It sounds ridiculous, doesn’t it? The secret to weighing less is eating more? It’s true, however.
Of course I don’t mean you should eat more food, I mean you should eat more often. Many people eat only one or two meals per day… few indeed eat more than three. The optimum, however, is actually five or six.
Your body is designed to have food intake every three to four hours that you are awake. This doesn’t mean you eat the equivalent of a full dinner every few hours, though… you should, instead, have a portion of meat and a portion of vegetables.
What is a portion? A portion is an amount of food about the size of your palm. Easy enough to figure out, right? You don’t even need to read the nutritional labels for that!
It does, of course, matter what meat and vegetables you eat… leaner meat and vegetables that are lower in sugar are better. Men should keep in mind, however, that animal fat is an important part of testosterone production, so going ultra-low fat can be counterproductive.
There are two major reasons that eating like this helps you lose weight. The first is that your body automatically goes into starvation mode after not eating for a while, setting itself up to conserve all energy from the next meal you consume. The second is that keeping your body fed keeps it from craving sugary and fatty foods, which it mostly wants because it thinks it needs to store energy for the times when it is “starving”.
As you get into eating more often, you’ll find that it’s hard to eat as often per day as you should, both because you get tired of eating so often and because of the sheer amount of time involved. That’s when you can turn to protein bars and shakes. These are easy (though sometimes slightly more expensive than more “regular” food) and quick, but still provide the protein and other nutrients that you need.
If you go to a nutrition store to purchase the bars and shakes you’ll find that there is an incredible variety in brands and flavors. What you’ll want to look at besides that, though, is the nutritional label. If you want something satisfying, you’re probably going to be looking for something with at least 20 grams of protein (30 is better), and as little fat and sugar as you can find (fiber is fine, sugar is bad). You can also look at the additional things some of them will have, such as vitamins and minerals, or body building supplements such as creatine.
Speaking of body building, an essential part of losing weight in a healthy way is exercise. You already know that… what you may not know is that the best way to lose fat and look better is NOT cardio workouts. Weight training is much more effective, as muscle mass burns calories even while you’re just sitting around.
Weight training doesn’t have to make you big and bulky, though, for those of you who are worried about such things. You can, of course, get that way, but simply lifting weights doesn’t automatically make you that way (in fact, it takes quite a bit of work for most people). Even for girls who just want to slim down weight training is more effective than aerobics… especially because aerobics simply makes you smaller while retaining your current “shape”, while weight training can actually reshape your body.
There you have it in a nutshell… if you want to weigh less, eat more!
