The Slow Kitchen Podcast

Episode 21 - "The Metabolic Problem No One Is Talking About: Your Circadian Rhythm"

• Cat Dillon • Season 1 • Episode 21

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0:00 | 14:14

🧠 Key Topics and Takeaways:

  • Why metabolic health is deeply tied to circadian rhythm
  • How blood sugar, cortisol, and hormones interact
  • What “lifestyle jet lag” actually means
  • Why your body feels tired but wired at night
  • A simple nervous system reset if you can’t sleep
  • Practical ways to restore rhythm 


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SPEAKER_00

Hi everyone, and welcome back to the Slow Kitchen Podcast, your 15-minute space to slow down, breathe, and reconnect with nourishment that actually fits your real life. I'm Kat Dylan, registered holistic nutritionist and former chef, and I help women simplify food in a way that tastes amazing and feels grounding and supportive from the inside out. Food is essential. It fuels us, supports healthy aging, helps to prevent disease, and connects us to culture and community. But it's not the only piece. On this podcast, I explore how food, lifestyle, and nervous system health come together to help you feel more steady, more nourished, and at home in your body. If you're a woman in midlife, navigating work, family, shifting hormones, cravings, mood changes, and a world that rarely slows down, this space is for you. We take the pressure out of cooking and bring the pleasure back in. Because food is more than fuel, it's connection, regulation, nervous system support, sensory, emotional, even spiritual. And what I see again and again is this. When we slow down, even slightly, even for a moment before we cook or eat, something shifts. Digestion improves. Food noise quiets, energy steadies, and your nervous system feels more supported instead of constantly on alert. But these moments don't exist in isolation. They're shaped by the rhythm of your entire day. How you slept, how you woke up, how you use light and how you move, as well as how you wind down. So today I want to zoom out and look at what's really driving those end-of-the-day cravings, that tired and wired feeling, and why sometimes your body seems to move in a different direction than your intentions. Because what you're experiencing isn't random. And once you understand it, things start to make a whole lot more sense. You know that moment at the end of the day, and you're standing in your kitchen, lights are bright, maybe the phone is in your hands, you're not even that hungry, but you feel something. You're tired, wired, restless. Or maybe you already ate dinner, but you're still reaching for that something sweet at the end. And part of you is thinking, why do I keep doing this? Before we go any further, if this episode resonates, I'd love it if you follow or subscribe to the Slow Kitchen podcast. And if you feel called, leave a review. It helps this work reach more women navigating the same patterns. All right, let's begin. Today I want to talk about the connection between your daily habits, your circadian rhythm, and your metabolic health. This conversation is getting a lot of attention right now, especially with GLP1 medications like Ozempic and Wagovi. And while those can be helpful for a small subset of people, they don't resolve chronically elevated cortisol, living in flight or fight, emotional dysregulation, or disconnection from your body's hunger and fullness cues. They don't teach you how to eat. They don't restore digestion. And sometimes they make it worse. So this isn't the conversation, but it is important to say there is a lot at stake here because this whole thing is not about willpower. It's about biology under pressure. We're spending over$4.5 trillion a year on healthcare in the US. And chronic disease is still rising. Only about 10 to 12% of Americans are metabolically healthy. That's right, 10 to 12%. That means most people are dealing with blood sugar swings, chronic low-grade inflammation, insulin resistance, and hormonal shifts that affect mood, sleep, appetite, and of course metabolism. And these things don't happen in isolation, they're compounded. When blood sugar swings, cortisol rises. When sleep is off, insulin sensitivity drops. And when hormones shift in midlife, everything becomes harder to regulate. Over time, this creates a pattern of depletion where you feel less like yourself and more like you're just getting through the day. One of the most overlooked pieces is your circadian rhythm, your body's internal 24-hour timing system. It's not just one clock. You have clocks throughout your body, in your brain, in your gut, your liver, your muscles, and even your fat cells. They're constantly communicating, helping your body know not just what to do, but when to do it. When the system is aligned, your energy is much steadier, digestion improves, your sleep deepens, and hormones regulate much more smoothly. But when it's disrupted by late night light, irregular sleep, constant stimulation, or inconsistent eating, those clocks fall out of sync. And you feel it in your energy, your sleep, your cravings, mood, and resilience. When rhythm is aligned, things don't just work better, they feel a lot easier. This is where many people get stuck. They want to sleep, but they can't. And they're lying in bed, exhausted, but wired at the same time, tired body, but an active mind running like a hamster wheel. If this is you, you may want to shift the goal. Consider stopping