True Nature NZ

Eating the fibrous vegetables and protein on your plate first, before eating your carbs, significantly lowers blood glucose spikes.

What this means …… a lower blood sugar spike requires less insulin release to mop it all up. Less work for the pancreas and liver. Longer and more sustained energy and a more balanced and harmonious mood.

The same meal can produce a different glucose response depending on the order you eat it.

A new 2026 randomized crossover trial tested this in 33 healthy young Korean women. Each participant ate the same isocaloric foods under four different conditions, including vegetables first, carbohydrates first, and eating everything together. Continuous glucose monitors tracked what happened for three hours after each meal. When the meal was eaten vegetables first, then protein, then carbohydrate, the early glucose rise was smaller, peak glucose was lower, the peak occurred later, and overall glucose variability was reduced compared with the other meal sequences.

This is not an isolated finding. A 2024 randomized crossover study in 18 healthy adults compared a standard mixed meal with the same meal eaten vegetables and protein first, followed by carbohydrate. Simply changing the sequence reduced total post-meal glucose exposure by 40.9% and insulin exposure by 31.7% over the following two hours. The participants ate the same calories and the same foods. What changed was the order.

There are several plausible reasons for this effect. Starting with vegetables and protein may slow how quickly carbohydrate reaches the circulation and can alter the hormonal response to the meal. But those mechanisms were not all directly measured in these trials, so the strongest conclusion is narrower: meal sequence itself can materially change the acute glucose response to an otherwise similar meal.

That does not make meal order more important than total diet quality, carbohydrate amount, energy intake, or insulin sensitivity. These were small, short-term studies in healthy adults, and they do not show that eating vegetables first causes weight loss or prevents diabetes.

But for someone already eating a mixed meal, the practical implication is unusually simple: vegetables first, protein next, carbohydrate last may produce a flatter post-meal glucose response without changing what is on the plate.

References:
Choi M, Lee S, Bang E, et al. Diabetes Obes Metab. 2026. PMID 42608327.
Shaheen A, Sadiya A, M***a BM, Abusnana S. Diabetes Metab Syndr Obes. 2024;17:4257-4265. PMID 39559800. DOI 10.2147/DMSO.S468628

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Protein for fullness and meal satisfaction , protein for muscle, protein for hair and skin and gut health ✨💪

Spreading protein across breakfast, lunch, and dinner was associated with less snacking during weight loss, even when total daily protein was kept the same.

Researchers randomized women with overweight or obesity to consume 90 grams of protein per day in one of two patterns. One group spread it evenly across three meals, about 30 g at breakfast, lunch, and dinner. The other concentrated most of it at dinner, roughly 10 g at breakfast, 15 g at lunch, and 65 g at dinner. The intervention lasted 16 weeks and included an 8-week controlled weight-loss phase followed by an 8-week self-selected phase.

When the women were later given access to highly palatable snack foods in a laboratory task, the evenly distributed group ate 44.3 g of snacks versus 62.0 g in the dinner-heavy group. In calorie terms, that was about 219 versus 301 calories, roughly 82 fewer calories, or 27% less, during the snack test. They also showed a lower motivation to work for access to the snacks.

The important point is not that eating protein earlier somehow makes snack calories disappear. Protein is highly satiating, and in this experiment the evenly distributed group was getting a meaningful protein dose before the snack test rather than saving most of the day's protein for dinner. That may help explain why energy-dense foods were less compelling later in the day.

There are important boundaries. This analysis included 44 women aged 20 to 44 with overweight or obesity, most of whom were White, and snack intake was measured during a controlled behavioral task rather than by tracking every snack eaten in everyday life. The test lunch also contained about 35 g of protein and 697 calories in the even group versus 20 g and 563 calories in the dinner-heavy group, so the acute difference cannot be attributed to protein distribution alone with complete certainty. A companion analysis also found that the two protein-distribution patterns did not produce different changes in body weight, fat mass, or lean mass over the 16 weeks.

During energy restriction, putting a moderate amount of protein into each meal may make energy-dense snacks less rewarding and reduce how much gets eaten when those foods are available. It does not show that everyone needs exactly 30 g at every meal, or that spreading protein across the day produces greater fat loss by itself.

Journal of the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics. 2026;126(9):156391. DOI: 10.1016/j.jand.2026.156391.

You can create fiber inside food that didn't have it before. The trigger is temperature.

When you cook starchy food, water enters the starch granules and the long amylose and amylopectin chains unfold. This is gelatinization, and it's why hot rice, hot pasta, and hot mashed potato are so easy for your body to digest. The chains are loose, exposed, and your digestive enzymes break them down within minutes. Your blood sugar rises fast.

When you cool that same cooked starch, the chains do something interesting. They realign and partially recrystallize into a tightly ordered structure called retrograded starch. Your digestive enzymes can't break the crystals as efficiently. The starch reaches your colon largely intact, where your gut bacteria ferment it into short-chain fatty acids including butyrate. Resistant starch is especially butyrogenic compared to other fibers. The FDA and AOAC classify retrograded starch (resistant starch type 3) as dietary fiber for nutrition labeling purposes. Same molecule. Different physical structure. Different physiology.

