Metabolism for Your Diet

You have to know that getting rid of that spare tire involves more than just the number of calories you put into your body each day. Your weight loss success is not just connected to your calorie intake, but also how often you take them in and what kinds of food they are. It's not much argument that eating 2000 calories of ice cream is far more weight gain promoting than 2000 calories of blueberries, but many dieters do not make this distinction. The same holds true eating all 2000 calories in one huge meal, or spreading it over several smaller meals. Each case is different in its ability to help you lose weight, but all of them involve 2000 calories of food.

The reason is simple. When you eat foods high in sugar, you tend to store more calories as fat. When you eat infrequently, your body tends to store the food you do eat as fat. Most folks trying to lose weight have a tendency to stay clear of sugary foods, which is great, but their failure comes when they eat the calories they do in infrequent meals (1-2, even 3 times per day). When they do this, their body enters "starvation mode" between each meal. This is a time when the body, realizing that food has been absent for 4 hours or more, sends out hormonal signals telling cells to slow down and hang on to any energy that they still have left and in order to get the necessary energy to keep us alive, we burn fat. Then, finally when the food does come, the body wants to store it all for the next bout of starvation.

The exact opposite happens when a dieter eats every 3-4 hours. Instead of triggering hormonal messages to slow down, the body send messages to speed up. This is obviously a good thing for someone trying to burn fat because the faster you burn energy, the greater potential to burn fat. We're not done there though. In order to keep these hormones sending the right message, protein in the diet must be significant and frequent. This is because we want to avoid the muscle wasting message send by our starvation hormones. Even frequent eating with low protein can cause fat storage and muscle wasting because your body needs the protein for building, repairing and regenerating tissues. If it isn't in the diet, then it has to come from somewhere.

So let's recap here. If you want to lose weight, you need to limit your calories (1200-1500 per day), but almost more importantly is to consume frequent meals (5-6 small ones per day) with plenty of protein in there. Calorie intake to lose weight is not your only concern. How those calories are used by your body is just as important.