Welcome And Why This Matters

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 to another episode of a Healthy Shift Podcast. You are most welcome. Thank you very much for joining me again. This one's a really important episode. I cannot believe that in almost 370 episodes, I've never covered this topic. Brace yourself for this one. It's really important because what I want to do, I'm going to start this one with a statement that might make you stop just for a second. And that is that you can look fine on the outside, but you can still be carrying the most dangerous fat in your body. Now, I've seen this for years working with shift workers, police, nurses, ambos, fly in, fly out. People who look like they've really got it together. I also see on social media a lot of fitness influencers, a lot of people who are shift workers that say that they're doing really well and they're really coping well and blah, blah, blah. But there's something that people never talk about, and it's something that is highly impactful to our shift worker, and that is visceral fat. Now, this isn't the type of fat that you stand in front of the mirror and you can pinch because you can see it. It's not the fat that's sitting underneath your skin. This is the fat that actually wraps itself around your organs, your liver, your intestines, and your pancreas. And it's not just sitting there doing nothing either. It's highly active fat. What it does is it pumps out inflammatory chemicals straight into your bloodstream. And that literally is driving things like insulin resistance, high blood pressure, a poor cholesterol profile. Does this ring a bell? And this is all the stuff that leads to type 2 diabetes and also to heart disease and cardiovascular disease as well. Now, here's the part that catches most people off guard. You can literally have high levels of visceral fat and you can still look normal. That's right. So while you're looking around at your colleagues and they all look normal and you wish you looked like them, remember they can still have extremely high levels of visceral fat. Now, I've worked with shift workers who aren't overweight, but their blood work actually tells a completely different story, and that's a trap. So why does this hit shift workers harder? Well, it comes back to one thing. You wouldn't believe it. I'm gonna say it, your circadian rhythm. I know, shocking, right? This is your internal body clock. This system controls everything inside. I've covered this backwards and forwards. I've covered it inside and out, upside down, topsy tube, I've covered it everywhere. But this system literally controls when you sleep and when you wake and when hormones are released in your body, and it also controls metabolism, digestion, and how your body is actually handling the food that you take. And shift work disrupts this. Not a little bit, completely. And unfortunately, majority of shift workers are not taught or educated properly on how to go about doing shift work, how to optimize their lives in shift work, and they're learning from others and they're bumbling their way through it. But that doesn't make it the right way. This is not impacting a little bit, it is impacting completely in a really big way. Now, you're awake when your body expects to sleep, you're eating when your body expects you to fast. And over time, this literally starts to break down your system. Now, let's break down what it is that actually happens. So, first of all, your hormones lose their timing. Now, when we talk about hormones, a lot of people say, oh, my hormones are not balanced. And this is true for a shift worker. The main hormones that we look at in shift workers is cortisol, insulin, and melatonin. Now, cortisol gets a bad rap in um social media circles. Oh, you've got to lower your cortisol, got to lower your cortisol. But cortisol is actually a very, very important hormone as well. Cortisol is the hormone that actually gets you up and about in the morning, or when you wake up, it gets you going. So it's important, but we don't want it elevated all day. Insulin is another extremely important hormone. Insulin is released and secreted by the pancreas in response to the intake of glucose or carbohydrates. And what it does is it shuttles that glucose into the muscle to be burnt for energy. That's simplifying things. That's the second hormone. And the third one is melatonin. Now, melatonin, we are learning more and more and more about melatonin all the time. But melatonin is an extremely important hormone. When we think melatonin, we think sleep. But melatonin is actually the signaler of darkness to our body and puts our body into another state where it actually recovers and repairs itself. It's also a highly active antioxidant as well, and free radical eradicator. And what it does is it runs through our body, eradicating cancer cells as we sleep. Now, these three hormones are all running on a rhythm. And when you work