Weight loss tip #5: Eating frequent meals

Tip #5: Eating more frequently throughout the day will help you lose weight.

To maximize the metabolic aspects of your food intake you should be working towards incorporating 5 evenly portioned meals each day. Your first meal should be with in ½ hour of waking up and each subsequent meal should be spaced about 3-4 hours after that. This concept can seem a bit foreign since most of us have been raised around the idea that there are three meals in a day: breakfast, lunch, and dinner. If it makes you feel better, you can call the extra two meals: mid-morning and mid-afternoon snacks. However, I usually encourage people to completely throw the traditional meal titles out the window and simply call it “Meal 1”, “Meal 2”, etc. The reason for this is that the traditional meal titles carry with them certain built-in connotations. For example, breakfast suggests that there should be cereal or bagels while dinner, to most people, implies a large meal with meat and potatoes. Meal 1, on the other hand can be whatever you want it to be. I trained one woman who decided it was more convenient to eat grilled chicken and vegetables as her first meal of the day and she loved it!

So why does eating more frequently help you to lose weight? The key to weight loss is increasing your metabolism. If your body was a furnace then your metabolism would be the fire and you want that fire burning hot all day long to consume as much fuel as possible. There are several ways to go about fanning that metabolic fire. Some are related to exercise, which I will cover in future articles, and some are related to your caloric intake. 

One of the most effective ways to increase your metabolism through nutrition is separating your daily calorie intake into several small meals evenly spaced throughout the day. Let’s look at the body as a furnace again, and the food that you consume as the wood that is to be burned. If you took your total wood for the day and split it into 3 large piles and threw one into the furnace in the morning, one in the afternoon, and one in the evening, what would the fire look like for the day? The first pile would probably be tough to get going and then once it started it would burn hot for awhile and then die down. Then when it came time toss in the next pile it would be the same thing. Therefore, you would have hot periods and cold periods throughout the day. Conversely, if you split the same amount of wood up into 5-6 piles then once you got it burning hot, you could put another small pile on before the fire died down and continue doing that throughout the day. The end result would be that you kept the fire burning hot consistently all day. That’s what frequent small meals do for your body’s metabolism.

Another reason that eating frequently will help contribute to weight loss is something called the thermic effect of food. When you eat a meal your body has to initiate the process of digestion and this process requires the use of energy. In other words, your body is burning more calories while it is digesting food. Therefore, it stands to reason that if your body has to digest more frequent meals, then the caloric expenditure of digestion for the day is increased. The types of foods you eat can also increase the thermic effect of eating.  Certain fruits and vegetables, such as grapefruit and celery, are considered to be a negative calorie food.  This means that your body expends more calories digesting them than it actually extracts from them. Consuming more of these fibrous foods will certainly work towards your weight loss goals.