How To Do A Metabolic Reset

What’s Inside This Episode?

• The Secret Culprit Behind Fatigue and Weight Gain: Why insulin resistance starts years before diabetes is diagnosed—and what your doctor won’t tell you.
• Metabolism’s Hidden Enemies: How stress, sleep deprivation, and timing your meals the wrong way are silently wrecking your metabolic health.
• A 30-Day Reset That Works: Step-by-step strategies for unlocking stubborn fat, stabilizing blood sugar, and boosting energy—without crazy diets or extreme exercise.
• Craving Crushers: The three nutrients you must add to your daily routine to stop sugar cravings and emotional eating in their tracks.
• Metabolic Myths Busted: Why “eating every two hours” could be the worst advice ever—and what to do instead.
• The Sleep Connection: How late nights and poor sleep could be turning off your fat-burning hormones and destroying your appetite control.

Resources and Links:

• See the Full Transcript here
• Get Your FREE Guide: FREE CHECKLIST: Foods that Can Reverse Belly Fat, Fatigue, and Lack of Focus
• Join the Next-Level Health Practitioner Facebook Group here for resources and community.
• ReInvent 2025 Replay and Slides: Watch a deep dive into gut health, genetics, and lab testing here.
• Check out our Insulin Resistance Mastery Program for Practitioners and/or The Sweet Spot Solution for a metabolic reset.
• Explore Advanced Training and Resources: Visit INEMethod.com to take your practice or personal healing to the next level.
• Check Out Related Podcast Episodes: Dive into more metabolic health strategies here.

 

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Transcript

Dr. Ritamarie Loscalzo 

Today I want to talk to you about how to do a metabolic reset in just 30 days. 

 

In my world, a metabolic reset is when you do specific steps over the course of a length of time to help your metabolism improve. A lot of the metabolic problems we see are attributed to insulin resistance and the cells in the body are no longer sensitive to the signal of insulin to get the fuel in, and as a result, we have high blood sugar which has so many different problems. 

 

We also have issues with the mitochondria not being able to make energy, and when the mitochondria can’t make energy, everything falls apart in the body. We feel sluggish and bowels don’t work and the mood is sluggish and the heart rate, everything gets affected. 

 

So a metabolic reset is a set of steps that you can do to basically revive your metabolism, reset your metabolism, so it works the way it’s supposed to. 

 

So who would be a great candidate for a metabolic reset? I see this all the time. We see people who are struggling to lose weight. They’re struggling, they’re starving themselves, they’re going to the gym for three hours, or they’re just doing crazy stuff to try to lose weight, and they can’t, probably because they have too high a level of insulin and their insulin receptors are resistant. They’ve lost sensitivity.

 

 So a person like that, a person who has thyroid complaints, a person who has been told that they have hypothyroid and put on medication, and it may not be working properly for them, or somebody with an autoimmune condition where the body is basically self-sabotaging. 

 

Dr. Ritamarie Loscalzo (02:19)

It’s really protecting itself, but it feels like it’s self-sabotaging because it’s creating antibodies against its own tissues. People who have diabetes, people who have already been diagnosed with type two diabetes can definitely benefit from a metabolic reset. People who have pre-diabetes or what’s called insulin resistance diagnosed by their practitioner, those people can benefit but also people who are in what I call the pre-insulin resistance stage. 

 

People who are struggling with imbalanced blood sugar, dysregulated blood sugar, and they don’t know. All they know is that they feel tired, they feel hungry even after they eat a big meal. They can’t go more than a couple of hours between meals without craving, and they just don’t have the energy. 

 

So what’s happening inside when we’re doing a metabolic reset is that the receptors on every cell that are responding to the presence of insulin and glucose, they get sensitive again. They actually open up again. They allow the insulin and the glucose to get into the cells, so the cells can do their jobs. And what happens in say thyroid health is the same thing. 

 

We have receptors on every cell for the thyroid hormone and that sets the metabolic rate. It’s like the furnace in your house. It sets the metabolic rate, how well we’re burning fuel. And the metabolic reset will help reset those. It helps decrease inflammation in the body, and it helps to decrease some of the stress hormones like cortisol. And it helps the body to be able to accept not just insulin and not just thyroid, but all the hormones in the body, because all of those receptors get to work better.