nights or you're rotating shifts, that rhythm gets thrown out. And you end up with high cortisol at the wrong times, reduced insulin sensitivity, you have poor blood sugar control. And that combination does what? What it does is it pushes fat storage and not just any fat, visceral fat. And this is a fat that we've got to avoid. Now, secondly, sleep loss. Now, most shift workers are not getting enough quality sleep, and that matters more than what most people think. A lot of shift workers wear fatigue as a badge of honor. It is not. Let me be the one to tell you right now. Because when sleep drops, a number of things occur. Leptin, which is the hormone that actually tells you that you're full, goes down. Ghrelin, which drives hunger, goes up. So you eat more. And what do we eat? What do we crave? Highly palatable carbohydrates and fats. So when those two hormones, leptin and ghrelin, add a sink, what actually happens? We end up all over the place. So sleep loss actually changes where your body is storing this fat. And more of it gets pushed into the abdominal area to start off with. And this is more visceral fat. And this could be, you could be a reasonably lean-looking person, but you could have high levels of abdominal fat purely because of the desynchronization of the circadian rhythm and the poor functionality in your body just because you're a shift worker. Now, the third thing that we need to look at is eating at the wrong time. Because a lot of shift workers eat overnight. You can't help it. It's just there. It's food, you're craving food, you're looking for energy, and you eat. And I get it. You're awake, you're working, and you're tired. But your body does not process food the same way at night. It's important that you understand glucose tolerance is worse. And your insulin response is impaired. We know that our pancreas is snoozing. It's nighttime. Even though you're awake, melatonin will elevate and it will still tell your body that it is resting. Our body is still running on this normal diurnal clock, even though you're awake. So therefore, your pancreas is resting and recovering, and it's not releasing the same amount of insulin overnight as it does during the day. And this is why our metabolism reduces significantly overnight. So the same meal that you can handle during the day becomes more likely to be stored as fat at night. And again, where does it go? It ends up as visceral fat. Now, I want to be really clear here. This isn't about how you look. Be very, very clear on this. This is about your long-term health because visceral fat is strongly linked to type 2 diabetes, heart disease, fatty liver, even cognitive decline, and certain cancers. And it builds ever so quietly. There are no obvious early signs, there's no pain, no warning, there's nothing to see here until something starts to show up in your blood work. Or even worse. So what is there that we can do about this? Because you don't fix this with a supplement or quick fix. We have to fix the inputs. So let's have a look at the inputs. And the first one, you guessed it, nutrition. Now, this is where most people need to be honest with themselves. So if you're serious about reducing this highly damaging visceral fat, you need a real food approach. What diet? Of course, the Mediterranean style of eating fatty fish, poultry, olive oil, vegetables at every meal, legumes, nuts, seeds. Very important. This isn't about cutting calories, it's just about reducing that inflammation and improving how your body handles energy. And here's the part that most people are going to push back on. And you are going to hate to hear this. But alcohol. If you have visceral fat and it's the issue, alcohol goes to zero. No, we don't reduce it. We have to cut it completely. Zero. Because alcohol directly drives fat storage around the liver and it contributes to visceral fat. You've all heard of fatty liver. And this is what actually happens, and alcohol drives this. Our ultra-processed foods, gone. These foods are designed to make you overeat. And when the circadian rhythm is already disrupted, it hits even harder. So once those hormones, ghrelin and leptin, are out of sync, that ghrelin elevates, your body craves highly palatable carbohydrates. And what do you do? You reach for highly processed or ultra-processed foods, which is your chocolates, your chips, your lollies, damn Jenny and that cake. Keep remembering that this is why you are craving it because things are out of when you say your hormones are broken. Yes, they are. And shift work and circadian disruption creates this. The next thing we need to look at is movement. Now, this is not about smashing yourself in the gym. And I want to be quite clear about this. It's about doing things, the right things, consistently. Resistance training, three times a week, non-negotiable. Let me repeat that. Resistance training, three times a week, non-negotiable. Now you don't have to go into a gym and