Does Eating Smaller Meals More Often Help you Lose Fat?

Dieters are frequently advised to eat smaller but, more frequently meals based on the fact that this will maintain more even blood glucose levels by avoiding peaks in hormones such as insulin that lower blood glucose. This is significant because if your blend sugar levels drop too low, you'll get overly hungry and find it overwhelmingly difficult to stay on a diet. Eating smaller, more frequent also appears have beneficial effects in lowering blood cholesterol levels, and some experts contend that it increases the efficiency of nutrient uptake.

For example; taking in too much protein at one meal may overwhelm your body's protein digestion and assimilation processes. This could lead to protein degradation in the liver, followed by conversion of amino acids to glucose, which is either burned as energy or stored as fat.

Eating larger meals may increased release of insulin, and insulin promotes fat synthesis by stimulating the fat cell enzyme, lipoprotein ilpase. Even so, there is no existing research to show a superiority of smaller, more frequent meals over larger, infrequent meals in preventing fat synthesis in the body.

A recent study that compared the effects of three vs. six meals a day showed no increase in bodyfat. As expected insulin levels rose higher after the subjects ate larger meals, but that didn't seem to foster increased bodyfat. The researchers concluded that bodyfat is only increased during ideal conditions of hormone and substrate availability.

In short, you only get fat if you consume calories in excess of the amount you use whether you eat frequently or infrequently doesn't matter, although missing meals will promote hunger, which, inturn, will probably lead 'to your eating excess' calories, thus promoting increased bodyfat.