Do not deny yourself sweets, even if you are on a proper diet or diet. Our clients eat sweets and lose weight, so it’s realistic to indulge in treats and lose weight. It is important to know when it is better to eat sweets in order not to gain weight, and today there are two conflicting opinions, we will analyze them in this article.
“If you want to lose weight, stop eating sweets” - this postulate is known to many. But is it really true that all slender women never eat sweets, cookies, other confectionery and flour products? After all, people of different sizes line up in stores to buy the “forbidden fruit.” Despite the fact that sweets are most often included in food, psychologically giving up such treats can be very painful. And many nutritionists say that you can pamper yourself with different delicacies. It is only important to know when it is better to eat sweets so as not to gain weight.
Why you shouldn’t give up sweets completely
Sugar itself, as a carbohydrate, in small quantities (up to 50 g per day for women and up to 60 g for men) is necessary for the human body because:- it is a source of energy;
- it improves brain function;
- it is necessary for the liver to perform barrier function(removing toxins from the body);
- it improves mental condition person.
The best time for sweets, the hours when sugar is best absorbed by the body, is a topic that modern nutritionists argue about. Some are of the opinion that you can only enjoy dessert without harming your figure in the morning. Others believe that if you are going to eat chocolate and cakes, it is better to do it in the afternoon. Both points of view are quite reasonable.
What time of day is best to eat sweets?
Opinions for the MORNING
Many weight loss experts advise consuming sweets exclusively. in the morning, until 12 o'clock. They justify a positive answer to the question whether it is possible to eat sweets in the morning as follows:1. An energy reserve is created for the coming day.
2. Sweets for breakfast are insurance against overeating.In the morning, the body needs energy more than ever. For breakfast to be truly nutritious, it must consist of 60% carbohydrates. It's great if it's porridge. But if there is egg white omelette, for example, it can be easily complemented with a small cake. Fast carbohydrates will improve your mood and performance. They are unlikely to be deposited on the waist and hips with extra centimeters, as they will be used up in a day.
3. Sugar-containing foods for breakfast help create a psychological mood for proper nutrition for the rest of the day.Energy value A proper breakfast should reach 500-600 kcal. If you eat cottage cheese and drink unsweetened coffee, your body will not receive even half of the required “fuel”. It is not surprising that soon a person will really want to eat again. Eating a cake will make you feel full. At the same time, the received dose of sugar reduces the production of gherlin; during the day the person will not experience a strong feeling of hunger.
The person does not feel that he is infringing on himself in any way. It is easier for him not to give in to temptation, knowing that tomorrow morning he will be able to afford the coveted eclair or a piece of chocolate.
Opinions for the afternoon tea
Opponents of this theory are quick to express their opinion that, unfortunately, it has its drawbacks:
- In the morning, the insulin level is very low, eating sweets leads to a sharp jump, which, on the contrary, will provoke overeating during the day;
- sucrose is a carbohydrate that is quickly absorbed by the body, so we can’t talk about any energy reserve;
- It’s better to eat “sweets” in a separate meal, without combining them with other dishes or products, and a piece of cake up to 100 g can hardly be called a full breakfast.
1. Sugar breaks down quickly and is well absorbed.
2. You will be able to hold out until dinner.From 16.00 to 18.00 the level of insulin production is highest, so sucrose is quickly broken down into fructose and glucose and is almost completely absorbed by the body. Eating a cake will not harm your figure.
3. It will be possible to eat separately.A sufficient amount of time has passed from lunch to afternoon tea, the body needs to be recharged with energy.
4. You won’t want sweets late in the evening.As mentioned above, confectionery and other sweets are recommended to be consumed separately from other products. This can be done as part of an afternoon snack. But, besides this, it will be useful to harmonize the intake of a large amount of simple carbohydrates if you first eat something with a very low GI.
But:Snacking on “goodies” allows you to avoid overeating at dinner.
- after such an afternoon snack, it is recommended to spend the evening actively, and not lying in front of the TV;
- It is advisable to train 30-40 minutes after such a carbohydrate “load”;
- there is a risk that after sweets you won’t want to have dinner at all.
Overweight people often eat only 2 times a day, and sincerely do not understand why the weight does not move. Some even gain weight with this lifestyle, especially if the second and last meal occurs in the evening. Let's look at what the error is.
