Shift work can be brutal, but it doesn't have to be. Welcome to a healthy shift. My name is Roger Sutherland, certified nutritionist, veteran law enforcement officer, and 24-7 shift worker for almost four decades. Through this podcast, I aim to educate shift workers using evidence-based methods to not only survive the rigors of shift work, but thrive. My goal is to empower shift workers to improve their health and well-being so they have more energy to do the things they love. Enjoy today's show. And welcome back to another episode of a Healthy Shift Podcast. Today, well, actually, first of all, my name's Roger Sutherland, and I will be your guide on this journey of shift work. Today, I'm answering what is without doubt one of the most common things that occurs to a shift worker. It is the biggest problem that shift workers have, and we don't know what to do about it. And I'm just going to go straight into it because most shift workers think that weight gain is literally about willpower, and it's not. There you go. I've said it. Thanks for joining, and I'll talk to you tomorrow. No, it's not that. Let's go into this properly, all right? Because a lot of people that start shift work start off with good intentions. They start off feeling fantastic, they're healthy, they go into their vocation, whether it's the police as a paramedic, whether it's nursing, no matter what you're doing, you go into this, and before you know it, you're feeling awful. You start gaining weight, you can't arrest it, you don't feel like you're eating anymore. You're trying diet after diet, you're exercising, as in you're going to the gym, then suddenly the gym drops off. Then you get yourself into a whole motivated thing doing something. And the biggest problem is that's not where the problem is. And gaining that body fat is not that you're doing anything wrong. You're actually fighting a biological problem that a shift worker has. You're eating less than you used to. You're training whenever you can, but the weight still creeps on. Now, this is not a personal failure. I've said that. What it is, it's your biology literally colliding with your roster. Shift work. This is a problem. So today, what I want to do is I want to go into and explain why it is that shift workers actually gain weight. And then what I'll do is I'll go into the most important part of the whole podcast. This is the bit that you're waiting for, and that is what actually helps. Now, they're not going to be hacks, and it's not going to be extremes. It's just going to be things that work with your body instead of working against your body. It's really simple. And I just wish that more people understood just how simple it is. Clients of mine that I have, when they look at it, they think, what's going on? Like, is it really this easy? And I go, yes, it is. Follow me. Follow the bouncing ball. Trust the process. This is what will make the difference. So let's start off with the real reason why weight gain actually happens. Now, the biggest driver of this is your circadian disruption. And you are a self-sabotager. It's not your fault. You've just never been educated as to how to go about doing it. And that's how I help. Because what I do is I educate you because you've not been educated before as to how to go about doing shift work, how to optimize this circadian rhythm, how to keep going in the right way. Now, what's the biggest issue, and the thing that you've got to remember most of all is your body has a clock. It is controlling all your hormones, it is controlling digestion, it controls the release of insulin, it controls your hunger and satiety hormones, and it also controls your fat storage and how you metabolize food. But here's the problem: shift work actually scrambles that clock because all of those different parts of your body all have different clocks. And then there's the body's master clock, which is in the supracosmatic nucleus, which is in the base of the brain, which is responding to light and dark signals, and you're confusing it. Now I want you to think of it like this. The master body clock in the brain is the conductor of the orchestra. And every single bot, everything single cell in your body has a body clock. And the conductor is conducting all those clocks and telling them where they should be, and everything runs simply, very simply, and right in sync with each other. But you, the shift worker, what you're doing is you're disrupting this all the time. So it's like the orchestra or the conductor playing the music and telling it what to do, but every single cell has got a different piece of music and is playing their own music. And this is literally what happens in our body. So what we got to do is we've got to try and bring all of this back together. And that's how I coach clients to bring all this back together so their body is running as much in sync as it possibly can. And this is what helps. When your sleep and your eating times are continually moved around, your metabolism, the way you actually metabolize and store nutrients, becomes inefficient. And here's another kicker for you. On night shift, you're actually burning fewer calories. And you're burning fewer calories at rest. And you store more of that energy that you are consuming, energy being food, is going to body fat. Now then we have the insulin resistance problem because at night your pancreas does not release. It's got the signal of darkness and it's going into sleep mode. Regardless of whether you're awake or whether you're