When it comes to dieting a lot of people still have a hard time understanding the importance of meal frequency. Almost all of us have been taught as young kids that you eat breakfast, lunch, and dinner. Our ancient ancestors didn’t eat this way, it was more or less developed as our society progressed and we started going to school, or working real jobs. It became more of eating before work or school, having a lunch break in the middle of the day, and then having a meal after you got home. Our ancestors ate when they were hungry, or when they were able to gather food, which was at intervals throughout the day.
It also just recently occured to me that we all began by eating frequent meals throughout the day as infants. My wife and I just gave birth to twin girls, and now I know the true meaning of eating throughout the day!!! I’m a bit of a nutrition nut, so after my girls got here and we began feeding them it occured to me that this EXACTLY what I have always preached to people. The human body was programmed from day one to eat throughout the day.
The biggest reason for smaller, more frequent meals is efficiency. Your body is only going to use what nutrients it needs at the times that it needs them, and anything that is left over is either going to be stored as fat for later, or excreted as waste. With frequent meals the body can better utilize the nutrients you are taking in, and therefore less fat storage will occur. Insulin spikes are another reason to eat more frequently. Our goal is to keep insulin levels from surging and then plummeting throughout the day. Insulin is a hormone that is released to shuttle nutrients to cells throughout the body, and when we have large spikes in insulin we tend to shuttle any unused calories into fat cells. The more stable we can keep our insulin levels the less fat we will attain.
Frequent meals also have an effect on metabolism. Think of your metabolism as a fire. In order to keep that fire burning you need to keep adding fuel to it, and in this case our fuel is food. You have to keep “feeding the fire” so to speak. When you eat only three meals a day, and often I see people who only eat twice, then you never really get the metabolism going. Your body is always wondering when the next meal is going to come, so now your body is constantly in survival mode and just trying to conserve as much energy as it can until the next meal comes along.
So how frequent is frequent? In a perfect world I would like to see my clients eating every 2 hours, but I know that can be a bit cumbersome for most. More realistically I would like to see clients eat a small meal every 3 hours, but never any longer then 4 hours between meals. We are not talking about 5 course meals here. For a person on an 1,800 calorie weight loss plan this would equate to roughly 6 meals consisting of 300 calories per meal. In other words they are small meals. So if time is your excuse, there is no excuse. You can spare 15 minutes out of every three hours of your day to get a meal in. It will no doubt take planning, but it can be done. Especially since we now have Meal Replacement Powders that can be used for a couple of those meals. There really is no reason you can’t get a balance of your protein, carbs, and fats in every 3 hours.
As with working out this is a LIFESTYLE! It is something that becomes second nature. My body is so programmed, that if I even consider going longer than three hours without food it thinks it’s starving. There is no way I could go back to eating three square meals per day. At first it seems like a chore, but after you have done it for as long as I have it will just become second nature, and you will wonder why you ever thought it was so hard. It will just be a way of life, and your body will thank you for it.
