I'm not sure why I'm thinking about this today, but I felt compelled to explain why one of the most common eating habits that people have is ALL WRONG. I am referring to the tendency to eat tiny little meals for breakfast and lunch and then eat a big, multi-course dinner at 8:00 at night and then go to bed 2 hours later.
When you think about it, it just doesn't make any sense. When you wake up in the morning, you've been fasting for at least 8-10 hours and you're getting ready to start a whole day's worth of activity. Why would you think that what your body needs is just a cup of coffee? Even if you eat breakfast, you're probably eating something like a yogurt, a granola bar, bowl of cereal, bagel, donut, or some other carbolicious 3-bites-and-it's-gone food. For one thing, most of these popular breakfast items are not enough calories. Yup, you read that correctly. NOT ENOUGH. Secondly, they also happen to be high in carbohydrates and/or refined sugar but low in protein, healthy fats, and often fiber. These are the things that give you lasting energy and make you feel full.
For many people, this starvation continues through lunch, where typical choices include salad, soup, sandwiches and other "light" fare. After all, we don't want to blow all of our calories by mid-day do we?
Then 3:00 hits. And the munchies start to set in. The next thing you know, you're grabbing whatever junky snack you can out of the vending machine and wondering how you'll ever stick to a diet when they all make you so hungry!
When dinner rolls around, the only "real" meal most people eat all day, it's a big production: big portions of meat, starch, and sometimes a veggie (like a salad drowned in a few hundred calories' worth of dressing. And of course, you have to save room for dessert. Now having eaten all of those calories, you do the only reasonable thing: go to sleep.
Does this seem backwards to anyone else but me??? Your body needs the most energy in the morning, not in the evening. Accordingly, breakfast should be the biggest meal of the day. Lunch should be moderate in size but still pretty hearty and dinner should bear closer resemblance to a snack than a holiday feast. I realize this is a difficult concept for people to grasp. Most of us have grown up eating this way and it has become part of our culture. But starving all day and binging at night is a recipe for weight gain. And if you try to lose weight while maintaining this habit, you will set yourself up for struggle and failure.
