Of course, you have heard that eating right means eating 5 times a day. According to one statement, it helps you lose weight and speed up your metabolism. Others think you should eat every 3 hours to avoid hunger. But which is correct?
How Often Should You Eat?
The recipe for cooking five meals a day is just a summary, not the most successful one. How often you end up eating depends on many factors: presence or lack of appetite, daily activities, work, schedule, physical activity, etc.
Therefore, forcing yourself to eat more healthy snacks after breakfast and in the afternoon can cause you to eat foods that should not be eaten at all. For example, sweets, fruit juices, sodas, potato chips, sausages, yogurt drinks … after all, they can be sold in any store and easily removed from healthy foods as a snack.
If you want to start eating right, remember that the quality of the food is more important than the amount of food. Getting three healthy meals a day is better than eating five, but it can have unhealthy consequences.
Another problem is worrying many people. Which diet is the most important? What if I don’t have breakfast? Although there are many articles on ‘Breakfast is the main meal’, please rest assured that all dishes are the same. So if you don’t have breakfast, nothing happens because you’re not hungry or have breakfast at 12 noon instead of 7 in the morning.
Will it Speed up the Metabolism?
The idea comes from the fact that you eat energy to absorb and absorb nutrients. This is the so-called thermal effect.
In fact, the calories you “spend” on the digestive process are more or less proportional to the amount of food you eat and the types of macronutrients that make up it. In other words, if your daily diet contains 2000 kcal, it doesn’t matter if it is divided into 3 or 5 doses, since the calorie effect is the same.
A study published in the Journal of Nutrition and its authors came to the following results. There is no convincing scientific evidence that increasing the frequency of food intake affects the weight loss rate.
What Happens If You Go Hungry?
They understand that because of the mechanism for regulating hunger and satiety, you should eat when you are hungry. It is controlled by the peptide for the release of growth hormone and leptin. Therefore, you can never force your child to eat.
Healthy adults (with the exception of special groups such as athletes or pregnant women) can safely spend hours without food or even the whole day. When you starve for a few hours and your blood sugar is exhausted, the body begins to use its reserves in the liver and muscles.
As soon as these reserves are exhausted, gluconeogenesis is activated. This means that glucose is produced by proteolysis and lipolysis (destruction of muscles or fat), which leads to the formation of ketone bodies and excretion from the urine.
In fact, hunger can be a great way for some people to lose weight. Everything is not so terrible. Spending 16 hours without food is the same as skipping breakfast. However, it is recommended that this process be carried out under the supervision of experts.
What is the Logic of Eating 5 times a Day?
- Fear and hunger when you need to control food. If you eat 5 times a day, you are probably not hungry. Therefore, it is best to control the number of copies. For example, if you miss a meal and go home hungry at night, you will definitely eat more than you need for dinner.
- Suffer from certain diseases like diabetes. This is important to prevent hypoglycemia and maintain a stable blood sugar level.
- If you are an athlete and need a lot of food every day. Receiving 5 times is much easier than receiving 3 times.
It is recommended to stick to a specific diet plan. If you are used to eating five times a day, it is difficult to switch to three meals and vice versa. Therefore, each of us has a convenient schedule. There can be no general advice.
The most important thing is to eat healthy and nutritious. If you eat a varied and balanced diet, it doesn’t matter how often you sit at the table every day. It depends on everyone’s preferences.