Friday, December 19, 2008

Skipping Meals Makes You Fatter

By Jason King

For a lot of people attempting to lose weight the first thing that comes to their mind is eating less. Instead of eating smaller meals they usually eat less meals. If you want your body to become heavier and have a higher fat percentage this is the quickest way to achieve it.

At first this looks like an extremely effective method of losing weight, but it is very short lived. What you lose at first is water weight and muscle mass. It's the loss of your muscle mass that is the start of you getting heavier, it just takes a little time to start showing on your body .

The first meal overweight people usually give up is their breakfast. They think that skipping breakfast after waking up hungry will cause their body to start burning fat. What skipping breakfast does do is slows down your metabolism. As your metabolism slows throughout the day your body goes into starvation mode. This is where it will start storing fat, and burning off your muscles as energy.

The human body is very intelligent. It will eat away at your muscles because it knows these are burning off more calories than fat does. Because you're starving yourself with less meals your body will burn less calories when your muscle mass is lower. Fat storage is something else your body does while you're not eating as many meals as you should be. Your body will store fat so as your muscles waste away it will have a natural food source when your muscles are no longer burning too many calories.

When you eventually eat in the evening your body will sore all the calories from your meal as fat. Your body will learn that it's not going to get any more food until the following evening so it will store as much as it can. It will also slow down the rate in which the meal is digested so you'll be digesting while you sleep.

5 to 6 meals a day is what you should be looking at eating as part of a successful weight loss program. Increasing your muscle mass is also needed to speed up your metabolic rate. Cardio is also needed as it can burn an extra 2000 to 4000 calories a week depending on your weight and the intensity in which you train.

Losing weight and keeping it off is not an over night process, and anything that loses you weight overnight will be very short lived. You need to do it safely, and not starve your body of the calories it needs to function properly.

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