asleep, your body is sleeping. It's resting, it's in a rest and digest mode. And what it does is the pancreas, which secretes insulin, which helps to shuttle the glucose through the bloodstream and into the uh muscle to be burnt, there's not enough insulin to do that. So what happens to the glucose? The sugar in the bloodstream is running around, and it goes, oh, well, we're not used, so we'll get stored. So hello body fat. Now, because we have insulin sensitivity, sorry, eating at night means that we're actually eating when we have insulin resistance and lowered insulin sensitivity. So therefore, as I explained, it becomes very, very difficult. Now, I just want to try and explain this to you in simple terms to help you to understand literally the insulin system and how it actually works. I want you to imagine that you're at a rock concert and you're all there and everybody is in the rock concert and it finishes at 11 o'clock at night. And then you all pour out of this rock concert at 11 o'clock at night. That's the food going into your bloodstream. That's what happens. Now, we have insulin, which is secreted by our pancreas as a response to this food in our bloodstream. And what happens is, let's call them buses and trams that are coming to pick you up from the rock concert and take you home. But what happens is the insulin is the buses and the trams, but there's not enough of them because it's nighttime and they've started to shut down the services, and there's hardly any buses and uh trams. So therefore, you are left standing at the bus stop. And when a tram comes, it gets packed on, but everybody else gets left at the station unneeded. And then what happens is you get on, and as you drive in this tram, there's no point in stopping at the next station because you're full, because the station's closed, and then you get to the next station and the station's closed. And this is insulin resistance. This is what happens at night when your cells close down. So what happens is the bus gets to the end of the line, and none of the passengers have been able to get off. So it gets parked, and the bus parks, and the driver says, That's it, we're at the end of the line. And the passengers, which is all the food and the glucose that you've eaten, goes, Well, where are we supposed to go? He goes, I don't care. And you just get off, you've got nowhere to go. So you're not getting burnt, so you're actually just going to get stored as energy, you're going to get stored as body fat. That is how insulin works. It collects the bus, the bus is the insulin, it collects the glucose and transports it to the station that you want to get off at. But the problem is, is the station's close when you get there. So you get to the end of the line and there's nowhere to go. When you eat those chocolates, chips, lollies, and damn jenny and that cake at night, what's happening is that is getting shuttled all the way through the bloodstream. It's not going into the muscle to be burnt because you are insulin resistant at that time and it goes into the and just get it becomes body fat because it's stored energy. It's not getting burnt. I hope that helps you to understand what happens, but this is literally what happens once melatonin is elevated in your body from about nine o'clock at night. So this is why that little treat and that little snack that you're having at night, it's not innocent. It counts ten times more than it did if you ate it during the day. This is the reason why shift workers, even though research shows that shift workers don't eat any more than your normal nine to five um day shifter or or day walking friend, you don't eat anymore. Research shows that you're eating pretty much the same. So, why do shift workers gain weight? The theory that I've just explained to you is the very reason. Because of the insulin sensitivity, it gets parked as body fat, even though you're eating the same amount. So I hope that explains it. Eating at night is eating during reduced insulin sensitivity. It's going to body fat. And because your body is stressed, and you might not feel stressed, but your body is stressed because it's out of circadian alignment, we add cortisol to that as well. Now, cortisol is a hormone that inhibits fat loss. Right? It actually pushes fat storage. Now, cortisol is an essential hormone for us to get us up and get us going in the morning as a day walker, but at night to be having cortisol elevated is actually causing us more problems. And the weight that gets stored by high cortisol is guess where? Around the waist. Hello? Is it all starting to fall into place now? And the other thing that happens is your hunger hormones get distorted. We have a hormone called leptin, and leptin is our body's own lifeguard. It tells, yep, we're good, we don't need any more. That drops. This is a hormone that tells you that you're full. But then we have ghrelin, and ghrelin is the hormone that tells our body that we're hungry, and it makes us hungry, and it makes us want to eat. And this is why we want we crave those sweet foods for energy overnight. So you're hungrier, you're less satisfied. And what are you going to crave? Fast energy foods, glucose, chips, chocolates, lollies, and damn Jenny's cake. Now, this is not weak discipline. This is actually a predictable response biologically to shift work. And that's the simple way that I can actually explain it. So when I say to you, just eat less and move more, this is why that fails. Because majority of the advice that's