What is the interval between meals? Meal regimen - the third principle of rational nutrition

Fractional meals are the most important tool for burning fat.
You need to eat every three hours. This is not an absolute dogma, but the interval between meals should not be more than 4-4.5 hours.

Of course, you can eat 3 times a day and achieve certain results, but remember that 3 meals a day is a regimen tailored to the working day, which does not mean that such a schedule is ideal. Until you eat 5-6 times a day, you will not be able to spin your metabolism to maximum capacity.

As you remember, food has a thermal effect, i.e. The body spends energy to digest it. If you don't eat anything, then your body has nothing to burn except its muscles and fat. When fasting, fat will burn much slower than muscle. For more information about starvation diets and their consequences, see the articles in the chapter “low-calorie diets”, I think that the information given in it will convince you that it is better not to starve and eat often.

Most The best way stock up on fat - go on a low-calorie, carbohydrate-free diet or fast.
It doesn't take long for the body to adjust to a calorie deficit (4-4.5 hours between meals is enough for the body to turn on the emergency light). If skipping a meal is a “high crime,” then skipping breakfast should be punishable by “death penalty.”

Let's do the math. For example, your last meal was at 7 pm. You woke up at 7 in the morning, you have no appetite, you drank a cup of coffee, ran to work, and only at 12-13 o’clock did you get to the dining room... “and then Ostap got carried away.”
It turns out that the time interval between the last and first meals is 16 hours. During this time you will burn a large number of muscles. In addition, if you eat this way, your evening meal will usually be very large, because the body will already throw all its energy into feeding itself and its fat reserves. full program, because the next day and the next and again you will torture yourself with 16-hour fasts.

Frequent meals are a strategic solution to control appetite. In which case do you think you will eat more? What if the last meal was 7 hours ago or 3 hours ago? Think back to your big dinner and think about why you eat so much? Obviously, the body simply demands its own. Remember strong feeling hunger is the first signal that the body has begun to prepare for storing fat, because. hunger, especially unbearable, is the effect of hormones.

Digestion of food takes from 2 to 2.5 hours. If you eat more often, you will simply pile food on top of previously undigested food. If there were 40 hours in a day, then yes, you would need to add 2-3 meals. 5-6 times is the optimal number of meals, taking into account a 24-hour day.

Get rid of the stereotype that our grandmothers and mothers instilled in us, that we should not suppress our appetite and not eat before meals. The results of a good appetite (which, however, is not an indicator of anything good...) can be very clearly observed in nature in the spring, when people, after hibernation, expose their bellies, gained over the winter, to the sun.

In addition, during one meal, more than 500-550 Kcal in the morning, 300-350 in the afternoon and 250-200 in the evening are not absorbed (the excess goes partly into the toilet, partly into fat). You won't be able to in 1-2 abundant intake food to saturate your body with essential nutrients, and saturate your fat with quality fat cells. A higher calorie intake in the evening is only necessary if you had an intense strength training session in the evening. More on this later.

Conclusion: Eating every 3 hours is necessary in order to maintain a stable and high level metabolism and prevent the use of muscles as fuel, as well as prevent the body from going into emergency economy mode. This is especially true for those who lead active image life and simply necessary for those who engage in serious training.

Visceral therapy, classic massage, spine treatment.

For many people, their diet is regulated by appetite. What is appetite and how to treat it?

The question often arises: how to suppress appetite? It has been shown that fractional meals (5-6 times a day) suppresses the excitation of the food center. In this case, sometimes one apple or a glass of kefir is enough. In order not to stimulate appetite, you should not eat spicy and salty foods and you must completely avoid alcoholic drinks. Alcohol not only poisons the body, but also has a strong, appetite-stimulating effect.

So, increased appetite may be harmful to health, but its complete absence is also undesirable. This often affects young children, whom loving mothers and compassionate grandmothers endlessly stuff with something “tasty.” As a result, the child loses his appetite, and frightened parents, instead of coming to their senses, try to feed him continuously.

Eating with appetite is always a pleasure. It takes time for appetite to develop. Eating breaks are absolutely necessary. IN childhood they should be shorter than in a mature one.

What should these breaks be? How much and what should you eat during a particular meal? In other words, what should an adult’s diet be like? healthy person.

The diet is based on four basic principles.

• Regularity of nutrition
• Divided meals during the day
• Rational range of products
• Physiological distribution of the amount of food according to its intake during the day

Meal times

The main criterion determining given time, is the feeling of hunger. It can be identified by the following sign: when thinking about unattractive food (for example, the image of a piece of stale black bread), saliva appears; at such a moment, the tongue, rather than the stomach, primarily needs food.

