When to EAT!

I am continuing today on the theme of scheduling your life down to the most minute details, like when to drink your water and when to eat your meals and snacks! If you are a spontaneous person, all of this probably sounds insane to you. Or if your life is regimented by outside forces, such as your job, school, children, or other factors that must remain in place, you have probably already developed an eating schedule. But for those of us who have some or lots of leeway, I thought I'd give you a few different takes on when to eat.

First of all, if you are attempting to lose weight, there are a few schools of thought on the subject of scheduling your meals and snacks. The Zone diet, created by Dr. Barry Sears, has some rules about this subject. Dr. Sears suggests that you eat your first meal of the day within an hour of waking. Blood sugar tends to be at its lowest when you rise, and the Zone diet attempts to keep your blood sugar as even as possible throughout the day. Another rule on the Zone is never go more than 5 hours without eating a meal or snack. How you space out your meals and snacks, beyond this, is up to you. While some diet plans suggest you eliminate those evening snacks, the Zone has the opposite theory: eat a bedtime snack in order to keep your blood sugar more steady throughout the long, nighttime fast while you sleep.

There are many diet programs that encourage you to eat 5-6 mini-meals throughout the day instead of 3 large meals. The most recent studies I have read suggest that it really does not make much difference either way. If you are eating basically the same healthy foods, in the same general quantity, you should feel free to divide up that food into the number of meals and snacks that best suits your life style. Busy people with young children or hectic schedules that involve a lot of running around might find that the mini-meals work best, as there is never enough time to prepare or sit down to the large meals. Young children with small tummies tend to eat this way naturally. As long as those mini-meals are full of healthy, whole foods, there should be no problem with this plan. On the other hand, packing your food into fewer meals per day is also just fine! I tend to get annoyed if I have to eat too many times per day. For me, 3 meals and 1 evening snack is how I usually divide up my food. On the Zone, a 1 block snack is so small that I almost never bother! Only if I am really hungry in the afternoon, which usually means that my lunch was either a bit too early or a bit too small. A balanced Zone meal of 3 blocks should last at least 4 hours before hunger sets in.

And what about Intermittent Fasting (IF)? I have mentioned this idea briefly in my earliest blog posts. I experimented a tiny bit with this concept back in the beginning of the year. The basic idea is stretching out the hours per day (24 hour cycle) during which you fast and condensing the number of hours during which you eat. For most of us there is a rather large window during which we eat, say 7am-7pm (12 hours) and then we fast from 7pm-7am (12 hours).  If you were to give IF a try, you might wait a couple of extra hours before eating your first meal, say 10am instead of 7am. Then you might eat your final meal at 4pm instead of 7pm. Thus you would condense you eating down to 10am-4pm (6 hours) and expand your daily fast to 4pm-10am (18 hours!) Advocates of IF believe there are many benefits to this plan, such as increased overall energy, health, and longevity, as well as previously unattainable weight loss, even with the same overall amount of food consumed. Some folks do a once-per-week 24 hour fast instead of the daily condensing. If you want to learn more about IF, look to Precision Nutrition, Mark's Daily Apple, or LeanGains which all have articles on the subject on their respective websites. Before and after photos are pretty remarkable in some cases!

So I think that just about cover when to eat. In other words, you have a whole lot of choices! And there are many differing opinions on the subject. If you feel that your current schedule is not working well for you, you might experiment a bit. Take the exact same amount of food you normally eat, and just divide it up differently, eating either more frequently or spacing out your meals more. Sometimes just shaking up your routine in this way is enough to give your weight loss a little boost. Enjoy your meals and let me know how your scheduling choices affect your weight!