Little and often the way to go

A good tip for healthy eating is to split your meals into smaller portions and eat more often. Try to eat every two and a half to three hours and eat 5 to 6 small meals a day.

Remember this is not an excuse to eat more than usual you need to break down your daily intake over the more frequent mealtimes.

The key to this is metabolism. Your metabolism is the rate at which your body uses energy or calories in order for your body to function. Everybody has an individual metabolic rate ( some have a naturally fast metabolism and are people who can eat quite a lot and not seem to put on weight, others have a slow metabolism and put on weight easily).

Metabolic rate is directly affected by food intake, when you eat your body's digestive system etc kicks into action to turn the food into energy. When we have large gaps between meals the rate slows down in-between whilst not digesting food, thus burning less energy. By eating little and often and reducing time between meals you are able to keep your body's automatic functions like digestion going more constantly using more energy whilst processing the food.

Therefore, if you eat the same amount of food but over more frequent smaller meals your body will use more energy to do this which should result in burning off more calories without actually changing the content of your diet.

It may be that you need to change what you eat as well to make your diet healthier and to achieve a goal of weight-loss or toning but this approach will form a good basis on which to build.

Another benefit is that more regular eating will help to regulate blood sugar levels reducing peaks and troughs which tend to lead us to hunger pangs and binge eating.

Small meals are important as the body can only digest so much food in one sitting, any additional food will either be discarded as waste or stored as fat another reason for little and often.

5 to 6 meals per day, every 2.5 to 3 hours.....

Call in the gym and ask Jon about his campfire theory.......it works!!

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