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Eat More, Weigh Less: Why Frequent Eating Is The Key To Keeping Off The Pounds

By: Brenda Watson Eat more food to lose weight? Sure, it sounds crazy. That’s probably because many of the weight loss plans you’ve encountered in the past have told you just the opposite: eat less, avoid this, cut back on that. But the simple reality is that frequent eating—five or six times throughout the day—is a common-sense way to healthy weight management. So just how does it work?

The concept is called dietary thermogenesis, and it refers to the energy required by the body to digest food. Digestion is a very energy-intensive process, and it takes work to convert an entire meal into the nutrients that your body will actually utilize for energy.

It may help to think of thermogenesis as a process, along the lines of refining oil into usable gasoline to run your car. The refinery must burn energy to convert oil into the fuel you pump into your car at the gas station. Every time you eat, you have to burn calories in order to digest your food and unlock the energy within your meal. And guess what? Eating increases your metabolic rate. In fact, studies have shown that as you eat, your metabolism increases by as much as 30 percent, and this effect can last for up to three hours after you have finished your meal.

Fasting, on the other hand, lowers your metabolic rate, which is the reason why so many diets fail. When meals are skipped or long periods of time elapse between meals, this slows down the metabolic rate and decreases the rate at which the body burns calories. So the key to maximizing weight loss when you are following a reduced-calorie weight loss program is to continually fire up your metabolism through dietary thermogenesis. And how do you do that?

Eat smaller portions approximately every two to three hours. By doing so, you will increase the frequency at which your metabolism is fired up to fuel the digestive process. If your metabolism is increased for as long as three hours after eating, and you are eating every two to three hours, you will consistently engage your dietary thermogenesis process. Therefore, a very important factor in any weight loss program is to eat every two to three hours.

You might be thinking that it is going to take a lot of work to eat so often throughout the day, but in reality it should not. There are 24 hours in a day, and you are awake for approximately half of them. If you scatter your meals and snacks over the course of about twelve hours, you will have eaten five or six times during the course of the day. For example, if you eat breakfast at 7:00 a.m., and then eat every two to three hours thereafter, you will be done with your last snack at 7:30 p.m. As a result, you will have effectively managed to keep the thermogenesis process engaged, thus increasing your metabolism.

Article Source: http://www.lifeweightloss.com

Brenda Watson is a Naturopathic Doctor and world class authority on digestive health issues. She is the President of Renew Life Formulas and has been helping people restore health for over twenty five years. free online weight loss program

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