Personal trainers tell us many times that we should eat every two hours to burn fat and gain muscle. But how true is it?
According to personal trainers:
If you eat little every 2-3 hours your metabolism "will burn" stronger and constantly your body burn more fat.
If you eat every 2-3 hours will not go hungry, causing the body to burn fat because it believes that there is no lack of food and nothing happens if you burn your fat.
sugar levels and insulin levels remain more standardized, causing the body to burn fat.
Before continuing I want to clarify some things.
1) I am not a doctor, I am final year student of physical preparation.
2) everything that I share is a compilation of what has been learned in my four years of study.
3) all based on scientific evidence, you can check the studies conducted at the end of the post.
I say you do not need to eat 5 or 6 times a day to get a good body.
It is true that the digestion and assimilation of foods cause an increase in our metabolism (called "thermal effect of food") and can be up to 10% of all energy consumed the body daily.
However, this effect has to do with the amount and type of food you eat, not the frequency.
The belief was created based on some studies on the thermal effect of food, only digest 10% of ingested calories spent, so the more often you eat and digests do more calories will spend ¿ true? false! let's look at an example.
Person A: 6 meals of 300 calories is 1800 calories you expend in digestions 10% = 180 calories.
Person B: 3 meals of 600 calories is 1800 calories you expend in digestions 10% = 180 calories
Conclusion: a same number of calories NO DIFFERENCE.
In 2010 in the British Journal of Nutrition they published a study showing that the same number of calories consumed no increase in weight loss between those who ate 6 times a day with those who ate 3 times a day. Science rules!
Who invented the myth forgot hormones, our body is designed to release insulin in large amounts every 2 to 3 times a day then every time you eat you force yourself to secrete insulin, this often creates the ideal environment for resistance insulin and can result in diabetes do not you believe me?
Look: http://www.endocrineweb.com/conditions/type-1-diabetes/what-insulin
It accounts much what you eat. Not the same eating fat is easy to process and has little impact on metabolism, which consume protein requiring greater waste of energy to be processed.
Also a study (http://www.foodandnutritionresearch.net/index.php/fnr/article/viewArticle/5144/5755) showed that meals of highly processed foods make decay thermal effect of food to less than 5 % because they are for the most part easily assimilated sugars.
Proving that if you make a mistake when choosing your meals, instead of losing weight and gaining weight'll decrease your metabolism.
conclusion
Eat 5-6 times a day really adds no significant effect to the body when you lose fat or increase your metabolism compared to eating in a normal way (3 times daily).
the important thing is to pay attention to the quality and quantity of what you eat
Scientific studies:
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/8383639
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19943985
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18053311
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/1905998
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19566598