Severely cutting your calorie intake is NOT the key to permanent weight loss and a healthy lifestyle. Instead, you should be eating 5 to 6 small meals a day for maximum weight loss. Read on to find out why.
There are so many people who think losing weight is about slashing your calories to ungodly amounts. However, I'm here to tell you that this is all wrong. You've been lied to.
How many people do you see on the roller coaster diet? Probably too many to count. Why is this? Simply because diets don't work. Most diets restrict your calories and slow down your metabolism. This causes your body to go into starvation mode. In starvation mode, your body burns very few calories and experiences extreme hunger pangs.
Fortunately, there is a solution. Eat 5 - 6 healthy, small meals per day. Men should shoot for 6 meals a day while women should try to get in 5 meals per day. Yes, you heard me right and you may have heard it before, but please take notice this time. Frequent, small, healhy meals provide a number of benefits that will help you reach the highest fitness level possible.
Increase Your Metabolism
Eating 6 meals a day will boost your metabolism, helping you to burn more calories all day long.
In fact, by eating super-clean, high protein foods at each of your six meals, you will find that your metabolism goes into overdrive, becoming extremely efficient at burning off calories.
Burn Calories with the Thermic Effect of Food
Frequent eating revs up your metabolism due to the thermic effect of food. This is because the breakdown and absorption of food itself requires a substantial number of calories.
This is known as the thermic effect of food. Foods have a thermic effect ranging from 3% to 30%. Protein foods create a thermic effect of up to 30%. This means that 30% of the calories from foods like turkey, tuna, and salmon are burned simply by digesting them. Complex and fibrous carbohydrates burn about 20% of their calories through digestion. This includes broccoli, spinach, corn, green beans, etc.
On the other end of the spectrum are fats and refined carbohydrates. They have an extremeley low thermic effect of about 3%. This is one of the reasons that dietary fat is stored so easily as body fat.
As you can see, what you eat matters even more than how much you eat.
Maintain Peak Energy Levels
You will feel 10x better by eating smaller, more frequent meals. Your energy level will soar and your hunger cravings will be destroyed.
This is because eating 5 to 6 meals per day helps maintain a balanced blood sugar level, preventing hunger attacks.
This is in direct contrast to the calorie depriving diets that send your blood sugar levels into havoc, with too many peaks and valleys.
Build Muscle
You will also find it easier to build and maintain muscle. The more muscle you develop, the faster your metabolism becomes.
Frequent meals help promote muscle growth by regulating insulin levels and providing a steady flow of amino acids into the muscle cells.
By eating approximately every three hours you are constantly delivering a steady output of insulin, which is necessary for muscle growth and glycogen storage.
Insulin plays a major role in transporting glucose and amino acids into the muscle cells where they can then be used for recovery and muscle growth. Are you starting to see the many benefits of eating 6 meals a day?
Frequent meals also allow for more efficient use of vitamins and minerals. Your body simply becomes much more effective at processing these vital nutrients.
To reap the full benefit of this lifestyle, be sure that you eat on a consistent schedule. This requires a bit of meal planning, but it is certainly worth it. It is very important to get your body into the habit of knowing when it will be supplied with nutrients. This way, your body won't fall into dreaded hunger attacks and cravings. Instead, it will always know that a steady flow of nutrients will soon to be supplied.
The key is to center your diet around lean protein, fruits, vegetables, and healthy fats.
By eating 5 to 6 small meals per day, you will increase your energy levels, accelerate muscle growth, and speed up your metabolism without storing fat. In fact, frequent eating will actually allow you to eat up to 50% more calories without storing an ounce of it as fat.
To really burn the fat, you will need to combine this healthy eating plan with cardio work and strength training.
Using these 3 techniques, you can turn your body into a fat-burning machine.
Kim Roach is the Fitness Reporter at HealthyEveryDay.com, where you will find
healthy diet recipes,
fitness articles, and information.
