones aren’t a thing. As a kid I was a wild child, more at home in the woods and the fields, to my mother’s despair; every evening she combed leaves and twigs out of my long hair. I climbed and scrambled and ran and jumped, and I carried the thing that genuinely counts on a scale: muscle. These days the trees are safe from me (and I comb my own hair), but the grudge against scales never left.

Why? Muscle weighs more than fat. As you get stronger, the scale can go up while you get healthier, and the thing calls that gaining. You train, your clothes fit looser, and still that number gives you a fright. So let me say it as it is: your scale is lying.

What tells you the truth

Waist at the narrowest point, hips at the widest point, then divide: 80 ÷ 100 = 0.80. Healthy sits under 1.0 for men and under 0.85 for women (WHO). This number is about the deep fat around your organs, the fat that actually matters, and exactly that responds to your lifestyle. Mine, measured last week: 78 ÷ 99 = 0.79, comfortably in the green. It takes 2 minutes.

The second lever: your blood sugar

Next to your muscles there is a second lever the deep fat responds to: how calmly your blood sugar moves through the day. Every spike calls up a hefty dose of insulin, and insulin is your storage hormone. The more often your blood sugar shoots up, the more often your body sits in storage mode. Eating glucose-aware does not mean eating less; it means stacking smarter, so the same food moves your blood sugar only half as hard.

When hunger hits and it is not mealtime yet, I always eat a small GOOD. Granola bowl. 100 g of kefir (soy yoghurt works too), 100 g of frozen berries, a splash of almond milk to make it creamy, 2 to 3 tablespoons of GOOD. Granola on top, at most 1 teaspoon of honey drizzled over it, though I usually skip that, and a scoop of protein powder.

The fibre in the granola absorbs fluid and forms a gel in your stomach. Your food leaves your stomach more slowly, the glucose enters your blood gradually instead of in one wave, and you stay full for hours. Your gut bacteria turn that same fibre into compounds that prompt your gut wall to release satiety hormones, among them GLP-1, the very hormone you know from the weight-loss injections. That is how your brain gets the message: there is enough.

Do you know that little voice nagging you all day with "shall we eat something?", even right after a meal? There is a name for it: food noise, food thoughts that keep coming back and demand attention. Sound familiar? Then your satiety system probably does not get enough of a say, for instance because there is too little fibre on your plate to switch on your body’s own GLP-1. The good news: you can do something about it yourself. With fibre at every meal you turn that voice down, and once you learn to eat glucose-aware, you can even turn it off. That is exactly what I teach you in GOOD.21, step by step over 21 days.

Want to make it even easier? Drink a glass of Fibre before every meal.

I make sure I have everything in stock: kefir lasts a long time in the fridge, the berries sit in the freezer and the granola waits in a jar. That way I am never without a healthy option when hunger comes. Waiting too long to eat tells your body there is scarcity, and your metabolism dials down a fair bit.

Let's go!
Tanja

PS Muscle as the engine of your fat burn: that was the August edition, "I'm already eating so little, so why am I not losing weight?" If you missed it, you can read it back in the archive. And later this week on my channels I take the whole belly-fat myth apart, study included.

Tanja Thielen Health strategist & bestselling author Instagram (English)  ·  Facebook (Deutsch)  ·  LinkedIn (Nederlands) My books →