Eliminate sweet cravings and put in muscle in one go!

Is it breakfast, lunch and dinner? Or is it breakfast, dinner and tea?

Hopefully neither, because if you want to get the best body composition then you should be eating much more often than three times a day!

The general justification is that eating 5-6 times per day is good to 'spark the metabolism'. Which is true, in a way but is actually very misleading. As if eating smaller meals more frequently will increase the rate at which you burn energy and will therefore make you lose weight.



Not quite.

In fact increasing meal frequency to eat every 2-4 hours does 'spark the metabolism', just not in this way.

It depends very much on what you eat, and unfortunately the catch is that it is only of value if you eat well to begin with. This is why simply changing someone's eating pattern to 5 times from three will make little difference if their dietary quality is poor.

The first effect is that it increases protein turnover rate, and the faster protein turns over in the muscles the faster it can be built when the correct stimulus is applied.

For example giving someone a bolus of protein once per day will result in most of the protein being burned and used or stored as fuel. However if you give someone the same protein in small doses throughout the day, a much higher quantity of the protein will be used to generate muscle tissue (again assuming the correct stimulus has been applied)

The second effect, and the one which is more significant to the majority of people is in the maintenance of blood sugar.

When people first come off of a typical western diet they are used to a cycle of large doses of carbohydrates. This results in a very unstable blood sugar. As the nutrients enter the blood stream a large insulin response is caused, sending the blood sugar crashing as fast as it went up.



The body is not stupid, and all it wants to do is stay as stable as possible. Leptin tells the body to look for a high calorie or sugary food to counter this low blood sugar. Unfortunately we have access to far more sugar than we should, and so we reactively overeat beginning the whole cycle again. People make food choices based on how they feel there and then, and at that point eating an entire bar of chocolate seems the only way to make that bad feeling go away!

If you eat small high quality meals throughout the day then sugar in the blood stays stable, and reactive eating is diminished.

So if you are a hard gainer, or you suffer from sweet cravings, eliminate the obvious causes first by eating regularly when you are looking to improve you diet.