Skipping meals can also lead to overeating. These things put additional stress on your body and can contribute to worsening PCOS symptoms by amplifying blood sugar and cortisol issues. In general, I recommend eating about every 3-5 hours throughout the day to support stable blood sugar and hormones.
Since PCOS can often cause weight gain, many women try to lose that weight by skipping meals — this can worsen PCOS symptoms. On the contrary, eating well-balanced meals at regular intervals will help keep your hormones in balance, which will help improve PCOS symptoms.
Focusing on whole grains, fruits, vegetables, lean protein foods and low-fat or fat-free milk, cheese or yogurt can help manage both your weight and blood sugar. A healthy eating plan for women with PCOS may include: Four to five meals or snacks daily, including breakfast. Avoid skipping meals.
When you continue to skip meals, your body will produce more and more ghrelin, the hormone that causes hunger pains. It will also produce less leptin – the hormone that decreases appetite – making it harder for you to know when you're already full and can lead to overeating or binge eating.
Adherence aside, there are numerous health benefits of intermittent fasting. What makes intermittent fasting an especially good fit for women suffering from PCOS is its ability to improve biomarkers such as body weight, body-mass index, blood-glucose levels, and insulin levels, all of which can help you manage PCOS.
There's evidence that eating fewer carbs can help people with PCOS lose more weight and improve their metabolisms. Thankfully, low-carb doesn't have to mean no-carb.
Prioritize breakfast.
Breakfast is an important time to refuel your body after an overnight fast, to stimulate digestion, to support stable energy, and to jumpstart your metabolism which has an effect on the rest of your day.
When you skip a meal, you're directly affecting two key hormones: insulin and cortisol. Your cortisol increases because your body thinks it's starving, which triggers a stress response.
The prolonged starvation of anorexia can lead to low estrogen and progesterone in women, often accompanied by amenorrhea. Bulimia, too, can cause menstrual dysfunction and mess up levels of sex hormones.
You are in a hypoglycemic state when wake which stimulates the adrenal glands to release cortisol. If you do not eat breakfast, cortisol levels remain elevated. Neuropeptide Y levels stay high which can lead to carbohydrate cravings.
Breakfast is essential, especially for women with PCOS, because it starts your day off on the right foot. It is easy to want to reach for a coffee first thing in the morning and push off eating until later. However, this can cause a dip in blood sugar levels and an increase in cortisol spikes (your stress hormone).
Research suggests that shedding between 5 to 10 percent of your overall body weight can help you to regularise your periods and relieve some of the symptoms of PCOS. An egg or two a day may help you with your PCOS. So, add into your veggies or make an omelette, eggs could be your perfect meal partner.
Especially for people with health conditions like diabetes, high cholesterol, blood pressure and PCOS as even small indulgences can have larger effects on health. An overall balance of macronutrients is necessary even on a cheat day.
Encourage eating a combination of protein, healthy fats and fiber. Remove triggers: work with your client to cut down on foods that contribute to more intense cravings (processed/packaged foods and artificial sweeteners above all).
Ghrelin is famously known as the “hunger hormone”.
Under-eating can cause a down-regulation of T3, the active thyroid hormone. This can lead to a condition called euthyroid sick syndrome, where T3 is low, reverse T3 is high, and TSH and T4 are often normal.
Cortisol levels will rise
If you skip a meal your body sees this as a small emergency. As a result your cortisol levels will rise. When cortisol levels are elevated it causes fat to be deposited deep in the abdomen. This visceral fat in turn will produce more cortisol so that losing it becomes quite challenging.
Cortisol is a steroid hormone released in response to stress. The results of a 2015 study published in Physiology & Behavior found that skipping breakfast leads to increased concentrations of free cortisol in the body, which suggests that skipping breakfast is a stressful event.
As previously stated, the shape of a PCOS belly differs from other types of weight gain. It often appears large and bloated but can also be small and round, depending on genetics and other factors. The PCOS belly involves the accumulation of visceral fat in the lower abdomen and typically feels firm to the touch.
Many women with PCOS struggle to lose weight because the condition creates an imbalance in hunger hormones, causing blood sugar levels to spike and crash throughout the day. “As a result, it is not uncommon for women with PCOS to develop an eating disorder, such as binge eating and yo-yo-dieting,” Dr. Kumar says.