You’re eating less than you ever have.
Smaller portions, smaller breakfasts, when you have breakfast at all, or just a coffee instead. A modest lunch, and trying to be good.
And the numbers won’t budge. Or worse, they’re going up. The fasting glucose creeps. The HbA1c isn’t moving. The energy isn’t there. Your middle is softer than it’s ever been despite the discipline.
And the conclusion you’ve quietly come to, somewhere late at night, is that you must be doing it wrong. You must need to try harder. Eat less still.
I want to say this clearly. You might not doing it wrong. You might just be doing the thing that’s making it worse.
When you under-eat over weeks and months, your body reads it as scarcity. “Something’s wrong. We need to do something.” And your body has one priority above pretty much everything else: keep glucose available to your brain. Your brain runs on glucose and it really doesn’t want to run out.
So your body releases cortisol. Cortisol tells your liver to push stored glucose into the bloodstream to make sure your brain has what it needs. And your fasting blood sugar (that morning number) starts to quietly climb, even though you’ve been eating less than ever.
This is a huge part of why so many women in their forties and fifties tell me the way they used to eat just stopped working. They didn’t do anything wrong. Their body’s tolerance for under-fuelling has changed, often quite dramatically. The skipped breakfast that was fine at 35 sets off an internal alarm at 48. The small lunch that was plenty leaves you feeling wiped out by 4pm.
The body has changed, while the eating pattern hasn’t kept up.
A few patterns I see constantly:
Coffee instead of breakfast, small lunch, energy collapse at 4pm. Biscuit. Battle with yourself at dinner. Going to bed feeling like you’ve eaten too much - when across the whole day, you probably haven’t eaten enough
Intermittent fasting that started as a reasonable experiment and quietly became a six-hour eating window every day, moth after month, while fasting glucose climbs
The salad-for-lunch habit with not enough protein: a snack pretending to be a meal
Eating very little until late afternoon, then most of the day’s food in the evening
What helps:
Eat earlier in the day. Front-load protein and fat in the morning. Eggs, full-fat yoghurt with seeds and nuts, smoked salmon, leftover dinner. Real food whenever possible.
Don’t go too long between meals. Every four to five hours often works far better than long stretches. This doesn’t mean don’t do an overnight fast - a 12-14 hour overnight fast is great and has been shown to improve insulin sensitivity.
Protein at every meal (palm-sized minimum). Most people under-eat protein dramatically
And the counterintuitive one: if you’ve been eating less for a long time, eating a bit more (particularly more protein, earlier in the day) is often what brings your numbers down, not what sends them up.
Always eat real food, not ultra-processed foods like ready meals or packaged foods with lots of ingredients. The fewer the ingredients in a shop-bought food the better.
Give it a fortnight. Pay attention to your afternoon energy, your sleep, how often you reach for sugar, and your mood.
If this resonated, my free guide Is Your Blood Sugar Working Against You? Ten Signs Most People Completely Miss will help you spot the pattern. Download it at francesnorgate.com/#bloodsugarguide.
And if you’d like a proper conversation about what’s going on for you specifically, my free 30-minute Blood Sugar Audits are open this month. No obligation. Just answers. Book at francesnorgate.com/blood-sugar-audit.
Thank you for being here - see you next week,
Frances x
Frances Norgate
Qualified Nutrition and Lifestyle Advisor
