Don’t Forget to Take Proper Meal Breaks

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Cutting meals entirely does more harm than good.

When you want to try and lose some weight, what’s the first thing you usually think to do? Eat less food, right? Sure, if you think you’ve been overindulging in certain foods, dialing back a bit wouldn’t hurt. However, the one thing you absolutely should not do is cut meals out of your life entirely. Not only is that just kind of a miserable way to live, but it’ll likely hamper your efforts to lose weight more than help them.

Your body’s metabolic processes are constantly firing off in the background, and it’s through those metabolic processes that you burn off calories and weight. The thing is, though, your metabolism is, for lack of a better metaphor, kind of like a wood chipper. If you don’t put any wood in the top, it won’t shred whatever’s already in there. Your body needs to consume food to keep your metabolism firing at full strength; if you cut out entire meals, your metabolism will go dormant for long stretches of time, leaving whatever calories are already in your body to just sit there and take up space. When you finally do start eating again, it takes time for your metabolism to warm back up, so you might not burn off the calories you take in as quickly as you would if you hadn’t skipped that meal.

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In addition to that, skipping meals can throw your body’s hunger signals out of wack. If you skip an entire meal, you’re just going to be hungrier later, and when you finally eat, you have a much higher risk of overindulging yourself. You can try to forcefully push down those signals, but then you’ll just become crabby and irritable. Like I said, eating less is perfectly fine. It’s when you start eating nothing that you’re putting yourself at risk.