Your Food Order Matters. Here’s How to Do It Right.

Beginning with fiber also means you’ll likely eat more of it than you would otherwise—an important point, since around 95% of Americans are actually deficient in this critical carb. Because of this, “it helps with meeting the daily recommendation for fiber intake, which many of us tend to fall short of,” Holley says.

Eating more fiber can additionally make it easier to maintain a healthy weight. “Higher-fiber foods tend to be lower in calories,” Holley explains (and more filling to boot)—so when you load up on them early on, you’re likely to eat less of the higher-calorie foods coming down the line, making for a lower total calorie intake.

Next, turn to protein and healthy fats.

Protein is plentiful in meat, poultry, eggs, dairy, and seafood (as well as a few special plant-based items like legumes and soy products), while healthy fats can be found in nuts, seeds, avocados, vegetable oil, and fatty fish like salmon and mackerel. Both “are effective at stimulating the release of GLP-1, a hormone that helps to regulate appetite and blood sugar” (and which you’ve probably already encountered if you’re at all tuned into the Ozempic discourse), Holley says. Subsequently, that GLP-1 surge delays something called gastric emptying—“how quickly food moves from stomach to intestine,” according to Inchauspé. In practice, this effectively reduces the rate at which food is digested and, in turn, the rate at which glucose hits your bloodstream, resulting in a more gradual rise (seeing a pattern here?).

Finally, finish with carbs.

Once you’ve polished off everything else, it’s (finally!) time for carbs like rice, bread, and pasta, as well as those starchy veggies we mentioned above. By the time you reach this portion of the meal, there are “all these buffers in place to reduce the speed at which they arrive into the bloodstream. And that’s what we want,” Inchauspé says. Using chocolate cake as an example, she explains, “we’ll get all the joy from it, just as much as we did before, but on the inside, in terms of what happens in our intestine, things will be slowed down significantly.” Ta-da—“a smaller glucose spike and fewer consequences of the glucose spike on brain and body.”