Fitness Myth: Eat less to be thinner!

How many times, have you heard someone telling to eat less if you want to lose weight? For sure, you have heard many times before from the so-called fitness experts.

Is it true? No.

In a study that had been conducted back on 1996, researchers had proven that if you eat more frequently throughout the day you will lose more body fat. The participants in the study were grouped into two. Group #1 ate two meals per day and Group #2 ate 6 meals per day. In the last part of the study, researchers found that Group #2 who ate the same number of calories lost more body fat than Group #1 who only ate two meals per day.

A simple explanation is that the more frequently you eat (e.g. every 3 hours) the higher your metabolism runs and you keep your body out of its primal starvation mode where it tends to store everything you eat as fats.

If you want to lose fat you need to eat 5-6 small meals daily, that’s one meal for every 3 hours. When you eat less calorie than what your body needs, your body goes into the resting metabolic rate stage, wherein all of your bodies systems slow down because of lack of sufficient energy. Some people believe that if they eat less, their body will use its fat stores for energy, but it’s the other way around. The body uses the muscle tissue for energy, which decreases your metabolism.

That is why extreme caloric deficit diets never succeed. When you set your daily needs low, your metabolism becomes slower, which results to your total daily caloric needs becoming lower that creates a caloric surplus. If you reduce the amount of calories, the cycle will just carry on until the time that you are finally eating almost nothing and is still getting bigger.

The best approach is to have a weight-training program that builds muscle so that the fat will be melted even when you are resting.