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The new conventional wisdom of losing weight is to eat five or six healthy but smaller meals per day instead of the three squares we are used to eating.
The new, conventional wisdom of losing weight is to eat five or six healthy but smaller meals per day instead of the three squares we are used to eating. By spacing these meals two to three hours apart, and by making sure each meal offers a balance of protein, complex carbohydrates and good fats, the body undergoes a metabolic shift that results in quicker and easier weight loss and a more efficient weight management challenge going forward.
The primary reason for these golden goose benefits is that such an approach to eating accelerates the metabolism through increased and constant digestive activity, as well as a more even supply of nutrients to feed the organs and muscles. If the body never senses a lack of food, it won’t go into fat-hoarding mode, which is what happens when we go on a “crash diet” that deprives the body of the calories it is used to getting. This allows a more normal and healthy process of fat burning to occur when the body experiences a gentle calorie deficit caused not by calorie deprivation but by the demands of muscle activity.
Two commonplace metaphors help illustrate how this works. Both require a few leaps and visualisations but they’ll help you get your head around these concepts in a way that makes them better understood choices. In both metaphors, keep in mind that food is really nothing more than fuel for the body, and the body, in effect, “burns” fuel to provide energy for the sustaining of life and movement of the muscles.
First, picture a campfire. The more fuel you put on it, the hotter and longer it burns. To keep it burning at this pace, yet more fuel is required. Pretty soon you’re throwing on the logs at a fast pace, which depletes your stockpile quicker than if the fire is smaller and not as hot. If the objective is to use up your pile of fuel – just as our objective is to use up the calories we ingest instead of storing them as fat, as well as burning up what we have stored as fat when we run out of incoming fuel – it’s clear that a bigger and hotter fire is a better fire. We create a bigger and better fire in our bodies by raising our metabolism, since a faster metabolism means the body is consuming more calories throughout the day.
The other metaphor is that of a car engine. The bigger the car engine, the more fuel it burns. The longer that engine runs, even it if is just idling, the more fuel it burns. In the human body, we want the worst mileage we can get; we want to burn as much fuel as we can, as quickly as we can. So, back to our metaphor, we need a bigger engine. Which means, we need more lean muscle, because it is lean muscle that consumes calories, not fat. A pound of lean muscle burns many more calories per day, per unit of work, and even per night’s sleep, than a pound of body fat, which requires no calories at all other than the burden it places on whatever muscles we do have to haul it around.
So, if you could lose ten pounds of useless fat and replace it with ten pounds of lean mass, you’ll be burning approximately 350 more calories per day without doing anything extra in the way of activity. That means you’ll need to consume more than an extra 350 calories per day before you’d gain any weight. With that extra muscle, you’ll lose fat quicker, and manage your weight more easily, than ever before.
And you don’t need a metaphor to visualise what that will look like. All you’ll need is a mirror and perhaps a few new clothes with a smaller waistline.
Jim Robertson
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