There’s a common misconcepetion that snacking and eating multiple times a day boosts your metabolism and helps you lose weight.
The only way this works is if you’re ultimately still eating in a calorie defecit.
But you’re gonna be hungry.
All the time.
Have you ever noticed that snacking makes you hungrier?
And being hungry, makes losing weight hard.
Sometimes you cant help it, you missed breakfast, lunch was small, a mid afternoon snack hits the spot.
And that’s fine because the calories you missed out on for breakfast and lunch you can make up with a snack. Perfectly okay on an imperfect day.
BUT
If you are trying to lose weight, you should REALLY try to avoid snacking. or eating a lot of separate meals.
There is a reason Bodybuilders eat 5-6x a day.
They are trying to gain weight and they need calories.
They eat every 2 hours or so and their body gets used to this so it metabolizes the food quickly and needs more.
It actually requires less calories to metabolize these smaller meals so they’re burning less too.
That is not ideal for the average human trying to maintain the ideal bodyweight and composition.
The body will adapt to whatever eating schedule it is used to, and ideally you dont want it to include snacks.
Our ultra-processed american diet is designed to keep us con$uming.
Ultra processed food is easy to eat, digests very quickly, and keeps you hungry.
When you’re snacking on that stuff, you’re making it worse.
Whole, nutrient dense foods, take more calories to digest, take longer to eat, longer to digest, and keep you fuller longer.
Nutrient dense snacks are good but they are calorie packed (like nuts) and you can easily overeat them.
Yes they are healthy, but healthy snacks arent magic. They are still calories.
It will be hard to cold-turkey stop snacking, but I would urge you to figure out your caloric needs.
And then separate them in to 2-3 meals.
Initially make sure you account for some snacking calories, and then start to slowly phase out your snacking or replacing your snacking with something non-caloric like carbonated water to help appease the habit while you break it.
