How Often To Eat & When To Eat For Weight Loss

Eating five small meals throughout the day can help you control your appetite, raise your metabolism and reduce your chances of overeating. Eating more frequently reduces your risk of obesity by decreasing the blood insulin response to long fasts that increase fat storage and weight gain, according to MayoClinic.com. It's important to plan your grazing to ensure you eat the right amount of calories and get the vitamins and minerals you need.

One of the most important reasons why you should be eating smaller portions more frequently is because doing so can prevent the development of becoming overweight or obese. Research has found that people who eat only two or three large meals over the course of the day tend to eat more calories than people who break up their calories into five or six smaller meals. This appears to be in part due to the fact that when you eat breakfast at 7:00 in the morning, and then don't eat lunch until 1:00 in the afternoon, you are so hungry that you eat more calories that are necessary to help satiate your hunger. This overeating leads to increased calorie intake, and subsequent weight gain.



Planning your meals is essential to eating 5 meals per day, see a sample below: