Turn Up Your Furnace

Let's get that metabolic fire going by eating more!  It sounds like an oxymoron but eating more, and especially more often, does help you lose weight.  Fat weight. 

How?  By a wonderful process called "Thermogenesis." 

First, I'm going to get all scientific: Thermogenesis is when the body produces heat so that fat is burned for energy. A substance (food or supplement) that stimulates thermogenesis is called a thermogenic activator.  

So the body produces heat - energy.  Eating and the act of digestion stimulate thermogenesis. The act of digestion takes energy and therefore burn calories, which is also known as the "thermogenic effect of food."  It accounts for 5%-10% of your metabolism.  This is one big reason that starvation diets do NOT work - your body isn't processing food, so it isn't burning up those calories. 

No Food=No Fuel=No Weight Loss

It makes sense - if you are eating more often, your body is digesting more often.  Which means more energy is being consumed and produced.  Now, this doesn't mean you should be eating more total calories than you usually would (this is a very important point!). 

What it does mean is dividing those calories up into similarly sized meals that you eat every 2 1/2-3 hours.  And never going more than 3 hours without eating a healthy, balanced meal including protein and healthy carbs/fat.

A study published in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition (2005) looked at the effects of regular meal frequency on fat burning, insulin sensitivity, and cholesterol in otherwise healthy obese women.  The researchers compared people who ate small, regular, frequent meals (about 6 a day) to people who ate less regularly.

• The people who ate regular meal patterns had increased thermogenesis.
  
  
• The people who ate more erratically (skipping breakfast, going many hours between meals, etc. ) showed a lower calorie-burning effect and more fat storage.  They had higher cholesterol and insulin levels (which triggers more fat storage).  

What you can do to Increase Thermogenesis

• Drink Green Tea (2 cups per day)
  
  
• Have Protein (up to 30% of the calories in protein are burned in the digestive process) with every meal
  
  
• Eat a balanced, complete meal every 3 hours.  Some simple ideas for this include an apple with peanut butter, yogurt with fruit, wrap with beans, cheese and salsa, oatmeal made with milk, salad with tuna, chicken or tofu mixed in.  Stop thinking in terms of "meals" and "snacks" and treat everything like a meal.  You're less apt to scrimp on the nutrients if you reprogram your mind to approach every 3-hour meal time as a meal.
  
  
• Get one hour of exercise in 6 days per week, including both strength and cardio training.  Muscles burn more calories than fat.
  
  
• Eat less refined foods - Refined foods are in a sense already partly digested and speed sugars and fats directly into your blood stream. This lowers the metabolism. Whole foods take longer to digest. One example is oatmeal.  Steel cut oats, which are less refined, take much longer to digest than instant oatmeal.  The Weight Watchers Core plan focuses on these types of foods.
  
  
• Eat more fibrous veggies and beans - Low glycemic carbohydrates are ones that take the body longer to metabolize. (Examples -  celery and broccoli and all of the beans in the legume family)