You can confuse the feeling of hunger with the following conditions: the stomach “fails”, the stomach “sucks”, cramps occur. All this indicates the unloading of the organ after overflow, the needs of the stomach and the food appetite center (a number of brain structures that coordinate the choice, consumption of food and initial stages digestive processing).

It is necessary to distinguish between the concepts of hunger and appetite when organizing a proper diet. Hunger indicates the need for energy, appetite - the need for pleasure. The surest impulse to eat should be hunger, since the deceptiveness of appetite leads to excess weight.

Number of meals

The frequency of meals or the number of meals affects the metabolism in the body. Factors to consider when determining the frequency of meals:

• age;
• work activity(mental, physical labor);
• state of the human body;
• working day routine.

Benefits of multiple meals (four meals a day):

Approximate meal schedule

A sample meal schedule might look like this:

• 7:00 - First breakfast.
• 10:00 - Second breakfast.
• 13:00 - Lunch.
• 16:00 - Afternoon snack.
• 19:00 - Dinner.

Breakfast- most important technique food. Breakfast should be rich in proteins; you can include, for example, eggs, cottage cheese or other dairy products, and turkey sausages. If you can't do without carbohydrates, include them in your breakfast menu. fresh fruit or some muesli.

Lunch should be light and low carb. If you are not very hungry at this time, still try not to skip breakfast, but limit yourself to a glass of kefir or juice or some fruit.

Dinner should be balanced and include a source of protein (meat, fish or poultry) and some healthy carbohydrates, better only in the form of vegetables or grains. A little healthy fats from olive oil, nuts or avocados will also benefit.

Afternoon snack may include carbohydrates, preferably only in the form of some fruit, porridge or, at worst, a whole grain bun.

Dinner, like lunch, should be complete and well-balanced. After dinner, the so-called “Danger Zone” begins. Eating at this time is caused only psychologically, not physiological hunger. Only the desire to cheer yourself up can draw you to the refrigerator. If you intend to lose weight, never eat in the Danger Zone.

Biorhythm - the secret of a proper nutrition schedule

The secret to a good meal schedule is understanding your mind set. internal clock your body, i.e. what are your biorhythms? Each person has his own specific pace of life and the body’s readiness to eat food is directly related to the time at which a person usually wakes up when he starts eating. active work, when he is resting and, finally, when he is getting ready for bed. If you are used to waking up no earlier than 11 am, you are unlikely to feel the desire to have breakfast at 11:30. However, by lunchtime your appetite will probably be quite good, and by dinner you will definitely arrive without delay. Those who like to watch the sun rise when they rise, on the contrary, have a wonderful appetite in the morning, but they may completely forget about dinner.

Start your day with protein foods. Breakfast should be rich in proteins. This will help you get a sufficient boost of energy and is guaranteed to delay the feeling of hunger until next appointment food. It is believed that it is best to have breakfast no earlier than 8 a.m. and within 1 hour of waking up. If you wake up much earlier than eight in the morning, then drink a glass of water, do exercises, take cold and hot shower, in order to delay breakfast closer to the specified time.

Eat at the same time every 3-4 hours. This will help control your appetite. To organize such fractional meals, you can distribute over time the intake of the set of dishes that you usually eat for lunch, for example. First - salad and first course, after 3 hours have a snack with the second course. Drink during snacks more water. Water removes toxins from the body.

Lunch at lunch is an important point in the meal schedule. It is at lunchtime that you can afford the largest amount of food, because... The average daily peak of gastric acidity is observed in the middle of the day. Lunch should be served before 3 pm.

Have dinner no later than 8 pm. Eating after 8 pm is overwhelming normal function pancreas and blocks the release of melatonin, necessary for sound healthy sleep.

Distribution of calories during the day

Preparing for a new day for the body should begin with a certain supply of energy. To work fully, a person needs calories. That is why the most useful and optimal diet will be one in which our body receives a little more than 70% of the total kilocalories consumed at breakfast and lunch. And less than 30% of the total amount remains for dinner and intermediate snacks. With such a nutritional schedule, a person receives enough strength for his activities without storing excess fat during a rich evening feast.

A gap of 4-5 hours between individual meals will be the most optimal and physiological. And the time from the last meal to bed should be at least three to four hours. Such a diet can replenish the energy costs of our life and control appetite without loading the human system with extra calories.

Compliance with these principles optimal mode nutrition and rational reception food, as well as previous rules healthy food will not only protect your weight from extra pounds, but also keep it from unnecessary problems with stomach and heart disease.

For those who want to lose weight, fractional meals are attractive, first of all, because they do not impose the traditional prohibitions of strict diets. In addition, such a nutrition system does not require special preparation...