 

It’s like they get unplugged, they get unclogged. And some of the steps that we do in a metabolic reset help the body with the balance of fats in the body. And we’ll talk about that when we talk about the dietary approach, but it helps the body to not be inflamed. It helps to reduce cytokines in the body. And it helps the body to repair way better and become more sensitive to the signals of the hormones.

 

Dr. Ritamarie Loscalzo (04:33)

The first thing I generally start people with is a process to get their stress under control. When we’re under stress, the body’s producing a hormone called cortisol. What happens with cortisol is it prepares the body to run away from tigers. It prepares the body to either flee or fight, right? And when we need to do that, we need extra sugar into the blood. 

 

So what cortisol does is it has an effect on releasing stored sugar from the liver and from the muscles so that we can facilitate that fight-flight process. So I like to help people with a couple of simple techniques to help turn around the aspects of stress, to help shift them from the sympathetic nervous system. It is that part of the nervous system that’s responsible for our stress response, for keeping us alive in this space of danger.

 

So we want to start to do things that can shift us from the sympathetic into what’s called the parasympathetic. And the parasympathetic, also controlled by the vagus nerve, you might’ve heard that in your travels around the internet, on the vagus nerve and the parasympathetic, that’s where all the healing happens. That’s where resting, that’s where digesting, that’s where your sex drive comes from, has to come from that parasympathetic. 

 

So we want to shift the body from being in sympathetic to parasympathetic. And there’s some very simple techniques that we start with. And one of them is one of my favorites, because it’s quick and easy, is HeartMath, a company called HeartMath. Did all this research over the last few decades and has shown that by combining appreciation and breathing, we can shift it. 

 

We can shift from sympathetic to parasympathetic. We can go from being in fight-flight to going in the calm and decrease that cortisol level affect that the cortisol has on the body, all the negative effects the cortisol has on the body, which is number one, raising the blood glucose. Number two, raising blood pressure. 

 

And when we look around, one of the highest rates of death in the world actually today is from cardiovascular problems. High blood pressure is a problem that contributes to strokes and heart attacks and cardiovascular imbalance.

 

Dr. Ritamarie Loscalzo (06:58)

So when we do this, when we do this Heart Math technique, this combination of breathing and appreciation, we allow the body to get into a healing space and decrease the risk of all the bad diseases like diabetes and cardiovascular disease. You know what the cool part about this stress break is, I call it mini vacations? You can take these mini vacations throughout the day, and you can do them in a minute or less at a time.

 

And I’ve found that there’s five times throughout the day that are really effective. You can do it more, but five times throughout the day, taking one minute to do this. So five minutes out of your day is effective as all get out. It is so effective. 

 

And so what happens is you do it right when you first get up. So what happens when you first wake up in the morning? You’re stressed. You’re wondering about the day and this meeting and that meeting and the kids and the parents and whatever else is stressing you. And it’s not a great start to the day.

 

What if you started your day with some breathing and appreciation? It could be a minute. You could do it for five minutes if you want, but I’m not asking you to take a whole hour to do a meditation. That would be good for you, too. 

 

But I’m saying in a busy person’s life, one minute, one minute in the morning, breathing appreciation, one minute before each meal. Because what happens is when you are going to eat, your body needs the cortisol levels to go down so that the body can produce, the digestive tract can produce enzymes, can lubricate itself, can produce the bile, all those things, they don’t happen well when cortisol’s in the system. So you take a minute before each meal.

 

In the old days, like when I was growing up, we sat down, and we held hands, and we did grace before meals, and we give gratitude for our meal. That is such a healing practice, and I think everybody should take that up again, whether you’re doing it with your family, holding hands, or whether you’re just doing it quietly within yourself.

 

Doing that before each meal helps the meal get digested better. And then finally, right when you get into bed, and so many people have trouble falling asleep, because they have so much on their minds, right? All the things they have to do the next day. And right before you’re falling asleep, you take a minute to do it. Five times, one minute at a time is the minimum that everybody should do. And I think it’s pretty easy for everybody to fit that in.

