Of The Earth Wellness LLC

09/13/2026

Get movin yall…

The amount of movement required to blunt a glucose spike is far smaller than almost anyone assumes.

Contracting muscle takes up glucose without insulin. The transporter responsible, GLUT4, moves to the muscle cell surface in response to two separate signals, and contraction is one of them. That is why movement lowers blood sugar in people whose insulin signalling works poorly, and why the effect appears within minutes rather than requiring any training adaptation.

A 2026 trial tested how small the dose could go. Thirty adults completed two evening sessions after a 75 gram glucose drink, one seated and one with a single minute of stair stepping at a self selected pace. Participants rated the effort 1.9 out of 10, which is barely above sitting. The rise in blood glucose from baseline to 60 minutes was 2.5 millimoles per litre after the stairs against 4.3 after sitting, a difference of about 42 percent. Total glucose exposure over the session was lower as well. The evening was chosen deliberately, because the same carbohydrate load raises blood glucose more at night than in the morning.

One minute sits right at the edge of what works, and it does not work everywhere. The same research group ran the identical comparison in the morning with 1, 3 and 10 minute bouts. Three minutes and ten minutes lowered glucose. One minute did not, and the result was nowhere near significant. Then they ran it again after a real mixed meal of 650 calories rather than a glucose drink, and one minute did work, lowering glucose by 14 milligrams per decilitre. So the honest reading is that one minute is enough after a normal meal and enough in the evening, but not reliably enough after a morning glucose challenge. Three minutes worked in every version. If you want a duration that is robust across conditions, it is three, not one.

Timing turns out to matter more than duration. A 2023 meta analysis of eight crossover trials in 116 people, about 40 percent of whom had type 2 diabetes, compared exercising before a meal, after a meal, and not at all. Exercising after the meal beat exercising before it and beat doing nothing. Exercising before the meal was statistically indistinguishable from doing nothing at all. The analysis also found that the gap between finishing the meal and starting to move independently predicted the size of the benefit, with shorter gaps producing larger effects. A short walk taken immediately outperforms a longer one taken an hour later.

What this changes: not whether you exercise, but what you do in the ten minutes after you finish eating. Sitting down is the default and, for some people, it is the worst option available. Stairs if you have them, a walk if you do not, and starting sooner matters more than going longer.

Morales et al., Exp Physiol 2026;111(6):2956 · PMID 39705060
Moore et al., J Exerc Sci Fit 2024 · PMID 38572086
Kressler et al., Nutr Metab Cardiovasc Dis 2022 · PMID 34896000
Engeroff et al., Sports Med 2023 · PMID 36715875

09/10/2026

Keep them hips flexi!

08/14/2026

A local physician shares what nutrients and habits can support your brain from childhood through adulthood.

08/13/2026

07/22/2026

COFFEE!!! Also to get more polyphenols…stay away from the ultra dark roasts…

07/16/2026

Dr Dave Hamilton from New River Natural Health LLC dropped by today to talk about chronic inflammation- what’s happening in the body and how we can eat our way to better health.
See our story at the link below

https://www.wdbj7.com/2026/07/16/why-an-anti-inflammatory-diet-is-so-important/

07/04/2026

An interesting perspective on how to fuel your body and how to improve metabolism:)

The same meal, eaten about four hours later, changed how sixteen people's bodies handled it, with not one calorie different between the two conditions (not the "calorie is a calorie" vs "energy balance" reference toward the bottom)

A randomized crossover at Brigham and Women's Hospital and Harvard held intake, macronutrients, activity, sleep, and light constant, leaving clock time as the only variable. The same three meals ran on an early schedule, then on one shifted about four hours later. On the late schedule, the odds of feeling hungry while awake roughly doubled, from about 10 to 20 percent. Waking energy expenditure fell about 5 percent, 24-hour core body temperature dropped, and in the subset who gave fat biopsies, adipose gene expression shifted toward storage.

The waking ghrelin-to-leptin ratio rose about 34 percent, which reads as a stronger drive to eat, but ghrelin was not the driver. It did not change significantly. The shift came almost entirely from a 16 percent fall in leptin, the satiety hormone fat releases to signal that stores are adequate. Eating identical calories later lowered the body's own fullness signal, and it behaved as if underfed.

Feeding late pushes intake out of phase with the circadian clock, and the signals converge rather than cancel. Because intake was held constant, the leptin drop reflects circadian gating of that signal, not a change in how much was eaten. Daytime expenditure and core temperature fell together, consistent with lower waking thermogenesis rather than an overnight rebound. Appetite drive, whole-body expenditure, and fat-cell gene expression all moved the same direction at the same intake.

The trial ran 16 inpatient participants, all with overweight or obesity, with biopsies from 7 and no chronotype stratification. That isolates timing cleanly but does not reproduce free-living eating. Expenditure was sampled across the wake period rather than measured continuously, so the daily figure is partly inferred. The effects are a few percent each, and no single acute study can prove long-term weight change.

At identical intake, meal timing causally shifts appetite, satiety hormones, daytime expenditure, and fat-storage genes. This does not overturn energy balance. Energy in versus energy out still governs weight; timing is a lever that acts on the components of that balance, raising the drive to eat on one side and lowering daytime burn on the other.

"Metabolism shifts with timing" and "energy balance governs weight" are not competing claims, because the first describes how timing biases the inputs to the second. In free living the appetite increase is probably the larger lever, since hungrier people eat more, while here intake was clamped so only the expenditure side could show itself. Whether these shifts add up to real weight differences over months, and whether they track chronotype, has not been tested.

Vujovic et al., Cell Metab 2022

07/02/2026

Get movin’ yall! And don’t forget to have fun!