Healthy Tip for the Week

So since I've been learning about fitness and nutrition as a personal trainer, I thought I would share some of that information with ya'll each week. I'll have a tip on how to be more healthy or something about working out each week.

Healthy Tip: How to speed up your metabolism through food.

Some of you might already be aware of this concept, but hopefully there's still something you can learn from this:

WHAT: Eat every 3-4 hours throughout the day. This means you should be eating 5-6 times a day with three meals (breakfast, lunch, and dinner) and two snacks in between. Your snacks are a great way to get in your fruit and vegetable servings in for the day (which should be 5). Also, make sure that with each of those meals there is a small portion of protein in each of them. For example, a snack could include an apple with almonds, or a fruit with cottage cheese or string cheese, or an orange with 1 egg or 3 egg whites.

WHY: There are two reasons why you should eat every 3-4 hours, which is why you most likely have heard of it before.
1. If you go long periods of time without eating, your body will go into starvation mode and store the fat that you're putting into your body. Because it's saying, "Oh no, I won't get another meal for a while so I am going to hold onto this." So while you're eating, your body is actually storing that fat. This is a result of a slow metabolism. Your body is smart enough, that it takes what you do today and thinks you will do the same thing the next day. So if that is how you continually eat, your body will keep storing fat because it assumes you will do the same thing the next day. But the opposite is also true. If you eat ever 3 hours, then each time you eat your body will say, "I know I'm getting ANOTHER meal in a little while so I am going to burn this fat off right now." So you see, the more often you eat throughout the day, it teaches your metabolism to be more efficient at burning fat.

2. The second reason why you should eat very 3 hours is that it prevents you from overeating. Your body only needs a certain percentage of protein, fat, and carbohydrates at one time. So if you eat anything over what your body needs, it will turn to fat, even if it is protein or carbohydrates.

3. You will need to eat protein throughout the day because it will only stay in your body for a short period of time and you will need it to get through your workout sufficiently.

Next week: What to eat after you workout, and how we can speed up our metabolism through working out.