Importance of Eating Pattern

I meant to blog yesterday about how you shouldn't eat chocolates on Valentines Day, but I was too busy eating chocolates on Valentines Day. Sorry about that.

Actually, I was just taking a long blog weekend. But, now I'm back if full swing.

Today I wanted to write about the phenomenon of food storage. You have only been eating one meal a day, but you can't drop those extra pounds! Have you ever seen a "mature" man, maybe in his 50's, with a huge gut that you could bounce basketballs off of? Perhaps he is sitting in a lounge chair with a nice Budweiser balancing on his extended abdomen. No, he is not a protein starved child, he is a man who is storing for the winter! Yes, like a bear.

This man is most likely is the type of guy that drinks down a couple cups of coffee for breakfast, skips lunch except for maybe a handful of M&Ms or Ruffled Lays, then heads home for a nice meat and potatoes meal with 4-5 beers to follow. Overall, he is probably not taking in more calories than he needs.....but he is starving himself all day and then taking in his day's worth of calories at one time. And even though he is probably not hungry during the day, his body actually interprets this as starvation.

Do you know what happens when your body thinks it's starving? Thankfully, metabolism slows down and you naturally start storing calories as fat for later use. This would be great if there was an actual food shortage. HOWEVER, this is most likely not the case. Furthermore, if you are wanting to lose weight, this is obviously not going to be an effective way to go about it.

So, what can you do? Spread it out. 3 meals, and 2-3 snacks - This clues your body into the fact that there is more food coming. This signals the brain that it is OK to burn calories instead of storing them, inevitably speeding up your metabolism....or at least decrease the rate of decreased metabolism (which unfortunately happens with age). 

Below is a chart that shows you a positive eating pattern that will help your metabolism stay in check. The percentages show you how much of your daily caloric intake you should shoot for. For example, if you normally eat around 2,000 calories, for breakfast, which should be around 20% of your daily intake, you would need around 400 calories.

Meal                                    Time                                        % Intake 
Breakfast                    Within one hour of waking                      20%
Snack                          Approx. 2 hours after breakfast             10%
Lunch                                                                                        20%
Snack                          Approx. 2 hours after lunch or an           10%
                                    hour or 2 before an afternoon
                                    workout
Dinner                                                                                        30%
Snack                          Anytime after dinner                               10%

Everyone's schedule is different, and you have to adapt your pattern to your life. The point is to spread your intake out in order to keep your metabolism up!