Why Eating More Often Can Help You Lose Weight

Boosting your metabolism is a great way to ensure fat loss that’s consistent and doesn’t cause you to plateau.  Let’s take a look at why this might be something you should consider. If you’re someone who resorts to skipping meals when you want to lose weight or who is overweight but doesn’t think that they eat too much, this article can help shed some light on what you might want to consider doing to improve your body’s metabolic rate.

Some people skip breakfast. Some people skip lunch.  Some people eat just once a day.  A lot of these people are overweight.  If you look at fit people, most of them are continuously eating.  Why?

a) They eat the right food
b) They eat healthy portions
c) They burn more calories than they eat (to lose weight) or the right amount of calories (for weight maintenance).

You might think that eating just once a day would be good for keeping your calories low and for weight loss but for many people, it slows their metabolism to a crawl so their body is, in essence, hoarding the food they take in instead of burning it off.

Your metabolism adjusts to your habits. If you eat breakfast three days in a row, you’ll typically be hungry on the fourth morning.  If you skip meals several days in a row, your metabolism will slow down to preserve food stores.  Caloric cycling is something a lot of fitness buffs do in order to fool their body’s metabolism.  What they’ll often do is eat a low calorie diet and then switch to a high calorie diet.  Then they’ll eat low cal for a few days and then jump to high cal.  This can keep their body guessing and if they’re active, this can help their body keep burning calories at a high rate. 

Not everyone has the time or the inclination to carefully track their caloric intake and plan for calorie shifting. It can be a bit of an arduous task that might best be done by a personal trainer or nutritionist.  But if you follow a diet plan such as the Idiot Proof Diet, which has a computerized diet generator, you can do this on your own and without guesswork (or a math degree).

At first, you might find it to be an adjustment to eat four to six times a day (depending on whether your follow the Diet Generator Plan or the Beyond Calories menu option) because your body will feel satisfied all the time. Eating every few hours is something you might not be used to and it’s not going to cause you to gain weight. The right food in the right portion and at the right intervals will make your metabolism work like a fiery furnace so that your body starts to shed fat.

By eating smaller, more frequent meals, and by alternating your caloric intake as well as caloric type (some days you’ll be eating mostly protein and some days you could be eating a mixture of carbs and protein) you could prevent your body from plateauing and getting used to the same types of food and calories daily.

1200 Calorie diets aren’t for everyone!

Someone who always eats 1200 calories will stop losing fat (and feel hungry and sluggish all the time!) but someone who varies their intake in a particular way can ignite their metabolism, feel good, and release fat burning hormones.