 

Dr. Ritamarie Loscalzo (09:22)

Can you imagine not being able to fit an extra five minutes in your day? It makes so much difference. And when we do this with people, when I have folks do this, even before we start the nitty gritty of the metabolic reset with the foods and the supplements and whatever else we do, we start with the stress. And most people are seeing already, those that measure their blood glucose are already seeing effective changes in those blood glucose levels. It’s an amazing process.

 

The other things related to stress, lowering stress, meditation, if you’re a meditator, but if you’re a meditator, don’t just do it first thing in the morning and think you’re good as gold and be stressed out the rest of the day. You can incorporate these many meditation breaks, these mini vacations where you’re incorporating breathing and appreciation. 

 

So diet is critical. Nutrition is critical. Here’s the thing. Most people have trouble changing their diet, because there’s nutritional imbalances that are creating cravings. So in a lot of folks, before we even start on the diet, I don’t want to set people up for failure. Before we even start on the diet, I talk to them about what I call the craving crusher nutrients. So if someone is like a sugar craver, a binge eater, an emotional eater, and they’re struggling. They’ll be struggling when we start to talk about the diet stuff.

 

I give them some nutrients that they can try. And again, inevitably, whenever people try these three nutrients, there’s others, there’s plenty of others, but these three have the most, in my clinical experience, the most shift in people’s ways of dealing with food. Chromium, magnesium, and DHA. DHA is a specific omega-3 fat. 

 

Those three are very important for helping the insulin receptors to grab onto the glucose and pull it into the cells via insulin. So it’s really, really important that those levels be high. When you’re on a diet for all your life, like I was, drinking Kool-Aid and eating M&Ms and all the sugary and starchy foods, I burned out those nutrients because number one, they were not in the foods I was eating, but number two, they were being used up. Because all the sugars and starches I was eating were putting a load on them and making them work harder.

 

Dr. Ritamarie Loscalzo (11:50)

So chromium, magnesium, and DHA. So I start with that. Once people have been on those for a week or a week and a half, people are like, well, I’m losing weight already, because I’m not even thinking about all the sweets that I wanted to do. So the diet that we look at is a diet that does not require a lot of insulin to get digested and into the cells.

 

So we talk about reducing and eliminating all the foods that have an insulin surge that cause an insulin surge. And what we do is we actually have people measure their glucose during this process. They either measure it with a little prick, a little glucometer, you prick the finger and get a drop of blood. A lot of people don’t like to do that. And in the more recent five or six years, CGMs, continuous glucose meters have become available to the public.

 

And we have people monitor and determine which foods make their sugars go way high and which foods keep their sugars nice and steady. So we have a whole process that we teach for doing that. So this is a customized approach. I don’t believe in a one size fits all. Somebody can eat, you know, a pound of blueberries at a meal and not cause their sugar to go up. Somebody else can eat a tablespoon and their sugar goes up. 

 

So for 30 days, we’re eating in such a way that we keep the blood sugar below 110. Now, if you’re already diabetic, you’re like, I can’t even get my sugar close to 110. Yeah, for somebody who’s non-diabetic, has normal fasting glucose, normally in the 80s, then we don’t want them to go above 110. But we teach a method of how do you determine what your maximum glucose range is after a meal? And generally speaking, your sugar should not go up more than 20 or 25 milligrams per deciliter is the measurement after a meal. 

 

Otherwise, that’s a meal that’s putting a big strain on your system, making it really these big peaks. So that’s what we teach people how to do. And so it’s customized to the particular person. I don’t just say, here’s your metabolic reset, everybody do it. I mean, you certainly could follow the general guidelines, but the tweaking is what really makes a difference. There’s a lot of foods that, you know, all that said about customizing. There’s some basic guidelines that we all should follow. 

 

Dr. Ritamarie Loscalzo (14:14)

So I have a chart that’s green, yellow, red. And red is the foods everybody should avoid for 30 days. And that includes refined foods, ultra processed foods, flour products, all those sorts of things. And we give people options. If they love pasta, we have plenty of options in low glycemic, non-starch pasta, kelp noodles, or konjac noodles or coconut noodles.There’s so many options, zucchini noodles. 

