Weight loss and your metabolism: don't believe it all
Myth number 1
It is better to eat smaller meals more often, say every two to three hours, rather than eating two to three big meals a day. You know how babies are usually ‘demand fed’ meaning instead of being fed by the clock, they are fed when they are hungry. If you have ever tried to feed a newborn baby when it’s not ready, you will know what I mean. It just isn’t interested. So what happens? In time the baby’s body adjusts to three meals a day and it is then considered ‘normal’. But as adults it would be better to go back to ‘demand feeding’.
What is this metabolism?
Metabolism is the breaking down of the food we eat into
energy. You will probably have heard about counting calories, calories are units of energy. So eating more
calories per small meal will produce more
energy. More energy will burn more fat. Burn fat and you lose pounds and inches. The more often you eat the quicker your metabolism.
Myth number 2
Eating less will make you
lose weight. Wrong again. Why is this? Eating less makes you lose muscle What happens is your body is receiving less food. So it thinks to itself ‘there’s going to be a famine so I must store whatever
food I’m receiving as fat’. Fat can be changed into ‘energy’ but will only be stored for emergency use. Meanwhile, your muscles will be depleted. This means they will lose their tone and become soft and flabby. Bearing in mind, your heart is a muscle; you don’t want your heart going soft and flabby, do you? It could cause all sorts of problems. So the answer is if you want to lose weight, better than starving yourself, it would be better to have smaller but more frequent meals.
