Hopefully, you’ve been with me long enough to know I advocate only eating three meals a day versus the five or six.
Here's a quick breakdown of why multiple meals throughout the day isn't healthy from a physiological perspective. When you eat a meal your body spends a few hours processing it and giving you readily available, easy to burn energy to your bloodstream. Your body stores this easily available energy in the form of glycogen located in the muscle and liver. It uses this as its first energy source because it is available. Sugar in the form of blood glucose and starch sugar in the form of glycogen are by far the bodies preferred energy source before anything else...but only because it's easier… Not because it's healthier! Stand by an escalator and flight of stairs and see which one people pick… What’s easier of course.
Once those energy stores are used up, your body will then turn to it’s fat stores for energy. If you're constantly replenishing your glycogen stores by eating 5 to 6 small meals a day, how will your body ever be able to tap into those fat stores? It won't! The reason why so many struggle with their weight is because people rarely, if ever, skip a meal. As a result, our bodies are adapted to burning sugar as their primary fuel, which will down regulate enzymes that utilize and burn stored fat. In order to start using your fat stores as fuel, "or to be fat burning", your body has to be completely devoid of its blood sugar and glycogen stores. This only happens when we go without food for a period of 8 to 12 hours to just START burning fat as fuel.
Intermittent fasting is the most powerful way to shift your body into fat burning mode. This is the same concept when you exercise in a fasted state. Exercising after you have been fasting for at least a period of 8 to 16 hours dramatically increases fat burning. Consistently finish eating every night at 7pm and exercise in the morning fasted and see what happens!
I mean put the science aside, isn’t it just common sense?🤓
I cover all things Intermittent Fasting with all of my new clients. Come join us and give Intermittent Fasting a try!!
