For years I have heard people recommend eating 6 small meals a day. I tried it and it felt horrible! I actually gained weight back then and that was definitely not the goal. For a long time I thought that I did not follow my particular metabolism. I know people who feel they need a snack between breakfast and lunch or lunch and dinner and others who prefer to graze all day. While I don’t tell people they can’t snack, on Today is Still the Day, I do talk about this:
“One of our goals in this plan is to go from being a sugar burner to a fat burner. An effective strategy is to stop snacking between meals because every time you eat, your insulin levels spike, which prevents the burning of fat and stimulates fat storage Eating between meals creates insulin resistance, so I strongly suggest cutting out snacks and just eating properly structured meals.” p. 62
I’m talking about eating properly structured meals that include the highest quality foods from each of the three macronutrients: protein, carbohydrates, and fat. Carbohydrates come mainly from fiber-rich, non-starchy vegetables and fats are healthy fats from olive, avocado, hemp and flax oils, grass-fed butter and coconut oil, as well as nuts, seeds, olives, avocados and animal meat. grass fed. and finished animals.
When you truly nourish your body on a cellular level, you’ll find that you’re not reaching for snacks because you’re truly satisfied. Well-structured meals turn off hunger hormones and normalize blood sugar and insulin levels.
Eating consistently throughout the day sets you up for exhaustion and premature aging, as well as burning less fat, and here’s why:
When you eat, the digestion process begins. This requires your body to spend time and energy breaking down that food into molecules that can be absorbed and used. Complete digestion usually takes six hours or more. When you snack between meals, you’re in effect asking your body to restart a process it hasn’t completed since you last ate. This leads to weight gain because when your body can’t absorb and use food, it stores it as fat. Also, restarting the digestion process with snacks reduces your body’s ability to burn fat between meals because there is almost no “between-meal” time.
That makes sense, don’t you agree? And I haven’t even mentioned the quality of most of the “snacks”, which are usually high carb junk food. But it is true even if they are healthy foods. This is why intermittent fasting, which restricts eating to one or two meals in a small period of time, is so effective. It gives your body the downtime it needs to process the fuel you put into it.