 

So we give people options, right? What they could be eating at this time. But yes, there’s a chart of what you should be avoiding. The processed foods are killing us. I’m just, that’s good to say that we all need to be off the ultra processed foods. We all need to be off all of the refined and hydrogenated and oxidized oils that people are eating and the foods that contain them. So there’s some basic guidelines.

 

Then there’s some foods in the middle that are yellow that you might be able to eat it, but I can’t. So we have you test for those. And then there’s the green that almost nobody ever has glucose spikes from. And those are the foods that you’re safe. Now, someone could just take that chart and follow it;  just eat everything in the green. They’re like, I don’t have the time to test my glucose. I’m just going to do this. 

 

I will say that my experience has been if someone just follows eating everything on the green side, which is lots of non-starchy vegetables, nuts, seeds, avocados, meats that have not been processed. If you are going to do meat, it would have to be foods that are not fed in the factory farm ways, that are not loaded with hormones and pesticides and all that kind of stuff. So it’s a very specific set of foods. And when people follow that, we have phenomenal results in 30 days. 

 

We’ve had people go from being plump to having an hourglass figure in 30 days. We’ve had people go from being diabetic and on medications to non-diabetic and off medications with the blessing of their doctor in 30 days. So it happens, you’ve got to follow the guidelines, but it works. It definitely works well. 

 

So the next piece is movement. People get freaked out about movement. They’re like, I don’t have a gym membership. I don’t have time to exercise. But studies have shown that as little as five minutes of walking can help.

 

Dr. Ritamarie Loscalzo (16:39)

Every day you find one, two or three five minute segments to walk. It makes a difference because muscles that are trained, muscles that are active learn how to pick up the insulin and the glucose from the blood and into the cells much more effectively. Ideally you’re doing a half an hour of aerobics or weight training is great, but you don’t have to. 

 

And one of the kinds of movements that I teach people to do is burst training. And there’s other names for it out on the internet, the HIIT training. It’s a little bit more sophisticated and cumbersome, rigorous, than the burst training. But basically it’s short bursts, 30 seconds at a time, where you’re just moving. 

 

You can be jumping up and down, doing jumping jacks. You can be on a bicycle, pedaling hard. You can be walking up a hill, whatever it might be, but you’re only doing it for 30 seconds. All out, whatever your personal capacity is for 30 seconds.

 

And the studies have shown that in that 30 seconds, you generate growth hormone, which is the antagonist of insulin. Growth hormone helps you to burn fat and store lean muscle. So you’re getting more buff, you’re getting more fit, you’re burning fat just by doing these bursts. 

 

And in the studies that I’ve looked at, they show that what happens is over the course of the next two to three to even sometimes four hours, you’re increasing the metabolic rate, you’re burning more fat, you’re keeping the gross hormone elevated. 

 

So for 30 seconds of burst training, you can get the benefits of 30 minutes of aerobic exercise. So it’s so easy to do. And the studies, again, that I’ve looked at show that if you do it 30 seconds, and you do it a few hours later, you do 30 seconds and a few hours later, and you do three to five of these 30 second bursts a day, that you’re getting a great effect. 

 

You may need more. You may be able to get away with less, but the people who have the most benefit on the metabolic reset and get the most shift in 30 days are those that are fairly consistent on doing their bursts. 

 

You may be wondering, when can I do this? When is the best time to do this? So the best time is maybe an hour before a meal. So you get your metabolism revving, and you’re going to burn the meal better. A half an hour to an hour after a meal, so that you’re continuing to burn what you just ate.

 

Dr. Ritamarie Loscalzo (19:06)

First thing in the morning works really, really well. And even last thing at night, but not too close to bedtime, because sometimes getting your metabolism revved up like that before bed can interfere. 

 

So basically, first thing in the morning, maybe an hour, hour and a half before bed, and then two or three times throughout the day in relation to meals, whether it be an hour before the meal, an hour after. Think about it that way, an hour before, an hour after the meal.

