When You Eat It Doesn’t Matter
There are so many myths and strangely specific rules about when to eat to lose weight, but they alone do not help. Eat a hearty breakfast and glow all day. Eat small meals every few hours. Food rules are less important than you think, and even when they do help, they are not for the reasons you think.
Myth: Have a hearty breakfast first thing in the morning.
Sorry, there is nothing special about having breakfast. This is not the “ most important meal of the day”. At least not for everyone. For years, people (especially cereal marketing companies) have touted the benefits of breakfast because it supposedly keeps you from overeating, boosts your metabolism, or <insert any other reason for weight control and obesity>.
But here’s the catch: most research on breakfast is biased. A study from the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition found that most of the studies skipping breakfast and weight gain were conducted with the explicit intention of inducing this correlation. Likewise, the argument that school-aged children who skip breakfast are more likely to be overweight seems compelling, but the focus is on the school breakfast program and whether the child eats enough at home , rather than the breakfast itself, which changes the rules of the game.
What’s more, some of this breakfast research is funded by the food industry, including cereal companies like Kellogg’s and General Mills that are interested in your breakfast food. In other words, many of these nutritional studies were methodologically doomed from the start.
Personally, I switch between breakfast and skipping breakfast. Breakfast alone or skipping breakfast matters less than what you eat, how much you eat, and what your other lifestyle is like. In the end, people eat breakfast for a variety of reasons, but eating or skipping breakfast alone will not help you suddenly reduce your pants size. Eat breakfast because you want to, and punch anyone who makes you feel bad about missing it, right in the face that is eating breakfast.
Myth: you need to eat small meals every 2-3 hours.
I’ve worked with people in the past who – bless their heart – each of the six daily meals was perfectly portioned in crispy plastic food containers. Every few hours they rushed to the refrigerator and happily slept for the entire five minutes. “Supports my metabolism,” they said. But like their sandwiches, this basic principle was nonsense.
Say it with me: eating a lot of small meals does not “speed up” your metabolism. In fact, for some people, the more they eat, the more hungry they feel, and they may end up eating more calories than with fewer large meals. On the other hand, having more meals to expect throughout the day can provide psychological benefits for some people, especially when they find it difficult to diet, and help them avoid overeating after a long, hungry day at the office. In addition, there are health reasons to both eat and avoid frequent meals, such as regulating blood sugar levels.
As noted inthis study publishedin The British Journal of Nutrition , your body will process all of these calories the same, whether they come in one or three large packs or seven smaller ones. In fact, eating more often is just a key strategy in helping you manage your appetite and mindful consumption, so if more meals are right for you, then you do it yourself.
Myth : you need to eat right after training.
There is a popular belief among athletes that if you don’t have a protein shake and a good source of carbohydrates to replenish your energy reserves during 45-1 hours of training, all your hard work in the gym will go awry , Just like that. Since no one wants to risk losing their accomplishments, this fear of missing the extremely important “post-workout anabolic window” has been perpetuated by the “just in case” mentality.
Fortunately, this study review, published in the Journal of the International Society for Sports Nutrition, sheds some light: for most of us, when we eat after exercise, it doesn’t matter much if we end up eating a complete meal (which ideally contains and carbohydrates and protein) at some point after. If you can’t sit up and eat well for hours after your workout, your muscles won’t wither and die like the internet forums make you believe (phew!).
Refusal to eat immediately after exercise can affect you only if you still have one intensive training on the same day. Otherwise, everything will be fine. The study authors tell Born Fitness in an interview that if you’ve already eaten before exercise, you may be up to 6 hours behind before refusing to eat can interfere with your recovery. While there is no need to eat immediately, this Chipotle burrito is definitely a good boost to complete your workout, so if it helps you get to the finish line, be sure to have fun. However, if you’re trying to maximize your gym benefits, it’s more important that you focus on getting enough protein and calories for the day and getting enough rest.
Myth: you need to stop eating hours before bed.
You’ve probably heard the rash saying never eat after 6/7/8 at night, because if you do, all your calories will automatically be stored as fat calories and you will gain weight. The fact that the majority of practice related to diet , including regulations related to extreme diets and fad diets, are in fact the only rituals that govern your eating habits. This is because, for many people, nighttime eating is often associated with forays into ice cream, pizza, cookies, and all the other high-calorie foods that can actually lead to weight gain. Telling you that you “can’t” eat after a random amount of time simply helps you control your total calories and helps you avoid potentially bad habits.
However, it’s worth noting that this advice can certainly be applied to people who have digestive problems such as gastroesophageal reflux disease (GERD) . If this is you, you should definitely avoid eating a couple of hours before bed because it can worsen indigestion and heartburn.
Ultimately, all of these strategies may work as part of a weight loss plan, but for reasons that have nothing to do with what these diet guru magazines write. Most of the time, they just ritualize your food intake so that you control your hunger and cravings . However, that doesn’t make them magical or guarantee that they work for everyone, so you should ignore the myths and look for behaviors that can help. Remember, if you want your jeans to fit more loosely, it all comes down to your total calories and your personal habits. When you eat, these calories have less of an effect than you think.