When it comes to weight loss, eating habits and proper nutrition play an enormous role in your success. You can train hard everyday, but if you’re not fueling yourself properly, it will be impossible to get the results that you’re looking for. What is the number one mistake that the average working person makes with regard to their eating habits? Nope, it’s not one too many happy meals, but rather skipping meals all together.
When it comes to weight management, cutting back your calories is certainly a good remedy for trimming the waistline, but how you eliminate those excess calories is just as important as what you eliminate. Counting calories has never been a practice that I’d condone as a personal trainer. However, being mindful of your body’s daily caloric needs is very important when it comes to having a healthy weight. Your body needs calories in small amounts regularly in order to keep your metabolism up and working to burn the calories that you consume. However, skipping meals, especially breakfast, can greatly affect how your body uses the fuel that you provide it.
Imagine that your body’s metabolism is like that of a campfire. In order to keep the fire burning without going out, you must continuously maintain it with sticks and twigs and small fire logs, keeping the flame hot by regularly adding more good fuel to it. Forgetting to add more wood to the fire would result in a weak flame, or could even put the fire out, leaving you merely with smouldering embers. Once you realize that it’s time to add more fuel to the fire, it could be rather difficult to get a hot flame back. Your tendency might even be to add a rather large log in a desperate attempt to get it going. However, you needn’t be a scout to know that an oversized fire log will take days to burn over embers.
The same principle applies to your metabolism. If you skip a meal, or let yourself go hungry for too long, your “fire” will diminish as well, since it’ll have nothing to sustain it. Once you do decide to eat again, chances are that your body will have placed itself in a starvation mode, slowing the metabolism down, storing up energy in the form of fat. This is the body’s means of survival since it doesn’t know when it will eat again, and therefore conserves whatever fuel it had last. Unfortunately, it conserves it as fat on your body.
What also happens, is that when you skip a meal, you choose to overeat at the next meal, so not only does your body store extra energy as fat as a response to being starved, but overeating at one sitting stretches your stomach so that it will need all that much more to feel full the next time you decide to eat. You stomach is the size of a fist, keep that in mind when you’ve heaped a mountain of food on your plate.
You can avoid such detrimental eating patterns by eating small meals and snacks every 2-3 hours 4-6 times per day, with a cessation 3 hours before bedtime. After a good grocery shop, take a little time afterward to prepare snacks, cutting up vegetables and fruit, rationing portions of nuts and other snacks so that they are ready when you need them. Never let yourself go hungry! Keep your fire burning with regular, balanced meals and healthy snacks.
If you’d like more information on how to maintain a healthy weight by eating properly and regularly, contact me at www.fit-anywhere.com
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