Tip 5 of 101 Tips to lose fat and get lean: never skip a meal
Resist the temptation to accelerate your fat loss program by skipping meals. It doesn’t work and in the long run it is highly counterproductive.
The best way to lose fat and get as lean as possible is to plan ahead, prepare your meals and know what you are going to eat ahead of time. Yes this is “inconvenient”, and many of our personal training clients initially complain but once their fat loss results start to come through they soon realise that meal preparation is key to successful body composition improvements.
Those who skip meals tend to suffer for a number of reasons:
1) Skipping meals means you are far more likely to experience low blood sugar symptoms and the inevitable carbohydrate cravings that go with it. This makes a blowout binge eating session all the more likely. Trust me in this, we have all been there and it sure isn’t pretty!
2) Your body requires the right nutrients at the right time. Even if you are not at all concerned with building muscle, protein should be of primary importance and I have found that eating some protein (the amount is hugely dependent upon your activity levels, specific goals, and current muscle mass) every 2-3 hours makes an enormous difference to losing body FAT as opposed to just bodyweight. The distinction between losing fat and weight is a very significant one as losing the latter almost always involves losing muscle. This is a terrible thing to do if you want your actual fat loss to be permanent as muscle is the most metabolically efficient cellular substance in the body and the more we have the faster our metabolisms are. Our muscles need regular supplies of protein to maintain themselves, especially when we are in a hypocalorific state (as when we “diet” to lose weight / fat), so regular protein feedings are essential to your long term fat loss success.