 

The next thing I’m going to talk about is something hardly anybody’s talking about is the timing of those meals and exercise, because it’s not just what you eat, it’s when you eat. So we want to make sure that we time our meals so that we give a break of four to six hours between each one. And you say, whoa, I have to eat every hour and a half. We work with people to gradually increase that duration. There’s many benefits to that. 

 

Insulin is elevated if you are going to be eating all day long. If you’re going to be eating every two hours, the insulin is going to stay elevated. Insulin is an anabolic hormone. What does that mean? It means that insulin causes the body to store fat. So if you’re in a mode where you’re trying to lose fat, and you’re eating every two hours, because some expert told you that was the best thing to do to keep your blood sugar steady, you’re shooting yourself in the foot. Not a good plan.

 

Not a good plan. So what we want to do is we want to be able to time the meals. Some people do intermittent fasting. That’s great. We should have at least 12 hours between our last meal and our first meal. Longer than that, some people tolerate it really well. 

 

I benefit from a much longer fast than that. You might also. Some people don’t. So you have to find out what works for you. But 12 hours should be from the last meal to the first meal. And then from your last meal to bedtime, three hours minimum.

 

And that allows the food to digest, the cortisol levels to go down, and that gives growth hormone the opportunity to come up, usually comes up really high during the night so that you can clean up from the day, you can burn fat and store lean muscle. 

 

So those are the timings and then four to six hours between meals just to keep it steady. It has other benefits besides a metabolic rate, it has to do with the gut and SIBO and the movement of stuff through your intestinal tract.

 

Dr. Ritamarie Loscalzo (21:28)

There’s a lot of benefits to timing your meals properly. In addition to the timing of meals, there’s timing of exercise, which we talked a little bit about when we talked about movement. And then there’s the timing of sleep, which is the last pillar that I want to talk about. 

 

Sleep is the last of the pillars. And I left it for last, not because it’s the least important. It actually is one of the most important, but because it’s the one that’s so difficult for people to do. There’s people who have insomnia. There’s people who can’t fall asleep. There’s people who can’t stay asleep. They wake up multiple times throughout the night, and there’s people who have voluntary insomnia, which means they can’t get their butts into their beds, and they stay up late because they’re working or taking care of projects or taking care of kids or whatever else. 

 

So sleep is one of the most important things for your metabolic rate. There’s several things that happen during sleep that are critical to your survival that are critical to you having the best metabolism. And it’s a critical component of the metabolic reset. 

 

And what I do find as we guide people through this metabolic reset is that people might be exercising, they might be doing their mini vacations or meditating every day. They might be moving their body, they might be eating well, taking supplements, herbs, or whatever, but they’re still not getting the results they really need. And when we go deeper into the sleep issue, we’re finding that they are sleeping four to six hours a night on a regular basis. They’re going to bed very late and sometimes getting up very early, but sometimes getting up late. 

 

So let’s talk about sleep and why it’s so important for metabolism. And then I want to talk about the timing interactions with sleep that are so critical. 

 

So with sleep, when you go to bed and you fall asleep, there’s a hormone called growth hormone, which burns fat and stores lean. It does a lot of other stuff, but in general, for our purposes here, that’s what it does. And it has these peaks. So the first peak of growth hormone is usually before midnight. And it is within an hour of you falling asleep. So if you’re falling asleep at quarter to 12, you’re going to miss that big spike of growth hormone. All the subsequent spikes are much smaller. 

 

Dr. Ritamarie Loscalzo (23:51)

For one, we have less growth hormone when we don’t sleep enough. Number two, I talk about the hormones that dance in your sleep and all the interactions of hormones that happen while you’re sleeping. And some of those are the appetite hormones. So ghrelin and leptin. 

 

Ghrelin isn’t a hormone that makes us more hungry. Leptin is a hormone that gives us the satiation signal. When you don’t get enough sleep, ghrelin goes up and then leptin goes down. That’s a recipe for disaster when it comes to losing weight and when it comes to having good metabolism. 

 

I have found personally and through my clients, through my students, my patients, over the many years, the over 30 years of practice, that when folks don’t get enough sleep, they’re hungrier the next day than they ever are generally. And I find personally that if I don’t get enough sleep. I’m just hungry. I eat a meal, and I’m still hungry. I eat another meal. I’m hungry. I’m just hungry, hungry, hungry all day long. 