Why is eating rarely harmful?
The secret lies in the fact that the habit of eating infrequently, but a lot, causes you to gain more calories than you would gain from several more frequent snacks, when you manage to maintain a constant feeling of fullness in the body.
It is known that the feeling of hunger directly depends on the level of sugar in the blood. If you eat rarely, your blood sugar drops, you feel unwell, lose strength, and, as soon as the opportunity arises, you pounce on food to satisfy your hunger, and besides, you eat quite quickly. Since the feeling of fullness appears only 15-20 minutes after starting a meal, you eat much more than you should because you swallow pieces.
Those who are losing weight should try to maintain blood sugar at the same level throughout the day and avoid severe hunger when sucking in the pit of the stomach. The metabolic rate slows down within 4-6 hours after eating. That is why when losing weight it is important to eat often and in small portions, at least 4-6 times a day. It would also be good to count calories when losing weight so as not to overeat. You need to chew your food thoroughly, trying to eat slowly, this is important so that as little food as possible fits into you before you feel full.
What is better: 3 or 7 meals?
What diet fits your lifestyle? Do you eat rarely and thoroughly, or a little but often?
If you are trying to lose weight and are familiar with famous diets, then you probably know that many of them are designed for three meals a day. American nutritionists conducted an experiment: they offered those who want to lose weight a seven-meal plan. At the same time, the portions were made very small. This method is used to feed wild animals, which, by the way, do not suffer from excess weight at all.
Of course, eating all day and losing weight is every girl’s dream. But how effective is it really? Below we invite you to compare the pros and cons of 2 nutrition models: eating 7 times a day and eating 3 times a day.
Meals five to seven times a day
Of course, eating little and often is good. This way you maintain your blood sugar levels and avoid overeating from hunger.
Positive sides:
- With such frequent meals, performance increases. Your body is constantly fueled with energy through 5-7 meals a day. The result of this is vigor, activity and high performance;
- With seven meals a day, hunger pangs do not torment you. Such regular eating throughout the day with a small time interval helps maintain normal blood sugar levels. As a result, you don’t feel hungry and you won’t be able to eat much at one time. This principle helps you lose weight if you eat apples as a snack. This way you can develop indifference to sweets in your body;
- metabolism improves. This happens because the digestive organs are constantly working. As a result, many more calories are burned.
Negative sides:
- time frame. Sometimes it is difficult to maintain such a diet; not every person manages to eat every two hours;
- fats are burned more slowly. Due to the fact that the level of insulin in the blood is constantly increased, the process of burning fat in cells becomes slower or almost stops altogether;
- You can overeat if your stomach is stretched.
Meals three to four times a day
You do not fast for more than 3-4 hours, food comes evenly, there is no overeating. These are the pros, but what about the cons?
Positive sides:
- fats are burned quickly. Insulin is not produced at the moment when food is digested. The lack of insulin in the blood leads to the fact that fat is not deposited, the body begins to burn previously accumulated fat deposits;
- good food control. With three meals a day, it’s easy to control the number of calories you eat per day;
- hunger “by the hour.” The body gets used to a certain schedule, which is why hunger occurs every day at the same specific time.
Negative sides:
- If you don’t eat for about 4 hours, you suffer from hunger pangs. You may sometimes want to eat before the allotted time. This occurs due to the fact that when food is digested, a large amount of insulin is consumed, so its level in the blood drops;
- Nutrients are less absorbed. When the body receives many nutrients and beneficial substances from food at once, it often cannot use them in the best possible way.
Summarize
A three- or four-course meal plan is suitable for those who are unable to control the volume of portions eaten at one time and cannot eat every 2 hours. The five- to seven-meal meal plan can be safely recommended to people who have an active lifestyle and play sports. For those who want to eat constantly, you can also try to lose weight this way.
With any eating pattern, it is important to remember that your diet should be balanced. It is necessary to eat often without overeating. Frequently eat vegetables, vegetable oils in moderation, protein and slow carbohydrates, drink at least 2 liters of water per day and do not fast for more than 3 hours in a row so that your blood sugar does not rise too much, causing the desire to eat fast carbohydrates. To lose weight, it is much more important not to exceed your calorie intake, and it’s up to you to eat 4 or 7 times a day!
