Fitness & Your Eating Schedule
The food we eat affects our fitness and our looks. No one disputes that. But not only is the type and quantity of food you eat is important, when you have your meals and how often you eat is crucial too. If you want to succeed in improving your health and fitness, you should keep reading.
When you eat has a huge impact on your results. Let’s start at the beginning of the day. When you first wake up, your body has been without food for many hours. Your blood sugar level is low, and your body is running on stored energy. Once those reserves are used up, your body will turn to its next available source of fuel, your muscles! It’s very difficult to get in shape when you’re groggy, hungry, and your body is cannibalizing the muscles for energy. You really should eat something nutritious as soon as you can after waking up in the morning. This gives your body the fuel it needs to start the day, and spares your muscles.
So now you know why it’s so important to have a good meal when you first get up. To summarize, eating healthy foods soon after you get up in the morning will help you function better, work out better, and protects your muscles from being used as fuel. This is one part of the equation for getting fit quickly.
The quest to keep your blood sugar level in the right zone also tells us how often you should eat. Within 3 to 4 hours after a meal, your body will have digested that food and your blood sugar level will start heading down again. That means you really should eat something every 3 hours or so (except when you are sleeping at night).
When you think about this, it’s clear that you need to eat a lot of meals in a day. To really keep your blood sugar stable and gain all the benefits that brings, you need to move toward five meals a day, instead of the traditional three. If you wake up at say 6:00 AM, all you need to do is eat every 3 to 3.5 hours and your blood sugar should should be stable all day.
One last thing. If your new diet requires you to eat five meals a day, you’re going to have to eat less in those meals. Asimple approach is to make the second and fourth meals into healthy snacks of just 100-200 calories, and cut back on the other three a bit. Doing it this way should make it easier for your body to adapt. Forcing yourself to have a small healthy snack mid-morning and mid-afternoon isn’t a hard habit to pick up. And you should be less hungry at lunch and dinner than you used to be, so cutting back a bit on those meals easier too.
Eat this way for a few weeks and see what you think. It will take you a lot closer to becoming as fit as you want to be.
