Healthy Eating Habits, Part 1 - Many small meals are better than one big meal

This week we’re going to be talking about healthy eating habits.

The Problem - Big lunch, no other food.

One of the worst eating habits I used to have is eating a single large meal a day. At lunch, I would eat a very large amount of food and then nothing else for the rest of the day. I became known as a big eater even though I really didn’t eat that much over an entire day. My daily calorie intake was about 3000 calories, but almost all of it was coming in one large helping at noon, with a bit more coming in sodas and snacks spread through out the day.

There were times when I would eat a large pizza all by myself and then order another. For my birthday, my coworkers got me 30 McDonald’s hamburgers and cheeseburgers for lunch, and yes, I ate them. Even with these isolated incidents, I still thought I was being healthy because I wasn’t eating all that much.

Get your motor running…

When I started changing things and trying to be a bit healthier, I talked to a doctor who gave me a great explanation of how my eating habit was wrong. She told me to imagine my body as an engine. When I feed that engine a lot of fuel it revves up and spends that fuel. When you feed the engine no fuel it idles at a low level. If you feed the engine too much fuel at the same time, things break.

Now that’s not a perfect analogy, but it works. When you feed your body, you rev up your metabolism. When you don’t get food, the metabolism slows down in order to conserve energy. What I was doing was stuffing my body with so much food that my metabolism was overloaded.

Translating the problem into numbers

The large amount of food I was taking in was in fact revving up my metabolism, but there was simply too much of it. So my body was taking the leftovers and storing them as fat. Now in a perfect system, that fat would have been spent later in the day when I wasn’t eating. Unfortunately, our bodies are not perfect systems. Rather than waste the reserve it had built up during lunch, my metabolism would simply slow down during other parts of the day.

I was also having a problem in the morning time. My body was literally trying to recover from a famine of 8 hours during which I slept. It’s looking for food but it’s not getting it. So my body would slow down at the same time that it was sending signals to my brain “FOOD! EAT NOW!” This would cause me to spend less calories at the same time it would make me binge at lunch time.

	Morning	Noon	Afternoon	Evening	Night
Consume	0	2500	250	250	0
Spend	300	1700	400	400	200

TABLE 1

Take a look at this simple chart. The amounts aren’t exact but they get my point across. If you add up the amounts consumed you’ll see that I was eating around 3000 calories a day. That’s a large amount but it’s not incredibly excessive. However, if you look at the amount I spent, you can see the issue. My metabolism would spike around noon time and then spend very little the rest of the day. So the total calories I would spend would be 2400. That’s 600 calories a day my body would store away in fat.

Making Changes

So after listening to my doctor I decided to change. Most health experts would recommend five or six small meals throughout the day. However, this was unrealistic for me. I simply don’t have the time to stop and eat that many times a day. Since I was determined to make realistic changes to my body, I decided to go with the following plan:

• Breakfast - 1/6 of my calories.
• Lunch - 1/3 of my calories
• Afternoon snack - 1/6 of my calories
• Dinner - 1/3 of my calories

LIST 1

So if we look at that chart now, it looks like this:

	Morning	Noon	Afternoon	Evening	Night
Consume	500	1000	500	1000	0
Spend	700	700	700	700	200

TABLE 2

I split my food intake to even it out throughout the day. I also added a bit of a workout in the morning and in the afternoon to increase my metabolism at times when my food intake was a bit low. So now I’m spending 3000 and bringing in 3000. However, since I wanted to lose weight, I adjusted my calorie intake a bit to be around 2400.

	Morning	Noon	Afternoon	Evening	Night
Consume	400	800	400	800	0
Spend	700	700	700	700	200

TABLE 3

Summary

And there you go. I eat 2400 calories a day and spend 3000. I went from a net gain of 600 calories a day to a net loss of 600 calories a day. However, I only cut out around 600 calories from my diet. The other 600 calories loss came from properly spacing out my meals and keeping my metabolism from slowing down due to lack of food. Now that’s just a rough example. I also made some other changes such as working out that added to my weight loss, but you can see how spacing out your meals can have a positive impact on your health even without cutting out a lot of calories. Just make sure you don’t end up overeating at each of these meals. You’re trying to take the same amount of calories and space it over multiple meals, not eat the same large amount of calories at each and every meal!

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Healthy Eating Habits, Part 2 - Slow and steady wins the race»

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