 

That’s because of the interaction between ghrelin and leptin. Where too, there’s lots of studies, and we have another, we have a podcast episode, YouTube videos on this topic of what happens when you don’t get enough sleep is that you develop temporary insulin resistance. And what do I mean by temporary?

 

Well, if you just have a night or two of bad sleep here and there, the next day, you’re not going to handle your glucose very well. So I always tell people, if you have a bad night of sleep, just stay away from the carbs the next day, because you’re not going to handle them, you’ll have temporary insulin resistance.

 

But what happens if you have low levels of sleep every day? What happens if you have low levels of sleep that are continuous day after day, week after week, year after year, you develop insulin resistance.

 

And that happened to me. I was eating a great diet, meditating, exercising, not eating before bedtime, but I was not sleeping enough. And when I started testing my own blood sugar, I noticed that I had pre-insulin resistance. And I was heading down that path. Fortunately, the other good things I was doing kept me from going fully down to being diabetic. We want to get good sleep. We need to get good sleep. It’s when all the housekeeping happens.

 

Dr. Ritamarie Loscalzo (26:17)

All the sludgy cells that have receptors that don’t work, they get healed during the night. So good sleep. So what does that mean? Bed before midnight. I often, I tell people, try to get to bed by 11 o’clock at the latest. 10 o’clock is even better. Get there and then don’t eat three hours before you go to bed. So you have the best opportunity to have good hormone control, and can have good detox during sleep.

 

If you wake up in the morning, and you have not had a lot of sleep, and you’ve eaten right before bed, you’re not going to be as cleansed as you could be from all the exposures you’ve had during the day, but also from all of the endotoxins that get generated. 

 

So sleep is critical. It’s a critical component of a metabolic reset. And we have a lot of people who go through the metabolic reset, and they get some results, but when we go, what’s going on? We find out that it’s the sleep.

 

So the reason I left sleep for the end is because for those with voluntary insomnia, it’s not that hard to solve it. You just have to gradually move your bedtime, shorter and shorter. Psychologically, it’s hard and from a work standpoint, it might be difficult, but it’s so worth it. Other people have a lot more going on, and they have insomnia where they can’t fall asleep. And sometimes that is related to cortisol elevations. And sometimes the Heart Math before bed helps that.

 

But others are just, we don’t know, and we have to dig. You have to do a full functional medicine evaluation to determine what’s really going on with that person and their sleep. Some people, they fall asleep fine and then they wake up prematurely and they don’t get a full night’s sleep. So you have to look at what’s going on hormonally, what’s going on gut wise, what’s going on with their neurotransmitters. We have to look at all those things. So that’s why it’s a little bit more difficult. 

 

All of the others are easily within your control, the stress, the diet, the movement, the timing, the sleep. You do what you can to control what you can control. You can control how close to bedtime you’re eating. You can control how many hours you’re at least in bed, maybe not asleep. And you can control the time that you go to bed. It’s so critical, and it’s so overlooked, and it is really refreshing that there’s so much out there now.

 

Dr. Ritamarie Loscalzo (28:38)

Why We Sleep is one of my favorite books out there on sleep, scientific evidence of all these different things we’ve talked about. We have an insulin resistance training for practitioners, and it’s self-paced, and you can just go on the website and sign up for it and then you’ll get access to monthly calls with the group, so you can ask questions. 

 

We have what’s called the Sweet Spot Solution Program for our audiences, as we call them self healers, people who want to heal themselves. And that takes everybody through all these processes of doing the metabolic reset. And we have a lot of free workshops. If you’re on our list, you’ll get to hear a lot of the free workshops as well. 

 

So for all of you out there who are committed to being the best health practitioners you can. You want to be on the forefront of changing healthcare. Visit our website at INEMethod.com and learn more about it. Check out the show notes, check out the resources, and you have the power to change people’s lives. You have the power to adjust and help them adjust their diet and their lifestyle, so that they can be the healthiest they can be. So check out the show notes and until next time, shine on.