Small Meals Every Three Hours

Hello, Readers!

Most of us grew up on the concept of consuming three square meals daily, aiming to avoid snacking between meals. However, the grazing technique of eating smaller meals every three to four hours throughout the day has many benefits over the more typical routine. Some benefits include:

- Curbing your appetite by limiting hunger, therefore limiting your binge-eating brought on by bigger cravings

- Supplying you with a readily-available energy source throughout the day

- Minimizing healthy lean tissue (muscle) loss that is sometimes brought on by long periods without adequate caloric intake

- Aiding in the stabilizing of blood sugar

- Likely to reduce cortisol levels

The key is to go to three meals daily without increasing your total intake of calories. If your goal is to reduce your body fat, then you will probably want to decrease your total calories as you switch to this food plan. On the other hand, if you aim to maintain your body weight without reducing body fat, then you should keep your total caloric intake at the same value that it is currently, while splitting up those total calories into more (and smaller) meals.

Does Sweating = Fat Loss?

People often equate sweating with fat-burning because heavy exercise tends to produce sweat in most people. However, it would be incorrect to assume that sweating, itself, is always a sign of fat loss. While it is true that sweating can often be a by-product of fat-burning, sweating can also be caused by activities that do not burn fat, such as sitting in a sauna or being outside on a hot day. One trend is for exercisers to bring about significantly more sweat, during exercise, than what the body would normally produce, by wearing layers or a "sauna suit". While this will lead to a greater amount of sweating (and more loss of toal body water), it will not burn off any additional calories.

Celebrities are sometimes known for taking diuretics (often in the form of "water pills") to lose body water before performances or appearances. It is important to understand that this, much like excessive sweating, rids the body of water, but not fat. While many promotions for diuretics will claim to rid the body of "excess water", most Americans are chronically dehydrated, making additional self-imposed and unmonitored water losses unsafe.

While greater sweating or other forms of water loss may be advantageous in the removal of toxins, the American College of Sports Medicine and other accredited health and fitness authorities do not recommend any catalysts for producing more sweat or for otherwise eliminating a greater amount of body water than is natural. Dehydration, headaches, dizziness, lethargy, a reduced capacity for exercise, and other health concerns make this an unsafe practice. Further, as is explained above, there are no benefits regarding fat loss to losing body water.

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