(This is Part 15 of a series. Go back to Part 14.)
4. Eat three meals a day.
The most important meal of the day is breakfast. People sometimes skip breakfast in the belief that they will eat fewer calories overall, but the effect is just the opposite: A skipped breakfast tends to lead to snacking and larger portions at lunch and dinner.
For example, researchers in Great Britain compared three breakfasts: a) bacon and eggs with toast; b) croissants with margarine and jam; c) bran cereal with sliced banana.
The first two breakfasts, they discovered, had no staying power. The volunteers got hungry again by mid-morning, dipped into snacks and ate hefty portions at lunch. And the third breakfast? It resulted in almost a thousand fewer calories being eaten during the day.
The best breakfasts are ones that are high in fiber, low in GI and low in fat. As mentioned earlier, fresh fruit plus oat or bran cereal is ideal. Or beans and toast (or tortillas), found in many cultures, is also a good choice.
It is also important not to skip lunch or dinner. This is sometimes done, again, in the mistaken belief that it will reduce the total intake of calories. And/or portion sizes are sometimes reduced for the same reason. In reducing weight it is sometimes thought a virtue to go hungry.
Research has decisively proven the opposite: When a meal is skipped or the meal contains too few calories the bloodsugar level falls and the alarm reaction of stress is set off within the body. Hunger and anxiety both rise. In addition, dieting causes leptin levels to fall, decreasing metabolism and increasing appetite.
Thus, when we skip a meal or eat too little at one we are the most vulnerable to snacking, bingeing or overeating at the next meal. This is why diets don't work. This doesn't mean, of course, to fill up on high-fat or refined foods; that doesn't work either.
Fundamentally, it is not a matter of how much we eat; it is a
matter of what we eat. If we eat three meals of a natural high-fiber, low-GI, low-fat diet, we can eat to satisfaction and yet our body will naturally take us to our ideal weight and keep us there.
Moreover, we won't be hungry, we'll feel calmer, we'll have more energy and we'll be far less likely to incur the degenerative diseases now plaguing developed societies. Not a bad deal, I'd say.
When we habitually fall for the lure of "easy calories"—that is, calorie-dense foods—we seem to have hit the jackpot. Our hamburgers, cheese pizzas, white-flour pastas, chips and chocolate cakes all taste great. Food technologists have been hard at work designing high-fat, high-sugar, high-salt taste sensations. But that is only the primary effect, the surface effect.
The secondary, longer-lasting effect is that we gradually come down with conditions—the obesity, the cancer, the strokes and heart disease, the diabetes, the arthritis, the osteoporosis, the gastrointestinal diseases and on and on—that we lament. But it doesn't have to be that way.
Though exercise, sleep and rest, emotional poise and so on are important adjuncts, careful studies have shown that diet is by far the single most decisive factor in our long-term physical health and well-being. It makes sense; in our food we ingest 1.5 pounds of chemicals every day.
A diet of "fruits, greens, grains and beans"—or for the more adventurous, a fruitarian diet—addresses not just the symptoms of these degenerative and prevalent diseases, but far more crucially, the predominant cause of them.
(This is the end of Part 15. Go to Part 16.)
—jim sloman, 9.30.04 for Dec 8
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