How Many Meals a Day Should You Eat

If you are a weight conscious person who likes to read a lot of stuff about diet, then you might be in a state of confusion regarding the number of times, you should eat meals. While most of us are raised on three square meals a day, the recent remarks about 3 meal diet plan force us to think that we have been following a wrong diet practice all these years. 'Eat 6 meals a day for maximum weight loss' seems to be the current mantra for weight loss. Confused? Until now, the number of meals you eat a day was never a concern as we believed in the principle, 'lesser the number of meals, more the weight loss'. However, if the recent studies are to be believed then we ought to make some major changes in our diet plan.

How Many Meals a Day Should You Eat

Dietitians often advise us to spread out our food intake evenly throughout the day. Breakfast forms the most important meal of the day, followed by lunch, followed by dinner. Breakfast provides us the energy for performing various tasks throughout the day. A moderate lunch can give us sufficient calories to pull through the rest of the day. Since, you do not need much of energy after dinner, your dinner need not be heavy or filling. Unfortunately, people follow the reverse diet of this. Many working people skip breakfast, the most important meal of the day. Skipping breakfast makes you ravenous as the day proceeds. You are likely to grab any junk item you can lay your hands upon. They eat sandwich or burger during lunch and stuff themselves to heart's content at dinner. You couldn't possibly have a better recipe for piling up pounds of fat!

Following 6 meals a day menu has its own advantages. The calories are uniformly distributed throughout the day to give you continuous supply of energy. When you feed your body with only 3 or fewer meals a day (no matter now big), it starts to store fats, because it does not know when you will feed it next. However, a 6 meals a day diet convinces your body that the next serving of food is on its way. Therefore, it does not pile up on fat, but converts it into energy. Eating 6 meals a day also keeps your insulin levels in check, because when you skip a meal, your insulin level surges, which eventually leads to obesity.

3 Vs 6 Meals a Day

However, this theory of 6 meals a day diet is not acceptable to everyone. Some people still believe in the traditional diet plan of 3 square meals. They believe that distributing calories over 6 meals may not give your body enough nutrition. The proportion of fat, proteins and carbs may become skewed. However, this problem can be solved if you take care to incorporate sufficient amount of nutrients in your diet. Another argument against 6 meal diet plan is that you do not give your body enough time to burn fat after digestion. However, this is not true because when you eat small portion of food, your body instantly converts the calories to energy. Thus, there is no fat to burn in the first place.

Hope after reading this article you will agree to the benefits of 5 - 6 small meals throughout the day, rather than 3 meals a day.