4 Science-Backed Facts About Honey Diet for Hibernation

How can you use an easy honey diet to fuel your liver for the night, burn body fats when you sleep and, speed up fat metabolism?

Do a Self-Check -- 2 Qns

1. Do you experience these during the night - wake regularly, have night sweats, night cramps, acid reflux, or go to the bathroom?

2. Do you experience these in the early morning - feel nauseous, weak, wake up exhausted, or have a dry throat?

Each of those signs tells you that instead of burning fat and repairing muscles, your body has produced a stream of undesirable stress hormones while you've slept.

1. Hungry Brain Draws on Limited Liver Glycogen

Your liver has a small storage capacity of only 75g of glucose and it needs to deliver 10g/hour, 6.5g to the brain (the most energy demanding organ) and 3.5g to the kidney and red blood cells. While we acknowledge the common advice on getting adequate sleep to avoid problems such as weight gain, memory loss, physical impairment, etc, 7.5 hours turns out to be the optimal sleep duration with one-time fuelling with honey before sleep. This is very much in line with the many media reports which warned that prolonged sleep, just like sleep deprivation can lead to serious health issues over time.

2. Frequently Depleted Liver Leads to Health Issues

If your liver is depleted and not fuelled prior to sleep, the brain triggers the release of stress hormones from the adrenal glands and degrade the muscle and bone, and you do not "recover" during your sleep. And if you don't "recover", you do not burn fats. Furthermore, the over production of stress hormones in the long run, day after day can lead to many health ills - including obesity, heart disease, osteoporosis, diabetes, poor immune function, hypertension, depression and other distressing health problems.

3. Honey is the Gold Standard for Hibernation

Why a honey diet during hibernation? Honey is found to be the most ideal food that can provide a fuelling mechanism for the liver due to its 1:1 ratio composition of fructose and glucose. The fructose in the honey goes into the liver, is converted into glucose and stored as liver glycogen. The fructose also triggers the glucose enzymes in the liver to take in glucose, hence lowering the Glycaemic Index of glucose.

4. Power of Fat Burning with Honey During Sleep

The problem for a lot of us is, we cannot optimise body fat metabolism (20%:80%) overnight when we go to bed with a depleted liver. We activate stress hormones which inhibit glucose metabolism, which in turn inhibits fat metabolism. The incredible news is, metabolism stress can be easily prevented by eating honey prior to bedtime as it provides adequate fuel for the liver during the night fast. Honey intelligently restocks the liver selectively without digestive burden and forms a stable supply of liver glycogen which our brain demands for the 8 hrs of night fast – when we sleep.

A sedentary person requires 2400 calories/day. Metabolic rate is thus 100 calories/hr. Overnight consumption during 8 hrs of sleep is 800 calories. And if resting metabolism rate is 20% glucose and 80% fat, then during the night fast, 160 calories of glucose (in brain and red blood cells, mostly in brain) and 640 calories in fat (body fat).

If this person visits the gym and expends 1000 calories, the ratio is 20% fat and 80% glucose, ie 200 calories of fat and 800 calories of glucose. In exercise, fat is sourced from both muscle fat (triglycerides) and body fat (adipose tissue) in equal amount. Thus the body fat consumed during exercise is only 100 calories, which is about only 11g or less than 0.5 ounce!