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How to Eat and Lose Weight
People always ask now that they are exercising regularly what else can they do to increase the benefits and tone-up more and lose weight quicker. Well one of the most effective strategies for losing fat and improving your metabolism is by eating smaller, more frequent meals throughout the day. The frequency of how often we eat per day has been shown to greatly affect how fat we are. Many studies have concluded that those who eat four to six smaller meals per day have less body fat than those eating two or three meals a day, despite the fact that both groups eat about the same amount of calories.
Just the act of eating and digesting burns calories. So, eating smaller meals more often keeps your metabolism burning fat, and prevents you from getting so hungry that you lose control and make unwise food choices. Unfortunately, most of us have been raised to eat three meals a day, progressively increasing the amount of food as the day goes on.
Eating only three times a day requires us to go too long without eating. By the time lunch or dinner rolls around, we are so famished that we eat anything easily available. Eating small, healthy snacks in between meals not only prevents you from gorging; it increases your metabolism and helps you feel energized and satisfied throughout the day.
Eating a large meal increases the opportunity for fat cells to extract fat from the blood and, therefore, grow bigger. Fat cells can actually adapt to a pattern of large, infrequent meals by becoming more efficient at storing fat. In addition, eating only 2-3 times a day causes the body to face long stretches without food.
This two-to-three-meal eating pattern actually tricks the body into thinking it's in a starvation state, initiating physiological changes that actually slow down your body's resting metabolic rate, the number of calories "burned" at rest. Our body responds to the reduction in calories as if it was starving and your metabolism then slows down, as does the rate of fat loss.
So, if you are trying to lose fat by decreasing your caloric intake, it is best to eat small meals and snacks four to six times a day so your metabolic rate will stay "revved up" throughout the day, making fat loss and/or maintenance a much easier and healthier task.
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