to try to force your sleep and start focusing on down shifting your system. If getting out of bed feels helpful, keep the lights low and give yourself a few quiet minutes. But if staying in bed feels better, that is okay too. Turn away from the clock. I like to put my clock face down, let your body soften into the mattress. Focus on something simple: your breath, the weight of the blankets on you, a slow body scan. I like to take the alphabet from A to Z and find a vegetable or a fruit for each letter. And I will do that until I get to sleep. And it really, really works. So you're not trying to make sleep happen. You're helping your nervous system feel safe enough to return to sleep. All right. There's one thing where things start to break down here. You've heard of social jet lag, right? The difference between the weekday and the weekend rhythms. But often enough, it's lifestyle jet lag. Bright lights at night, your phone to get you to bed, constant input, the caffeine to push through, alcohol to come down, not enough morning light, and sitting without standing or moving throughout the day. We have normalized being on all the time. I had a client who brought her phone to bed every night. Nothing extreme, just scrolling and kind of trying to unwind. If she woke up, she'd pick it up again. What we realized is that her body never got the signal that the day was over. When she removed her phone and created a small buffer, her sleep deepened, cravings decreased, and her energy stabilized. Not because she changed everything, but she returned to rhythm. We're meant to be cyclical, light and dark, activity and rest, input and stillness. But we've lost our tolerance for stillness. We move from one input to the next all day long. And that constant stimulation keeps the brain in a low-level state. Even a few minutes of quiet can regulate your nervous system, improve clarity, and support emotional flexibility. But most of us never allow it in. And when your rhythm is off, the downstream effects are predictable. You feel exhausted, reach for quick energy and choose foods that keep the cycle going. At night, your body is meant to repair your brain, your energy systems and your muscles and bones. But if you never fully power down, that repair doesn't happen well. And this is where we shift from doing more to doing less, but better. Think of this as a stop doing list. Let light lead your day. Get natural light in the morning, ideally within 30 to 60 minutes of waking, even a short walk outside helps set your circadian rhythms and support cortisol timing. Pair that with a gentle morning movement, walking, mobility, or strength training, all send us clear signal that it's daytime, we are awake, we're metabolically active. At night, dim the lights and give your brain a clear signal that the day is ending. Remember that cortisol in the morning wakes you up, but it's the melatonin that sends your body that message that it's time to sleep. Try a gentle sleep reset. Move your bedtime earlier by about 10 to 15 minutes for a few nights, and then consider doing that for a few nights that week. Create a no-phone buffer before bed. Even 20 minutes helps your system downshift and of course set your lighting to very low on your phone. Practice stillness, no input, no task to do, even five minutes is regulation. So many people stop or don't meditate because they feel that they have to take 20 minutes to an hour to do a full meditation. But simply one minute of awareness is something. And support your body instead of overriding it. Eat enough at your meals, especially protein, so your body isn't playing catch up later. There's so much science here. This is one of the most simple ways to reduce end-of-the-day cravings that lead you to constantly need to snack. When meals are balanced and satisfying, your blood sugar stays more stable, your energy is steadier, and your body stops asking for quick fuel at night. Remember, it's not about restriction, it's about giving your body what it needs earlier so it can settle later, prioritize real food, and eat at regular times when you can. And try and use caffeine less as a crutch, but just more for an enjoyment rather than something that you actually need. So the next time you feel that pull to push, scroll, override your body, or reach for something late at night, pause and ask yourself, where am I out of rhythm right now? And then zoom in one more layer. How could you set yourself up to be in better rhythm, starting when you wake up tomorrow? Because this is the part we miss. Your night isn't about your night, it's shaped by how your day begins. This is what I want you to take from today. In the slow kitchen, we don't just look at food in isolation, we look at the rhythms around it: your sleep, your light, your stress, your nervous system, your exercise, and of course your meals. So instead of trying to fix everything at the end of your day, start earlier. Step outside within an hour of waking, get light in your eyes, move your body. Eat enough during the day so your body isn't running on empty by evening. Because when your mornings start to set your rhythm, your afternoons feel so much more steady. Your evenings, you feel much more in your body and in control. And food stops feeling like noise or something that you're constantly trying to manage. I keep saying it over and over. Your body isn't broken. It's just responding. And rhythm is something that you can rebuild, starting the moment you wake up. See you next time.