Understanding your metabolism is a cornerstone of maintaining overall health and well-being. One of the most insightful yet often overlooked metabolic health indicators is your wake-up breath.
Did you know whether you wake up in carb or fat burn reveals a lot about your body’s current state and ability to process energy efficiently?
In this blog post, we will delve into the importance of measuring your metabolism in the morning, what it reveals about your short-term and long-term health and lifestyle trends, and provide strategies to help you wake up in fat burn more frequently.
Metabolism refers to the chemical processes that occur within your body to maintain life, including converting food and drink into energy. By measuring your metabolism, you gain a snapshot of how efficiently the mitochondria, your cells’ powerhouses, perform these processes.
Measuring your metabolism over time also helps gauge your level of metabolic flexibility, or how easily your mitochondria can switch between carb and fat burn based on your body’s energy needs and fuel availability [1]. This is especially important because it translates to easier weight management, optimized athletic performance, metabolic syndrome prevention, longevity, higher energy levels, and improved sleep.
Measuring your metabolism at various points in the day and in different contexts – whether before a workout, after a meal, during fasting, or when you wake up – can unlock so much information about how your metabolism is responding to your lifestyle in that moment, as well as how flexible it is overall.
The wake-up breath is a powerful tool for understanding your mitochondrial state and metabolic health because it provides a “clean” measurement. In other words, after a night’s rest in a fasted state, your body is free from the immediate effects of food intake and physical activity. This makes it an ideal time to measure whether your body is burning fat or carbohydrates for energy.
During periods of rest and fasting, healthy mitochondria should ideally burn fat as their primary fuel source. Fat is a more efficient fuel for these states because it provides a steady, long-lasting source of energy.
When your wake-up breath indicates fat burn, it suggests that your lifestyle is in balance and your body is metabolically flexible and efficient. If your body is burning carbs, it may point to short-term lifestyle factors or potential long-term metabolic issues [1].
While healthy mitochondria should wake up in fat burn after a night of rest and fasting, occasionally waking up in carb burn can be a normal response to specific dietary or lifestyle choices that impact your mitochondrial state. Your lifestyle – nutrition, movement, sleep, and stress levels – impacts your mitochondrial efficiency through six metabolic mediators: your circadian rhythm, muscle mass, CoQ10, glycogen, insulin sensitivity, and cortisol.
Here are just a few factors that can throw your mediators out of balance, temporarily impacting your mitochondria and your morning measurement:
Eating too late at night: Consuming too many carbohydrates close to bedtime can overfill your glycogen stores, leading your mitochondria to burn carbs for energy overnight instead of tapping into fat stores.
Poor sleep quality: Insufficient or disrupted sleep can impact your circadian rhythm, limiting mitochondrial repair overnight and leading to carb burn upon waking.
Stress before bed: High stress levels can increase cortisol, a hormone that promotes carb utilization.
You may also wake up in carb burn for these reasons:
Illness: Being unwell can alter your metabolic state, causing a temporary shift to carb burn for the extra energy required to combat illness.
Monthly cycle: For women, hormonal changes throughout the menstrual cycle can impact metabolic fuel usage.
Waking up in carb burn after a night of late eating or drinking does not necessarily indicate poor metabolic health. It may simply be a temporary response to an imbalanced lifestyle over the last couple of days, something that can be easily remedied by rebalancing your mediators.
Here’s are a few things you can do to keep your mediators—and your mitochondria—on track, so you wake up in fat-burn mode.
Consuming carbohydrates earlier allows your body sufficient time to process and utilize them for energy before heading to bed. Plus, you are more insulin sensitive earlier in the day, making you less likely to store carbs as fat.
Building muscle enhances your metabolic rate, as muscles are packed with mitochondria. This helps you burn more fat at rest and switch to carb burn when a quick energy boost is needed [2].
Aligning carb intake with physical activity ensures that carbs are used for energy during high-intensity workouts or recovery. Insulin sensitivity is also higher after exercise, making it easier to use the carbs you consume for energy.
Complex carbohydrates like whole grains, legumes, and vegetables, especially when paired with healthy fats and protein, provide a slow release of energy and prevent sharp rises in blood sugar levels.
Ensure a proper balance of macronutrients—proteins, fats, and carbs. Having the right ratio of macros promotes weight loss, satiety, stable blood sugar levels, and optimal nutrition.
Aim for 7-9 hours of restorative sleep each night to enhance your energy levels. While you sleep, your mitochondria engage in maintenance, repair, and reproduction to ensure they function optimally.
