It is commonly said that if you want to lose weight you have to eat less. But that is not the case. In reality, if you have too few meals with too much time between them, your body will not be happy. Therefore, the real way to lose weight is to eat more.
Let's look at the process of food consumption. When you eat something, it makes its way into your stomach where dietary thermogenesis gets underway. In this process, your body needs quite a bit of energy to be able to start to digest the food items and break each of them down into their simple elements, vitamins and minerals, that you will then use.
As your body starts producing all the things it needs to break foods down into their usable parts, your metabolism kicks up a notch. In case you didn't know, each time your metabolism goes higher, your body burns more calories. This digestive process can actually increase your metabolism level by up to 30 percent, which means 30 percent more calories being burned when you are digesting food.
Now let's look at what many dieters do. If you are not eating for many hours at a time, and your body has nothing to digest, the metabolic rate ramps down again. This magnifies if someone decides to go on a fast. When you look at this, common sense would tell you to try and always keep your metabolic rate higher.
To do this instead of just eating 2-3 meals a day and going for many hours in between, you should try to make sure to consume many smaller meals all day, so you can keep your body working all the time. All that working means a constantly higher metabolic rate and more calories being burned.
It's not as difficult as you may think. Many people cringe at the idea of being told to eat more often all day long, thinking that means a lot more prep work for meals, but in reality, some of these meals can be easily prepared snacks that you fit between more moderate sized regular meals. A good rule of thumb is to try and make sure you eat a little bit every two to two and a half hours. This can be adjusted to go with whatever schedule you may be on at the time. For example, if you start your day extremely early on Monday, you start eating earlier, and spread the meals out every few hours. If you sleep in the next day, adjust the meals to be appropriately timed from the time you get up.
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