When I typically address nutrition with a client, there are 3 key areas that I must tackle: Quality (what you eat), Quantity (how much you eat), and Timing (when/how often you eat).

Today, we’ll tackle timing first. Now, the first rebuttal that I usually hear when I question the frequency of someone’s meals goes something like, “Yeah, I know I should be eating more often. Six small meals like everyone says, right?” This means that they have the basic concepts down, but only on the level of what they’ve heard their friend say or watched on an Oprah special.

Here’s why eating more frequently is so important:

Let’s say you were good and followed the “3 solid meals a day” routine, which I remind you most people don’t. Breakfast skippers, that means you. Anyways, at this model, the average gym patron feels they are doing pretty well. Not too hungry, sometimes tired in the middle of the afternoon, but that’s normal, right? Not exactly.

What’s actually happening in this format is detrimental for 2 reasons, especially for the client looking to drop bodyfat and look lean.

First, the fact that we only eat several times per day does not change the fact that our body requires energy constantly. This means that, during those times that we are not taking in any calories (Blue), our body has to turn to an internal source to stay alive. In this case, it will most often attack your lean muscle tissue, which is your body's  fat-burning engine!

This effectively lowers your metabolism over time, since the less muscle tissue you have, the fewer calories your body can burn at rest, and the fewer calories you can eat to maintain the same weight. Second, eating in this format throws our bodies into starvation mode. One side effect of this is catabolism (the breaking down of muscle tissue for energy) which I discussed above. The second is what happens to the food that you are eating. Because your body is thrown off by not being fed regularly, it seeks to store as much of what you do take in as an emergency supply.

This means that, no matter how healthy those 3 (or fewer) meals you’re taking in are, they will not be processed efficiently, and much of them will be stored as body fat as an emergency supply of energy. So, you can see that poses a problem for the gym member looking to lose weight. This also explains the New Year’s phenomenon that you can see happening in health clubs around the country: join in January, eat less/move more, lose weight quickly by burning up lots of muscle, hit a plateau, gain most of your weight back very quickly because your metabolism is actually slower, give up and join again next year.

So the first thing that we want to accomplish with you nutrition program to keep you from falling into these same patterns is make it so you are eating smaller quantities more often, not starving.  

You can see that these smaller meals are able to be completely utilized by your body to fuel your workouts. After this, we can successfully add exercise to increase your calorie deficit and help you get lean!

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