stand in a squat rack and put 160 kilos on your back and squat it. It's not about that. Bodyweight exercises. We need resistance training. Pick up one kilo dumbbells. Pick up two kilo dumbbells. Do you whatever, but you've got to do resistance training. Find yourself a PT that can write you a three-day program that's going to hit all the muscle groups and help you. Resistance training improves insulin sensitivity and reduces visceral fat. That's it's a non-negotiable. Plus, you you want to make sure that you've got lean tissue as you age, lean tissue being muscle, so that you can pick up that bag, you can get yourself off the toilet, you can get yourself off the couch, and you're not wandering around like an old person. Don't say, Oh, I don't resistance train, I don't like it. Go and enjoy it. Go and start and find that you'll start to really enjoy it, and you'll enjoy the benefits even more. Walking every day. This helps to control your cortisol. It also helps to stabilize your blood sugar, and it keeps your system just ticking over. Going for a walk 10 minutes after you've eaten makes such a big difference to your glucose control. It helps enormously. You notice the older Europeans are always going for a walk after dinner at night. You'll see that. We also need one high intensity session per week. Short, hard, done. You don't need more than that. You don't have to go and smash yourself in F-45s over and over and over again. Just one high intensity a week. And the third one, which is not the least important, but it's the third one, is sleep. Now, this is the big one. And this is the one that most shift workers struggle with. But if you don't address sleep, nothing else will work properly. Remember that. You need to control your sleep environment. You need a pitch black room. Remember this. Hold your arm out straight, turn your hand to face you. If you can see your hand, it's not dark enough. You need a cool temperature bedroom. You need no screens after sunset, nothing before bed. And the one that matters the most, and I want to repeat this and I'll say it loud, a consistent wake-up time. You might say, oh, but I'm a shift worker and I worked until late last night, so I need to get my eight hours sleep so I'll sleep in. That is causing you more problems. It's also causing metabolic chaos in your body. Waking up at the same time is the key to thriving in shift work. Learn to nap as a superpower, but wake up at the same time whenever possible. Because your body needs to be anchored. Your circadian rhythm needs to know where it is at in time and space. Otherwise, it wanders around with no idea where it is and it doesn't know when to release what. And this creates additional visceral fat. We don't metabolize or store, our hormones are all over the place and we're not functioning properly. Without this rhythm, your hormones are going to remain out of sync. So when you say, Oh, my hormones are broken, yep, probably because your circadian rhythm is out of sync, synchronize that, hormones line up. Now, I want to finish this off with something very direct because you can't ignore this. If you keep pushing through fatigue and you keep eating on the run and you keep telling yourself you're fine because you look alright, and visceral fat will build slowly and quietly. Or you can actually deal with it now because when you reduce visceral fat, you wouldn't believe it, but your energy improves, your sleep improves, your blood markers improve, and everything starts to move in the right direction. Now I want to be clear. I understand you might think, oh no, I'm all right, but this is literally accumulating all the time in your abdomen, and you have to do something about it. Get your doctor to check it. Go and get a DEXA scan to check it, see where you're at. It is that important. It's important to understand if you have visceral fat because it is active fat. It's not just that dormant fat that you can see on your stomach and oh yeah, I've got a bit of fat and it'll be alright, I'll just go into a calorie deficit and lose it. This is highly dangerous in active fat. It's driving inflammation and causing you metabolic chaos. Now, if you're not sure where to start, don't guess. Shift work changes the rules. And it does. Don't look for nine to five advice. It doesn't fit you. What works for day workers does not always work here for us. So if you want help, there is a link in the show notes where you can talk to me. You can book a free assessment call. And what we'll do is we will go through your schedule, your habits, and we will work out what's actually going on with you. And I will literally show you where to start. Where to start. And we will just chip away ever so easily to turn this all around for you. It won't fix itself, and the longer that you leave it, the harder it will get. Trust me. Thank you for listening, and I will catch you on the next episode. 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.