Practice stress-reducing activities such as meditation and yoga in your daily routine. Lower stress levels can prevent cortisol-induced carb cravings [3].
Chronically high cortisol levels, often due to stress, can impair insulin sensitivity and negatively impact blood sugar levels and even cardiovascular health [4], which is why stress management is crucial for maintaining optimal metabolic function.
According to Mia Johanna Dige, Lumen’s Metabolic Coach, “A metabolically flexible person wakes up burning fat more often and shifts easily to burning carbs after eating without storing it as body fat.”
If you consistently wake up in carb burn, it may be an early indicator of metabolic syndrome—a cluster of conditions that increase the risk of heart disease, stroke, and diabetes. This also can suggest that your body is not efficiently utilizing fat for energy, which can signal the need to adjust your lifestyle choices [5].
Consistently eating refined carbohydrates and simple sugars, especially with a sedentary lifestyle, can lead to high circulating blood glucose and insulin, a hormone responsible for shuttling glucose into your cells for energy uptake.
If your cells don’t use carbohydrates efficiently to produce energy, glucose stays in the bloodstream longer and can cause insulin resistance over time. When blood glucose levels remain chronically high because of insulin resistance, the body flags it as harmful and stores excess glucose as fat. This impairs energy production, leads to weight gain, and ultimately causes metabolic diseases like type 2 diabetes.
Overconsuming carbohydrates also causes glycogen, the body’s carb stores, to be overfilled. As a result, glycogen stores don’t empty enough to allow for fat burn or to trigger mitochondrial biogenesis. This not only affects mitochondrial health, it also means you have fewer mitochondria.
To this end, measuring your metabolism can be an early warning system for potential metabolic health issues. Conditions like hypothyroidism, insulin resistance, or early metabolic syndrome can often go unnoticed until they manifest as more serious health problems [5].
Consistent carb burn upon waking calls for a comprehensive review of your lifestyle habits. Making necessary adjustments can improve your metabolic flexibility and overall health over the long run. In a 12-week pilot study of participants with prediabetes, using Lumen for nutrition and lifestyle management significantly improved several metabolic parameters, demonstrating its potential to deliver better clinical outcomes for patients with type 2 diabetes (T2DM) and metabolic syndrome [6].
Understanding the connection between your wake-up breath, your mitochondrial state, and your metabolic health provides valuable insights into how your lifestyle is affecting you in the short- and long-term. By measuring your wake-up breath and implementing lifestyle adjustments, you can optimize your metabolic health, promote fat burn, and achieve your health goals. Remember, metabolic health is a journey, and small, consistent changes can lead to significant improvements over time.
[1] Goodpaster, B. H., & Sparks, L. M. (2017). Metabolic Flexibility in Health and Disease. Cell metabolism, 25(5), 1027–1036. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cmet.2017.04.015
[2] McPherron, A. C., Guo, T., Bond, N. D., & Gavrilova, O. (2013). Increasing muscle mass to improve metabolism. Adipocyte, 2(2), 92–98. https://doi.org/10.4161/adip.22500
[3] Chao, A. M., Jastreboff, A. M., White, M. A., Grilo, C. M., & Sinha, R. (2017). Stress, cortisol, and other appetite-related hormones: Prospective prediction of 6-month changes in food cravings and weight. Obesity (Silver Spring, Md.), 25(4), 713–720. https://doi.org/10.1002/oby.21790
[4] Adam, T. C., Hasson, R. E., Ventura, E. E., Toledo-Corral, C., Le, K. A., Mahurkar, S., Lane, C. J., Weigensberg, M. J., & Goran, M. I. (2010). Cortisol is negatively associated with insulin sensitivity in overweight Latino youth. The Journal of clinical endocrinology and metabolism, 95(10), 4729–4735. https://doi.org/10.1210/jc.2010-0322
[5] Palmer, B. F., & Clegg, D. J. (2022). Metabolic Flexibility and Its Impact on Health Outcomes. Mayo Clinic proceedings, 97(4), 761–776. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.mayocp.2022.01.012
[6] Buch, A., Yeshurun, S., Cramer, T., Baumann, A., Sencelsky, Y., Zelber Sagi, S., Serebro, M., Greenman, Y., Mor, M., & Eldor, R. (2023). The Effects of Metabolism Tracker Device (Lumen) Usage on Metabolic Control in Adults with Prediabetes: Pilot Clinical Trial. Obesity facts, 16(1), 53–61. https://doi.org/10.1159/000527227
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