out there is not built for people who work nights or rotating shifts. Cutting calories too hard completely backfires for a shift worker. What it does is it actually increases fatigue, it worsens sleep, it raises those stress hormones. And more training isn't always better either. Training yourself into oblivion doesn't work. Hard training on low sleep actually increases injury risk, which means you end up becoming more sedentary, which means you gain more weight. The more stressed your body is through exercise, the higher cortisol is as well. Which means it could stall fat loss as well. Now, remember, we do need certain stresses as a result of resistance training or training. It's important. But when you're on low sleep and your body's not functioning properly, you run the risk of injury because your body's not performing optimally. Now, one of the other issues that I have as well, and I've got a massive issue with it, is PTs or nutritionists or dietitians issuing meal plans to shift workers. Because it just doesn't work. And these fail because shift work is not rigid either. It's all well and good for the nine to fiver that can have a standard breakfast, standard lunch, and standard dinner, but this is not who we are. We are shift workers. All the rules go out the window. Because if the plan doesn't flex with you, then the plan breaks. And when it breaks, you are blaming yourself. Oh, I've got no discipline, oh, I'm hopeless. No, it wasn't written for you. So this is the wrong conclusion for you to have it. So let's now get into what does actually help you. And you don't have to have followed me for long to know. Number one, you must anchor your eating. Now you don't need perfect timing. What you do need is you need consistency. I highly, highly recommend that you eat during the biological day. What is the biological day? Let's make it between day sunrise and sunset. And what we want to do is we pick an eating window that suits what we're doing. But regardless of the shift, we want to be eating during the biological day. And if you're on night shift, yeah, I know, you're asleep. So you skip, you miss until you wake up and then you eat. Your metabolism has slowed down. It's no good you saying, oh, my PT told me I've got to get three and a half thousand calories in. When am I going to eat? Do you know what? It's not efficient for you to eat three and a half thousand calories when you're on night shift anyway. Your metabolism slowed down, and the food that you're eating overnight is not going to where you want it to go to anyway. So shelve that bullshit, all right? Let me tell you, you know that doesn't work for you. I can help you with this. It's important. Now, what we do is we eat at the same time every day, whether we're working day shift, afternoon shift, night shift, day off, eat at the same time every day because your body anticipates it, it expects it, and it metabolizes and stores it efficiently. That helps. Breakfast at breakfast time, lunch at lunchtime, dinner at dinner time. And if you want to take at another level, majority of your calories before three o'clock, majority of your calories in the morning and then let them lighten up up until about three o'clock. Now you think, oh, I can't not eat after three. You will condition yourself to it. Most people condition themselves to what they call intermittent fasting, which is actually time-restricted feeding, where they fast from dinner right the way through until lunch the next day. You can actually train yourself to go the other way as well. That's where people get it wrong. You should be putting the majority of your calories in in the first half of the day. And watch the difference that that makes. What this actually does is actually improve that insulin response because your body is programmed and anticipating that that food is coming in at that time. It helps you with appetite control. It'll get you hungry at breakfast time, lunchtime, dinner time. And you won't be hungry outside of that because you're eating according to your eating window. The second thing that we need to focus on is to eat protein first. Protein helps to stabilize our blood sugar. That's important for us as a shift worker. It reduces cravings and it preserves the muscle when our sleep is actually short. Every single main meal that you eat should have a solid protein source in it. Not just an add-on. It's got to be the base. You start with chicken, fish, tofu, whatever it is that you're actually having as a protein source, that goes on the plate first. And as much as you can handle, then you add your starchy carbs and your fats. That will help you to stabilize your blood sugar. Now, third, listen carefully. Be very careful eating at night. Now you don't need to starve yourself overnight. You know, I talk about fasting from 9 p.m. to 6 a.m. And people that actually do it find that they thrive so much better, their systems perform better. What you do have to avoid is those chips, chocolates, lollies, and goddamn Jenny and her cake. Have you ever noticed Jenny never eats her own cake? You ever notice that? Jenny's the one that brings it, but she doesn't eat it. That's just a side note for you. Grazing at night and eating overnight, those types of foods are a problem. So if you eat on night shift, just keep the meals super light. Just protein, yogurt, fiber, fruit in the protein. Something that's really, really low sugar and lower those refined carbs. What are refined carbs? Highly processed chips, chocolate, lollies, and