Want to teach your body not to store fat? Follow Nutrition Rule #1: Eat five meals a day. Read on to learn the science behind how and why following this rule will help you lose weight.
Your endocrine system produces powerful hormones that control growth and energy, among other things. If you eat too infrequently, your body recognizes a famine situation and this system will respond by making changes that are counterproductive to weight loss. Your body does this to protect you. This is how human beings have survived periods of time when food has not been available. (Cavemen didn’t have a friendly grocer's freezer.)
When you severely restrict your calories, your body doesn’t know you’re choosing not to eat; all it knows is that the stretches between food intake are too long, so it must be that you don’t have access to the food you need. Your body does what it has to do to protect you – which means slowing everything down and storing more of what you do eat as fat.
If your objectives are to lose weight, build a little muscle, and have enough energy for an active and fun life, then you must teach your body how to support those needs. Food intake is one of the ways in which you communicate with your body. When you eat strategically, you will begin to direct your body to do the things that support your weight loss and fitness goals.
By eating five small meals throughout the day, the first message you send is that there is an abundant supply of food, and that your body needn’t worry about starvation. It’s similar to the way you budget your money. Expenditure decisions are made based on cash flow, reserves, and income. Your body acts in a similar way with fat storage. If your body knows that more food is always coming in, it won’t be as likely to store fat, and it will be more likely to let stored fat go.
In addition to teaching your body that it doesn’t need to hoard fat, frequent meals create another very beneficial situation. Every time you eat, your blood sugar level increases. Blood sugar gives you energy. When you go for long periods of time without eating, your blood sugar level drops, and so does your energy level. Small, frequent meals spread evenly throughout the day encourage consistent energy levels. By eating every three hours or so, you will no longer have the lags and dips in energy that most people experience throughout the day.
Here’s another important thing to consider: Whenever you eat and your blood sugar level rises, your pancreas releases the hormone insulin. It is the job of insulin to help transport blood glucose (sugar) into your cells where it can be used for energy. When you eat bigger meals that are higher in sugar, your body will respond by releasing a surge of insulin which will then wipe out all of your blood sugar, causing your energy to plummet shortly thereafter, and resulting in food cravings, which make you want another big meal, which causes another insulin spike, and on and on it goes.
Smaller, more frequent meals lead to:
- smaller increases in blood sugar
- smaller releases of insulin
- less fat storage
- greater mobilization of stored fat
- more consistent energy levels
That’s five fantastic reasons to stop skipping meals and switch to five small meals a day.
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