Snacking

Nearly all diet books these days recommend five or six small meals a day or three meals and two or three snacks. Supposedly, this is to regulate appetite by keeping blood sugar constant.

I don’t know about anyone else, but I find that eating every few hours actually makes me *hungrier* resulting in more food eaten in a day.¹ Here’s a graph of typical post-prandial blood glucose fluctuations on a three meal a day plan:

When your blood glucose gets low, your body will try to make some from your fat (these would be ketones from lipolysis). Unless you’re trying to put on fat, this is a *good* thing. Even if you’re not eating carbohydrates, you still won’t reach into your fat stores if you’re taking in enough fuel during your snacks and meals. If I were conspiracy minded, I’d suggest that diet authors who call for all this snacking are just trying cause failure and make sure you need their next diet book!

In short: Americans seem to eat constantly. We also seem to be getting fatter. Maybe these two things are connected.

Here’s a terrific quote from The Leptin Diet by Byron Richards:

The advice to eat five to six small meals a day or to snack between meals to maintain a steady blood sugar level and keep metabolism “stoked with food” is among the worst advice possible. It boggles the mind that a majority of doctors, dieticians, nutritionists, and fitness instructors promote this absurd approach to energy management. It is as if someone started a bad rumor and everyone accepted it as a truth. If a person does lose weight eating this way, it is usually because he or she is eating fewer calories in total than before. This may “work” for a few weeks, until leptin levels readjust to the new level of calorie intake and slow down metabolism. However, this eating strategy inhibits normal fat burning by interfering with the proper function of leptin and insulin.

There are several diets that prohibit snacking, but they are not in the majority. First, there are plans mostly about fasting: The Fast-5 Diet, The Warrior Diet, and Eat Stop Eat.

More traditional ideas can be found in The No-S Diet and The Leptin Diet (quoted above). These give advice more like what you’d get from your grandmother. The No-S Diet takes a simple, logical approach in that it doesn’t really talk about the science at all.

The Leptin Diet covers a lot of science and is about mostly about inflammation and hormones. It has no meal plans or food lists. Here are the basic rules:

• Never eat after dinner. Allow 11 to 12 hours between dinner and breakfast, and finish eating dinner at least three hours before bed.
• Eat three meals a day. Allow five to six hours between meals and do not snack. Snacking causes leptin to malfunction.
• Do not eat large meals. Eat slowly and stop eating a meal when you are slightly less than full. Consistently eating large meals is the easiest way there is to poison your body with food.
• Eat a breakfast containing protein. Your metabolism can increase by 30 percent after a high-protein meal. A high carb meal such as cereal or a bagel will increase your metabolism only by four percent.
• Reduce the amount of carbohydrates eaten.

While poking around on the web for info about The Leptin Diet, I saw a lot of people (incidentally, all were women) saying that it was too hard or totally unrealistic to not eat for five or six hours or to let 11 to 12 hours pass between dinner and breakfast. I find that totally baffling. Why is that so hard? If you really can’t go that long without eating, you either aren’t eating enough at meals, or your meal choices simply don’t have enough nutrients.

Of course, I’m also confused by people who can’t manage to eat protein at breakfast or can’t stomach breakfast at all.

While writing this entry, I read an entry on the Fat Head blog. Check out this hilarious take on energy balance from Tom Naughton’s blog.

¹This was one of the problems I had with Gundry’s Diet Evolution – the nut snacks were just keeping my appetite up all the time. I can eat nuts at meals, and I do just fine with them. If I eat them between meals…I get hungrier and eat more at meals. In the case of that diet, I was eating a *lot* more green vegetables and possibly making other choices that involved eating more. While more vegetables seems like a good thing, it really is possible to eat too much of them. It’s a lot for your system to deal with, if you eat enough of them. I also seemed to discover that some vegetables cause inflammation for me, but enough about my adventures with broccoli for the moment – inflammation is a subject I’ll be covering in the future.