Weight Loss Diet Strategies: When it comes to diet and health, especially when it comes to losing weight, the main focus has been on what you eat and how much you eat. Eating fewer calories than you consume is key to losing weight, but another important factor is how you eat – like how often you eat each day.
Much attention has been paid to eating habits in recent years. While some diets suggest that the key to losing weight is to have only one meal a day, other popular diets suggest that people should eat up to six small meals a day. Many of us have also been raised to eat three meals a day – so what’s the best?
Many diet plans also follow a three-square-meal-eating pattern. Such a rigid approach can cause people to get hungry between meals. This can lead to people snacking between meals, potentially overeating.
But while snacking between meals has long been viewed as a way to satisfy hunger pangs, some early studies showed that eating more meals a day was linked to lower body weight. Since then, research has explored a variety of different eating habits, ranging from “snacking” (up to 17 small meals a day) to “slings” (two to three meals a day).
There is a popular belief that nibbling boosts your metabolism, but it is not. There is evidence from a study that nibbling after meals causes a less pronounced increase in insulin than eating. This indicates better blood sugar control, which may indirectly be linked to better weight control from storing less fat. But while there is more research, nibbling may not burn more calories than eating.
Later studies looking at the effects of two to four meals a day failed to show whether nibbling or eating was more beneficial for weight loss. Some studies show that eating more often helps you lose weight, but it can also increase hunger and affect your ability to remove fat from your blood – a major contributor to your risk of cardiovascular disease.
But the way we eat has changed over many decades as more of us eat snacks or follow other eating habits, such as: It is believed that such eating habits help the body lose weight better.
If we follow a traditional eating pattern of three meals a day, we tend to spend a large portion of our time (12 hours or more) in the postprandial state, with very little time in an actual fasting state
These diets are based on understanding the various metabolic states of our body. After we have eaten, our body goes into the postprandial state. In this state, which can last for several hours, the body stores energy from the food we just ate – often in the form of fat. The post-absorptive (or sober) phase is when the body begins to burn through stored fuels, which doesn’t begin until about ten or more hours after a meal.
If we follow a traditional eating pattern of three meals a day, we tend to spend a large portion of our time (12 hours or more) in the postprandial state, with very little time in an actual fasting state. This is even exaggerated with grazing or “nibbling” eating habits. Intermittent fasting diets are based on the idea that reducing your meal frequency will help your body spend more time in a fasted state. This is believed to improve your ability to manage the fat and carbohydrates in the meal. These diets can give better control over the storage and burning of fat stores and improve your metabolic health.
Photo credit: eatright.org
This is also why some people purposely skip meals, such as breakfast, while still following a normal eating pattern (as opposed to intermittent fasting, where they may still have three meals in a shorter period of time, such as eight Hours). While skipping meals may or may not affect the amount we eat, it may have other metabolic benefits that come with prolonged fasting without affecting appetite.
time
Aside from how often we eat, another factor that could affect your weight is the time of day we eat. Research has shown that eating later is associated with more food overall, which can hinder weight loss.
The emerging field of chrononutrition has also found that humans are designed to eat during the day rather than later in the evening – much like our preferred sleep schedule. Some research has shown that eating later in the day is linked to higher body weight. Research also suggests that when we eat outside of our natural circadian rhythm, we are more likely to eat unhealthy foods.
Another consideration is when we eat carbohydrates. How you handle carbohydrates in a meal can be influenced by whether we have eaten carbohydrates in previous meals – known as the second meal phenomenon. Carbohydrates are largely responsible for bringing the body into the postprandial state, releasing insulin, and controlling fat storage. This means that if we eat carbohydrates with every meal, we are more likely to store them as fat. Some research suggests that limiting carbohydrates can help us burn more fat while exercising and improve exercise performance.
Different eating strategies can have different benefits for our bodies, such as better blood sugar control. But when it comes to losing weight, no strategy seems to work better than the other. At the end of the day, the nutritional strategy that works best for a person will be different. Knowing which strategy is best for you depends on many factors, such as: B. Your goals, your lifestyle, your sleep patterns and your type of exercise.
Adam Collins, Principal Teaching Fellow, Nutrition, University of Surrey first published this article on The conversation. The views expressed are the author’s own.
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