Last month, in chapter one of Metabolic Transformation, the critical topic of metabolism was covered. The fact that you can increase or decrease the amount of calories you burn per day is paramount in a long-term approach to weight control. I want you to have the advantage of eating as much as possible and your body metabolizing energy as rapidly as possible. To walk the line of edging your metabolic rate upward to your individual highest level and still be losing body fat takes a precise food volume plan. The first chapter emphasized having a nutrition “coach” who can lead you into a safe and correct eating plan (page 13 of the manual actually gives you a starting point for a weight loss plan.) Introducing chapter two, I will reproduce parts of the first two paragraphs:

“Now that you have established how much food you need per day, how are you to structure this food into your daily meals and snacks? This question is far more important than you might think. You can actually gain or lose weight eating the exact same amount of food just by changing how you schedule your meals during the day.

There is a limit to how much food your body can effectively digest, metabolize, and absorb at one time. If you eat too much at a meal, some of that food ends up stored as new body fat. So even if you're eating the right amount of food per day, you could be working against yourself by storing new body fat at certain meals. At best this could slow your progress; at worst it could negate any progress at all.”

Since an excessively large meal will provide more calories than your body can use at one time, the unnecessary calories are converted to body fat ultimately. Then, you're obviously not hungry for quite awhile, but when you finally get hungry again, the severe swings in blood sugar (more on this in the next chapter on carbohydrates) create intense cravings for another large amount of food. If you wait too long between meals to eat, you'll be extremely hungry and you and I both know that's a big problem. I can eat four times my normal amount of food if I walk into the kitchen starving!

A concise explanation is that if you eat smaller, more frequent meals your body has nothing extra to store as body fat. This is half the battle. If you are trying to lose weight, you don't want to be taking two steps forward and one step backward - I like to stay in a forward gear! The more frequent meals keep your metabolism working faster. It takes energy (burning calories) to digest food and distribute it throughout your body to be used at the cellular level. So, new body fat is avoided and the metabolic rate is increased so stored body fat can be used faster.

You undoubtedly have heard the theory of eating smaller, more frequent meals, but you may have also encountered the difficulty of putting it into practice. It may take more time preparing meals and you may be inconvenienced in keeping the right food readily available. Don't let this learning curve stop you from creating these vital new habits. Plan ahead. A lot of being successful at losing weight is being able to create new habits to replace bad habits not just “giving something up.” Once you establish patterns of food buying, preparing, and then making sure it's always available it will be much easier to stick to this type of meal plan.

I would also like to emphasize having some flexibility in meal structuring. Due to work and social habits as well as physiological uniqueness, we all have different hunger patterns. Going with a very rigid plan with the exact same amount of food in the exact same ratios at the exact same time intervals might be viewed as the perfect issuance of this rule, but completely impractical. You must be able to tailor sound nutritional principals to your individual daily life. I do find, however, there are some practices that seem almost universal. Eating a solid breakfast is a must to replenish depleted blood and liver glycogen (stored sugar) in the morning. This will start your metabolism churning and will decrease the feeling of mounting hunger throughout the day. It is also important to get some protein at breakfast to slow the digestion of your first meal and prevent your body from stripping amino acids from your muscles since you haven't eaten since the night before.

It is also helpful to have a normal-sized supper. A portion of lean protein such as a chicken breast or fish, a fibrous vegetable like a salad, and a small serving of carbohydrates will set up your evening with more stability than if you tried to “skimp” on supper. The evening hours are treacherous for most of us, proven by a well-worn path from the couch to the refrigerator. It's easier not to snack all night if you've enjoyed a full supper. The rest of the day, between breakfast and supper, should be filled with semi-evenly spaced meals/snacks with some protein in each and a fairly even distribution of the day's allotment of carbs and fat. Give yourself 3-5 days to get used to this type of eating pattern and you'll start to see and feel the difference.