damn Jenny's cake. Save the bigger meals for when your body handles them correctly, breakfast, lunch, and dinner. And fourth, underestimated is to protect sleep like it matters. And I'll tell you why. Because it does. Sleep loss drives weight gain faster than almost anything else does. You need a pitch black room. Hold your arm out, turn the hand to face your face. If you can see your hand, it is too light in your room. Use a sleep mask or get blockout blinds or a roller shutter or something. You need a cooler temperature, 18 to 20 degrees Celsius, perfect temperature. You need a consistent wind down routine. To actually trigger your body into this is what we're doing to go to sleep. Even an extra 30 to 60 minutes of sleep can actually help you with appetite control. So let's go with that. Let's aim for 30 to 60 minutes extra. And fifth, train to support recovery and not punish the body. I had a conversation with a client during the week about training on night shift. She feels guilty because she doesn't train on night shift. And I've said, shelve it. Go for a walk. That's all you need. Your body's already stressed. Don't stress it any further. Take the pressure off yourself, take yourself for a walk. Besides, walking is probably more beneficial for energy balance than going to the gym anyway. Strength training two or three times a week as a shift worker is more than enough. If there are efficient sessions and you're doing it properly, that's enough. I only train three sessions a week. I've got a bonus session that if I feel like doing it, I'll do it, but I train three sessions a week and that's enough. I do swim every other day, but that's beside the point. This does resistance training is important. It improves insulin sensitivity because what it does is the muscle then craves the glucose and it sucks it into the muscle, which is required insulin to do it. It also protects muscle. You should be resistance training because you don't want chrome rails on either side of your toilet to get on and off it when you get as you age. It also raises your metabolic rate. And you know what that means? You can eat more. So what I want you to do is to just add walking or light movement on those tired days, those between shifts. Don't think, oh, I've woken up, oh, the PT is going to hang me. I've got to go to the gym. You're not working efficiently anyway. So just take yourself for a walk. And this is where having a coach like me who understands shift work and the impact on the body can help you more than any PT will. It's really important. Just add light walking on those days. Not every session has to be hard. Just turning it over. Resistance is just picking up one kilo and just doing something with one kilo or body weight. You're still resistance. And the sixth point that I want to make, listen to this carefully. Stop chasing perfection because you're not going to get it as a shift worker. So get rid of it out of your head. Weight loss for shift workers, weight loss for shift workers is a lot slower than anybody else. So stop comparing yourself to anybody else. Someone who lost six kilos in a 12-week challenge, kudos to them. That's great. You may not be able to achieve it. You may, and there are people out there that will, but that's not the general rule for every shift worker. And that's the reality of it. You've got to accept that. And as a female, you've got to accept that you're going to lose weight slower than a male will. So if you're a female shift worker, you're really up against it because you're up against it because you are female and you're going to lose weight slower than a male. And as a shift worker, you're going to lose weight slower than Jenny next door. And that's a fact. It's biological. Accept it. The goal is trend, not speed. Stability first. Pillars. Routines. You do that and get those right and align that circadian rhythm and eat at the right time, and the fat loss just follows. So just remember this. Shift workers don't need more discipline. What they do is they just need better alignment. Because when your body supports your biology, effort drops, cravings reduce, energy improves, your energy balance changes. And this is not about eating less forever. It's about eating smarter within the limits of shift work. And once weight stops creeping up, you are then winning. So if you're a shift worker struggling with weight, you're not broken. Your body is doing exactly what it's designed to do under stress and poor sleep. So you need to fix that stress and that poor sleep. And the answer that you're looking for is not in an extreme. It's in structure, it's in consistency, and it's actually in recovery. And if you want help building this around your personal roster, your personal life and your social life, guess what? That's exactly what I do. And if you go down to the links in the show notes, you'll see that you can book a free 15-minute call with me. Let's get you sorted and sort you forever. And if this episode helped, share it with your colleagues. Share it with another shift worker who's blaming themselves for something that simply is not their fault. I'll catch you on the next one. Thank you for listening. If you enjoyed this episode, be sure to subscribe so you get notified whenever a new episode is released. It would also be ever so helpful if you could leave a rating and review on the app you're currently listening on. If you want to know more about me or work with me, you can go to ahealthyshift.com. I'll catch you on the next one.