The Problems With Eating Three Meals A Day Vs. Five Or Six Meals A Day
|
Firstly by understanding the pros of the six meals a day plan as outlined elsewhere on this site you will gain a valuable insight into the problems with eating three meals a day vs five or six meals a day.
But let’s extrapolate the reasons a little further here and compare the two diet regimes - the “classic” three meals a day that most people live on and the six meals a day diet stuck to by professional athletes, models and numerous everyday people like me.
Why?
Because it works - it’s as simple as that.
Well, that and it’s so easy once you get into the swing of things you’ll be amazed why you didn’t try it earlier.
Principally the problems of eating just three meals a day rather than five or six meals are numerous.
The first is you’re likely to be starving hungry on a regular basis because it’s so long since your last meal. Get to your dinner at 6pm or so and you might have eaten your lunch at noon. Six hours later you’re ravenous!
You gorge yourself - and understandably so. Your body hasn’t had any calories added for six hours. Maybe longer if you missed lunch or are having a late dinner.
What stops you eating once you’ve started? Two things. Either you control your food intake physically or you eat until you’re full.
Typically with just three meals a day you’ll eat until you’re full when it comes to mealtime. It seems natural enough. It’s what everyone else does.
But feeling full is a feedback mechanism from your gut - your stomach and intestines telling you you’re “full”. As you eat, your gut stretches, and when it’s stretched enough you feel full.
The two downsides here are that it takes roughly 20 minutes from being full to actually feeling full in which time you’ve likely dusted off plenty more food - after all 20 minutes is a long time.
Secondly, if you regularly stretch and distort these receptors in your stomach, over time they will grow and take longer and longer to make you feel full. So your appetite will likely grow slowly over the years.
In contrast, with the six meals a day diet you’ll stick to a healthy portion size that will satisfy but not overfill you. You won’t feel lethargic afterwards. You won’t stretch your belly. You won’t get into a cycle of eating ever bigger meals. Instead another type of receptor will come into play.
And this receptor feeds back based on the calories in your body. A small meal taken regularly will keep your body fueled and keep these receptors happy.
You might feel a little hungry before your next meal but you’ll never feel “starving”.
You won’t be desperately lusting after food, or snacking on junk to keep you going till your next meal.
In addition the body has a canny ability to sense and adjust to the nutrients available to it.
Few calories available and your metabolism slows down to make the calories last longer and keep you going till the next meal.
A reasonable number of calories and it speeds back up again.
Too many calories and your body starts laying them down as fat.
This sounds like a good idea - and for survival it is. But for fat loss it isn’t.
You see, on the three meals a day plan you eat a huge meal and the excess calories are laid down as fat for use later. Then rather than using them when you’re hungry, your metabolism slows down using few calories and impacting the fat build-up.
It’s a vicious cycle.
With the five or six meals a day diet your metabolism is constantly stoked, minimizing weight gain and keeping your metabolism (and hence fat burning abilities) up in the short period between meals.
So there are just so many problems with eating three meals a day as opposed to five or six meals a day you’d be mad not to try it.
Now go lose some weight!
|
Related Posts:
No related posts
