christinielsen

Of course almost no personal development blog could not contain a “lose weight” topic. However, I am truly passionate about health and nutrition and will be talking about it a good bit here at Life Destiny. I believe health and nutrition is one of the main foundations to leading a lifestyle design that is balanced both mentally and physically. The number of obese Americans is now greater than the numbers who are merely overweight, according to government figures that were released early 2009. Almost everyone who is overweight has a desire to shed some of their pounds.  This is because slimming down has many advantages over being overweight and out of shape.  Some of them are more energy not only mentally but physically, better sleep, and looking better in which I will delve into more detail in a later post.  This post is going to focus on breaking the myth that many people believe in eating smaller and more frequent meals will lead to a more efficient metabolism.  It will also graze upon a recent style of eating I have stumbled upon called Intermittent Fasting.  First off, lets talk about eating more frequent, smaller meals.

Breaking the myth that eating 6 times a day leads to a faster metabolism

Go to any fitness message board, the local gym, even your health professionals and you’ll hear them repeat over and over again that you need to eat more frequent and smaller meals to increase your metabolism for fat burning.  I’ve believed it and have lived by that standard for about 6 years until recently when a few new styles of eating have risen to the surface.  These new styles, which we will talk about later, have risen because of recent studies done that show that by eating more frequent and smaller meals a day does not burn lead to greater weight loss than eating larger and less frequent meals.

The age old fact and easiest way to lose weight is calories in versus calories out

That is, if you burn more calories throughout the day, through various ways such as your basal metabolic rate (how many calories you burn if you did nothing), your lifestyle, and exercise than you take in through eating and drinking, and then you will lose weight.  It is that simple.

Here is some evidence of this claim:

From Pubmed.gov

“Increased meal frequency does not promote greater weight loss in subjects who were prescribed an 8-week equi-energetic energy-restricted diet.

Cameron JD, Cyr MJ, Doucet E.

Behavioural and Metabolic Research Unit, School of Human Kinetics, University of Ottawa, Ottawa, ON, Canada K1N 6N5.

There have been reports of an inverse relationship between meal frequency (MF) and adiposity. It has been postulated that this may be explained by favourable effects of increased MF on appetite control and possibly on gut peptides as well. The main goal of the present study was to investigate whether using a high MF could lead to a greater weight loss than that obtained with a low MF under conditions of similar energy restriction. Subjects were randomised into two treatment arms (high MF = 3 meals+3 snacks/d or low MF = 3 meals/d) and subjected to the same dietary energy restriction of – 2931 kJ/d for 8 weeks. Sixteen obese adults (n 8 women and 8 men; age 34.6 (sd 9.5); BMI 37.1 (sd 4.5) kg/m2) completed the study. Overall, there was a 4.7 % decrease in body weight (P < 0.01); similarly, significant decreases were noted in fat mass ( – 3.1 (sd 2.9) kg; P < 0.01), lean body mass ( – 2.0 (sd 3.1) kg; P < 0.05) and BMI ( – 1.7 (sd 0.8) kg/m2; P < 0.01). However, there were NS differences between the low- and high-MF groups for adiposity indices, appetite measurements or gut peptides (peptide YY and ghrelin) either before or after the intervention. We conclude that increasing MF does not promote greater body weight loss under the conditions described in the present study.”

One of the first laws of thermodynamics is:

The amount of energy stored in your body = your energy intake – your energy expenditure

As humans, certain mechanisms keep this difference very close to zero.   However, these small differences add up over a large period of time based on the cumulative effect.  Those between the age of 25-55 of Americans, on average, eat only 0.3% more energy intake (calories) than energy expenditure (burning calories).  The important thing to note here is that this leads to a weight gain of, on average, 20 pounds over that time period.

The most important thing to remember if you want to lose weight is calories in versus calories out.  Of course this can be hard if you are gorging down processed sugars and other non filling foods.

Disclosure on the more frequent, smaller meals style of eating

I also want to mention that although at the end of the day that the amount of calories you take versus calories you burn out is important…Eating more frequent and smaller meals does have its benefits such as those with hypoglycemia.

Final Thoughts

My next post on nutrition will look at how our bodies can adjust to the many different styles of eating.  We will look at how I lost around 12 pounds of bodyfat while increasing my lean body mass in a little over 1 and ½ month with my current style of eating based on The Warrior Diet, Intermittent Fasting, and the Paleo Diet.  These diets are based on how our ancestors thousands of years ago ate.  Don’t miss it, it is quite interesting.

I will also cover how to estimate how many calories you burn in a day and an easy program to make sure you are not taking in more calories than you are burning.
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