The numbers across foods:

White rice (Sonia et al., 2015, Asia Pacific Journal of Clinical Nutrition). Researchers measured resistant starch in three preparations: freshly cooked, cooked and cooled at room temperature for 10 hours, and cooked and refrigerated at 4°C for 24 hours then reheated. Resistant starch went from 0.64 g per 100 g (fresh) to 1.30 g (room temp cooled) to 1.65 g (refrigerated and reheated). The clinical follow-up was a randomized crossover in 15 healthy adults. The cooled-and-reheated rice produced a meaningfully lower glucose response than the freshly cooked rice. Same calories, same ingredients.

Potato (Larder et al., 2018, Food Research International). Boiled potatoes cooled for 24 hours at 4°C had up to 114% more resistant starch than potatoes cooled for one hour at room temperature. The exact magnitude varies by cultivar.

Pasta (Hodges et al., 2019, Foods). Randomized crossover comparing freshly cooked pasta, cold pasta, and reheated pasta. Reheated pasta produced a smaller and faster-resolving glucose curve than freshly cooked pasta. The mechanism is the same starch retrogradation that happens in rice and potato.

A few honest caveats. First, "your enzymes can't break the crystals" is a simplification. Pancreatic amylase has reduced activity against retrograded starch but isn't blocked entirely. Some still gets digested. The functional shift is meaningful, not absolute. Second, the magnitude of the cooling effect varies by food, by cultivar, by cooking method, and by cooling time and temperature. Longer cooling at lower temperatures (24 hours at 4°C beats 10 hours at room temperature) produces more retrogradation. Third, repeated extreme reheating can partially reverse retrogradation, but normal microwave or stovetop reheating does not.

Practical implication. If you eat rice, pasta, or potatoes regularly, cooking a batch and refrigerating overnight before reheating roughly doubles the resistant starch content of the same food. Your post-meal glucose response is lower. Your colon gets more butyrate. The fiber on the nutrition label is what was in the raw ingredients. The fiber you actually consume depends on how you cooked and stored the food before eating it.
Same food. Different temperature history. Different physiology.

Sonia et al., Asia Pacific Journal of Clinical Nutrition, 2015 Hodges et al., Foods, 2019
Larder et al., Food Research International, 2018

At the foundation of my Personal Training practice is one major premise..

EXERCISE IS MEDICINE 🤸‍♀️

Not because it helps us burn calories.
Not because we need to earn our food.
And certainly not because we need to punish our bodies into looking a certain way.

Exercise is medicine because the human body was designed to move.

Because movement can support our mental health and help manage symptoms of anxiety, depression and low mood.

Because it gives us opportunities to connect with other people — and social connection is medicine too. (In fact, the greatest study into our longevity has proven social connection as the number one most influential factor in how long we live!)

Because it helps us manage blood pressure, blood sugar and cardiovascular health.

Because it keeps our muscles strong, our fascia engaged, our joints moving and our bodies capable and conditioned for life.

Because strength and balance help reduce our risk of falls, fractures and loss of independence as we age.

Because movement supports circulation and lymphatic flow, helping the body move nutrients in and waste products out.

Because regular movement supports a healthy immune system and helps regulate inflammation.

Because exercise helps us recover — from stress, from sitting, from life, and from the physical demands we place on our bodies.

Because resistance training helps us preserve muscle, bone density, metabolism and physical resilience as we move through the decades.

Because moving our bodies can help us sleep better.

Because it can improve our energy, cognition and brain health.

Because it gives our nervous system somewhere to discharge stress rather than carrying it around all day.

Because movement creates stimulus.
And stimulus creates adaptation.

Your body gets better at what you repeatedly ask it to do.

So perhaps the question isn’t:

‘Do I feel like exercising today?’

Perhaps it’s:

‘What does my body need from movement today?’

Maybe it’s strength.
Maybe it’s mobility.
Maybe it’s a walk outside.
Maybe it’s a sweaty workout.
Maybe it’s stretching, breathing and gently reconnecting with your body.

Maybe it’s moving with other women and having a bloody good laugh while you’re at it 😂

It doesn’t have to be extreme.
It doesn’t have to be perfect.
It doesn’t have to look like anyone else’s exercise.

But your body needs movement.

Because exercise isn’t just about fitness.
It is about keeping you capable of living your life.

And that is why I will always believe with 100% of my heart that movement is medicine.

(I wasn’t doing much movement here whilst he was piggy-backing me 😉 But I did piggy-back him for a short while too 😜 And then we enjoyed the connection of an evening stroll along the beach at the Mount ☺️ So there is some relevance to the photo choice - as well as the memory just making me happy 🥰).

I have appointments available THIS WEEK!

It’s the first time in a while that I’ve not been fully booked 2 weeks in advance!

So if you’re after some last minute relaxation or treatment - get in quick!!

Treat yourself 💗✨. If you don’t, who will?