For many people, their diet is regulated by appetite. What is appetite and how to treat it?
The question often arises: how to suppress appetite? It has been shown that fractional meals (5-6 times a day) suppresses the excitation of the food center. In this case, sometimes one apple or a glass of kefir is enough. In order not to whet your appetite, you should not eat spicy or salty foods and you should completely avoid alcoholic beverages. Alcohol not only poisons the body, but also has a strong, appetite-stimulating effect.
So, increased appetite can be harmful to health, but its complete absence is also undesirable. This often affects young children, whom loving mothers and compassionate grandmothers endlessly stuff with something “tasty.” As a result, the child loses his appetite, and frightened parents, instead of coming to their senses, try to feed him continuously.
Eating with appetite is always a pleasure. It takes time for appetite to develop. Eating breaks are absolutely necessary. IN childhood they should be shorter than in a mature one.
What should these breaks be? How much and what should you eat during a particular meal? In other words, what should be the diet of an adult healthy person?
The diet is based on four basic principles.
- Regularity of nutrition
- Divided meals during the day
- Rational range of products
- Physiological distribution of the amount of food according to its intake during the day
Meal times
The main criterion determining given time, is the feeling of hunger. It can be identified by next sign: when thinking about unattractive food (for example, the image of a piece of stale black bread), saliva appears; at such a moment, the tongue, rather than the stomach, primarily needs food.
You can confuse the feeling of hunger with the following conditions: the stomach “fails”, the stomach “sucks”, cramps occur. All this indicates the unloading of the organ after overflow, the needs of the stomach and the food appetite center (a number of brain structures that coordinate the choice, consumption of food and initial stages digestive processing).
It is necessary to distinguish between the concepts of hunger and appetite when organizing correct mode nutrition. Hunger indicates the need for energy, appetite - the need for pleasure. The surest impulse to eat should be hunger, since the deceptiveness of appetite leads to excess weight.
Number of meals
The frequency of meals or the number of meals affects the metabolism in the body. Factors to consider when determining the frequency of meals:
- age;
- work activity(mental, physical labor);
- state of the human body;
- working day routine.
Benefits of multiple meals (four meals a day):
Approximate meal schedule
A sample meal schedule might look like this:
- 7:00 - First breakfast.
- 10:00 - Second breakfast.
- 13:00 - Lunch.
- 16:00 - Afternoon snack.
- 19:00 - Dinner.
Breakfast- the most important meal of the day. Breakfast should be rich in proteins; you can include, for example, eggs, cottage cheese or other dairy products, and turkey sausages. If you can't do without carbohydrates, include fresh fruit or some granola in your breakfast menu.
Lunch should be light and low carb. If you are not very hungry at this time, still try not to skip breakfast, but limit yourself to a glass of kefir or juice or some fruit.
Dinner should be balanced and include a source of protein (meat, fish or poultry) and some healthy carbohydrates, preferably only in the form of vegetables or grains. Some healthy fats from olive oil, nuts or avocados will also benefit.
Afternoon snack may include carbohydrates, preferably only in the form of some fruit, porridge or, at worst, a whole grain bun.
Dinner, like lunch, should be complete and well-balanced. After dinner, the so-called “Danger Zone” begins. Eating at this time is caused only by psychological, not physiological hunger. Only the desire to cheer yourself up can draw you to the refrigerator. If you intend to lose weight, never eat in the Danger Zone.
Biorhythm - the secret of a proper nutrition schedule
The secret to proper eating schedule is understanding how your body's internal clock is set, i.e. what are your biorhythms? Each person has his own specific pace of life, and the body’s readiness to eat is directly related to the time at which a person usually wakes up, when he begins active activity, when he rests, and, finally, when he gets ready for bed. If you are used to waking up no earlier than 11 am, you are unlikely to feel the desire to have breakfast at 11:30. However, by lunchtime your appetite will probably be quite good, and by dinner you will definitely arrive without delay. Those who like to watch the sun rise when they rise, on the contrary, have a wonderful appetite in the morning, but they may completely forget about dinner.
Start your day with protein foods. Breakfast should be rich in proteins. This will help you get a sufficient boost of energy and is guaranteed to delay the feeling of hunger until next appointment food. It is believed that it is best to have breakfast no earlier than 8 a.m. and within 1 hour of waking up. If you wake up much earlier than eight in the morning, then drink a glass of water, do exercises, take cold and hot shower, in order to delay breakfast closer to the specified time.