The main feature of fractional nutrition is that food must be taken not according to the usual pattern - breakfast, lunch, dinner - but much more often and in small portions. Thus, the time between meals remains not long enough to have time to become very hungry, and when there is no strong hunger, there is no “brutal” appetite, forcing us to overeat or lean on denser and higher-calorie foods. As a result, on fractional meals a person involuntarily begins to consume fewer calories, and, consequently, loses weight. In this article, we will introduce you to the basic rules of fractional nutrition, which will help you transition to a new “gastronomic” regime without harming your stomach and mood. So…

1. You need to eat 5-6 times a day. At the same time, food portions should be small. It has been proven that if you constantly feed the body, you can “indoctrinate” the regulatory system fat metabolism that there is always food, and the body will stop making strategic reserves. The absorption of nutrients is accelerated, and much less is deposited on the waist.

2. Interval between meals. The largest should not exceed 4 hours. The minimum interval must be at least 2.5 hours. If the feeling of hunger appears before the prescribed interval of 2.5 hours, it means previous appointment the food was not nutritious enough - in this case it is necessary to reconsider its quantity and energy value.

3.Eat at the same time. This will help the body digest food as efficiently as possible.

4. Properly distribute daily calories. If you eat six times a day, 25% of calories should be for breakfast and dinner, 35% for lunch, 5% for 3 snacks. If there are five meals a day - every time daily calorie content should be 20%.

5. Drink water. With fractional meals, you need to consume at least 1.5-2 liters of water per day.

6. Do not mix water with food. Water should be drunk either before or after meals. The interval between eating and drinking should be from half an hour to an hour.

7.Preference must be given healthy foods: whole grain bread, dairy products, cereals, fruits, vegetables, fresh meat and fish. Avoid processed foods and sausages.

8. Volume of food. Energy value diet should remain at the level daily requirement. The serving should not exceed the size of a palm or the volume of a glass.

9. Hot breakfast. It's better to start the day with it. Also don't forget about hot food for lunch and dinner. Between hot meals you can have a snack 2-3 times. What is important: morning meals should contain maximum amount carbohydrates from daily value. And during the day and evening you should try to eat foods containing proteins and fiber.

10. Snacks. Ideal foods for snacking: grain bread or crispbread, vegetable and fruit salads, just snacking vegetables and fruits, low-fat cottage cheese, natural sugar-free yogurt, sugar-free cereals and muesli. Chips, chocolates, seeds, and nuts are not suitable for snacking - they contain too much fat.

Proper nutrition. Menu for the week:

DIET

The concept of “dietary regimen” includes: the amount and time of food intake during the day; distribution daily ration according to its energy value, chemical composition, food set and food for breakfast, lunch, etc.; the intervals between meals and, finally, the time spent on it.

The rhythm of nutrition plays an important role in maintaining the normal functioning of the body and its health. The human body is designed in such a way that at a certain time the entire digestive tract prepares itself for food intake and signals about it. A person accustomed to a certain diet can check his watch based on signals from his stomach. If for some reason the next meal does not take place, the body is forced to rebuild, and this entails negative consequences.

At the hour allotted for eating, or some time later, when thinking about food, the stomach begins to receive gastric juice, which has a great digestive capacity, and if at this time there is no food in the stomach, the secreted juice begins to act on the walls of the stomach and duodenum. Frequent violations diets lead to the formation of ulcers, gastritis and other diseases gastrointestinal tract. To avoid such consequences of disruption of normal nutrition, it is recommended to eat something during normal meal hours if it is not possible to eat normally.

Human nutrition is regulated by the central nervous system. This is controlled by the so-called food center (appetite center) in the brain. And for normal and proper operation For this center, proper nutrition is extremely important. You need to eat a certain number of times during the day and at certain, strictly established intervals, if possible correctly distributing food for each meal (both in volume and calorie content, and in the composition of nutrients).

A person who is accustomed to a developed diet begins to feel hungry at a certain time and develops an appetite. But you need to know that hunger and appetite are not the same thing. Hunger is what it is physiological state when the amount of nutrients necessary for the normal functioning of the body ceases to enter the blood. An appetite may appear at the mere sight or even at the memory of delicious food(Although physiological need in a new portion of food in the body in this moment No).

It also happens the other way around - there is no appetite, although the body already needs the next portion of food. Both increased appetite, not caused by physiological necessity, and its absence are painful condition, most often caused by systematic violation of basic nutritional rules. A normal food reflex is developed from childhood, when the body is formed and eating habits (including harmful ones) are formed. You need to know that in children the food center (reflex) is especially easily excited not only by the sight of food, but also by the mention of it.

