Pyramid Down Your Meals

For healthy weight loss, one should eat 5-6 small meals a day, every few hours. If you feed your metabolism smaller amounts, more often, it will speed up, and you will lose weight.

However, if you’re a big meal eater, don’t fret, because you can still eat a good amount, just try to do it for your first meal of the day.

In the morning, your metabolism moves faster than it does in the evening. So you can make breakfast a larger meal without guilt, so long as it is healthy. An example of a good breakfast is one scrambled egg, a bowl of regular oatmeal, one banana, and a bowl of strawberries.

There is a common fallacy in the fitness arena that to lose weight you should eat as little as possible as rarely as possible. You actually need to eat less, but more often. For example one banana is not a well rounded meal. You can’t just eat a banana for breakfast and expect to get the results you want. It is also not enough to jumpstart your metabolism for the day. Your body needs more to start off with so it can get going for the day.

Also, each meal should have a blend of complex carbohydrates and protein. A banana is a good source of potassium, but it is hardly enough to constitute a “meal”. It is also just not enough to get you going first thing in the morning.

I use the banana example because all too often I overhear dieters say “I’m trying to lose weight, so I only grabbed a (insert any fruit here) for breakfast, maybe later if I get hungry I’ll have an apple.”

True, it is healthy to eat fruits, but they are not enough to constitute a meal, and you’re depriving your body of proper energy and nutrients if that’s all you’re eating for long stretches of time.

Your first meal of the day should be the biggest, and then gradually, as the day goes by, pyramid down the size of your meals.

If you don’t get home until say, 9pm one night, and haven’t eaten yet, this is not the time to go into the kitchen and cook up a big dinner. If you’re not getting around to eating until this late, you’ve missed the window for having a big meal. It’s time to grab something small and light, because your metabolism is working slower at night. A yogurt is a good thing to eat if you get hungry late at night.

To sum things up, when trying to lose weight, or just to eat healthier in general, you should start your day with a larger meal, then as the hours go by, gradually make them smaller.