Eat at the same time every 3-4 hours. This will help control your appetite. To organize such fractional meals, you can distribute over time the intake of the set of dishes that you usually eat for lunch, for example. First - salad and first course, after 3 hours have a snack with the second course. Drink during snacks more water. Water removes toxins from the body.
Lunch at lunch is an important point in the meal schedule. It is at lunchtime that you can afford the largest amount of food, because... The average daily peak of gastric acidity is observed in the middle of the day. Lunch should be served before 3 pm.
Have dinner no later than 8 pm. Eating after 8 pm is overwhelming normal function pancreas and blocks the release of melatonin, necessary for sound healthy sleep.
Distribution of calories during the day
Preparing for a new day for the body should begin with a certain supply of energy. To work fully, a person needs calories. That is why the most useful and optimal diet will be one in which our body receives a little more than 70% of the total kilocalories consumed at breakfast and lunch. And for dinner and intermediate snacks less than 30% remains total amount. With such a nutritional schedule, a person receives enough strength for his activities without storing excess fat during a rich evening feast.
A gap of 4-5 hours between individual meals will be the most optimal and physiological. And the time from the last meal to bed should be at least three to four hours. Such a diet can replenish the energy costs of our life and control appetite without loading the human system with extra calories.
Compliance with these principles optimal mode nutrition and rational eating, as well as previous rules healthy food will not only save your weight from extra pounds, but also save it from unnecessary stomach problems and heart disease.
When we try to stick to our chosen diet, we pay great attention on what we eat. But at the same time, we don’t think at all about when exactly it is better to sit down at the dinner table, how many times during the day we should eat and what will happen if we decide to eat too much.
The standard number of meals per day is three. And that's if you're lucky. Some people mistakenly believe that if they stop eating altogether or limit their meals to once a day, they will lose weight twice as fast. But usually such experiments lead to nothing but stress and health problems.
It is advisable to eat every 3-4 hours. This improves fat burning, prevents the release of excess insulin into the blood, allows leptin (the hormone that regulates energy metabolism) to work its magic and control appetite and metabolism. It also keeps the balance of cortisol production, the stress hormone, under control.
Don't skip breakfast! Our grandmothers were right when they said that you need to start the day with a good hearty breakfast. This gives you energy to start a long, productive day. If you skip breakfast, very soon the feeling of hunger takes you by surprise and you begin to interrupt the feeling of hunger with everything that comes to hand. And in offices, sweets and cookies are usually on hand.
Don't eat three hours before bed. Eating before bed increases body temperature, increases blood sugar and insulin, and reduces the production of melatonin and growth hormone. All of these factors affect sleep and the natural fat burning that occurs when we sleep. Besides, bad dream leads to the fact that we may overeat the next day.
If it so happens that you have time to eat before bed, it is advisable to eat light food low in and high in fat.
Start your day with protein. To improve appetite control, it is better to eat proteins at breakfast and leave carbohydrates for lunch or dinner. Omelette with tomatoes is a great quick breakfast!
Never start strength training on empty stomach. For activities like these, your body needs energy to perform optimally. But cardio training can be done 30 minutes before meals.
This does not mean that you need to eat too much right before training. Just don't start exercising if you haven't eaten in a while and you're feeling hungry. Before the workout itself, you can snack on bananas, nuts or dried fruits - they are high in calories, quickly absorbed, provide the necessary energy and relieve hunger.
Focus on food. While eating, it is not advisable to be distracted by anything that does not concern your lunch. Focus on your main activity, feel all the flavors, finally relax and unwind. Your lunch is an island of peace and tranquility among the stormy ocean of the working day.
The squirrels go first. When eating, eat first protein food, and then everything else. Proteins send a signal to your brain that your body is full. This way you will eat exactly as much as you need.
Drink alcohol after meals. If you decide to have a drink or any other drink with dinner, it is better to do it after you have eaten, and not during. Drinking alcohol after meals increases the production of hormones that control appetite and digestion.
And if you decide to drink white wine in the evening, keep in mind that it increases your appetite and the chance that you will want to snack is very high.