The question of how many times to eat a day, at what intervals and what caloric amount of food to take during each meal is one of the problems that is carefully studied by specialists. Research by scientists has shown that one-time meals are generally unacceptable: with such nutrition, the human body is under tension, not only does it not work properly digestive system, but also all other systems and organs of the body, especially the nervous system. Eating two meals a day also causes bad feeling. A person with such nutrition experiences severe hunger, and the digestibility of the most important part of the diet - protein, on average, is no more than 75 percent of what enters the body.

With three meals a day, a person feels better, food is eaten with good appetite, and protein digestibility increases to 85 percent. With four meals a day, protein digestibility remains at the same 85 percent level, but a person’s well-being is even better than with three meals a day. In an experiment, scientists proved that with five and six meals a day, appetite worsens and, in some cases, protein digestibility decreases.

Conclusion: for a healthy person, it is most rational to eat 4 times a day; acceptable and Three meals a day. As for therapeutic nutrition for obesity, gastritis, colitis and other diseases, the diet and diet are prescribed by the doctor.

INTERVALS BETWEEN MEALS.

Ideal with physiological point It would be possible to start the next meal only when the digestion of the food eaten at the previous meal is completed. To this we must add that digestive organs like any other organ human body, need periods of rest. And finally, digestion has a certain impact on all processes occurring in the body, including the activity of the central nervous system. The combination of these conditions leads to the fact that for a person accustomed to measured nutrition, it is precisely in right time normal appetite appears.

One of the indicators of the duration of the act of digestion is the time it takes for food to be removed from the stomach. It has been established that when normal operation stomach and other digestive organs, the process of digesting food lasts about 4 hours. Each meal results in more or less pronounced change conditions of the central nervous system. After eating, especially a large one, some apathy sets in, attention decreases, the will relaxes, the person tends to sleep, that is, in the language of a physiologist, conditioned reflex activity decreases. This state of the central nervous system, which occurs immediately after eating, lasts, depending on the abundance of food taken, for an hour or more. Then all these sensations smooth out, and finally, by the end of the fourth hour, the food center comes to normal condition- appetite appears again. And if a person who is accustomed to the regime does not eat in a timely manner, he becomes weak, his attention decreases, and his performance decreases. Moreover, in the future, appetite may disappear. If you are systematically late with food or eat on full stomach, the normal activity of the digestive glands is disrupted, digestion is upset. A longer period between meals occurs during the period of night sleep, but it should not exceed 10-11 hours. General rule is the following: the intervals between small meals can be short (2-3 hours), but eating earlier than 2 hours after the previous meal is not advisable. On average, breaks between meals should be 4-5 hours.

Great importance has a distribution of daily food intake, that is, menu preparation. This combines issues of food quantity, its quality composition and consistency in taking individual dishes.

Total The food consumed by a person per day, together with liquid dishes and drinks, averages about 3 kilograms. Breakfast is the first meal after sleep. During a night's sleep, everything eaten the day before was digested, all organs of the body, including the digestive ones, rested and were created. favorable conditions for their further work. Scientists involved in nutrition issues are unanimous that it is necessary to have breakfast, regardless of physical or mental activity a person is engaged. We can only talk about what part of the diet should contain breakfast.

It is believed that if a person is engaged in physical labor, then breakfast should contain approximately 1/3 daily ration both in terms of volume and nutritional value. If a person of physical labor eats a small amount and nutritional value breakfast or even worse - starts work on an empty stomach, then he cannot work at full load, and his performance drops significantly. Now it has become fashionable, especially among workers mental work, limit yourself to a cup of coffee or tea for breakfast. They refer to lack of time and appetite. Both are the result wrong image life, general regime, including diet. Putting things in order in your diet (as, indeed, in your entire lifestyle) is entirely within the power of a person, and anyone who wants to can overcome the bad habit of eating poorly, and by the way, give up bad habits, such as alcohol abuse and smoking.

Summarizing the above, I would like to draw attention to the fact that thinkers of the past already associated moderation in food not only with human health, but also with his moral state. The ancient Roman philosopher Rufus Musonius believed that “our duty is to eat for life, and not for pleasure, if only we want to follow the beautiful saying of Socrates that while most people live in order to eat, he, Socrates, eats in order to live." Socrates himself expressed his attitude to nutrition as follows: “Beware of all food and drink that would encourage you to eat Furthermore, as much as your hunger and thirst require.”

Scientists say that the basis of most diseases modern man lies poor nutrition. And the habit of it is laid in the family. Knowledge of principles rational nutrition and strict adherence to them in practice will ensure all family members good health and good spirits, the opportunity to live a full, interesting life.