Timing in Meal Planning




An average American eats an average 3.12 meals a day. Is it enough? How does meal timing affect one's body weight and general health? How does it influence one's appetite and muscle mass?

We implement several different meal planning techniques in our 92.34% successful Fat Burning Index™Diet. We do all the calculations, you eat all you want!

Meal planning while on a low carb diet

We all wake up in deep ketosis independently of our diet: low fat, low carb, or no diet at all. Even before breakfast, just by the mere fact of being awake and getting ready for our morning routine, our bodies start producing glucose using carb depots (if they are still there and not used up by a prolonged low carb diet.)

As glucose level in the blood increases, ketone bodies' level decreases because these two are deadly antagonists. You see, even the anticipation of breakfast works against ketosis, the real breakfast much more so, and a breakfast including sweeteners is almost as bad as breakfast with real bread and sugar.

As ketone level decreases, so does their appetite-fighting effect. As a result, you'll eat more during your next meal. However, if you indulge in tasty foods and sweetened desserts during your last meal, you don't have much time for overeating. This is why the Carbohydrate Addict Diet limit the last meal duration by 1 hour.

If however you find yourself hungry late in the evening, it's a signal that you've overindulged in tasty foods and you might want to reconsider your priorities. Ask yourself: what's more important - enjoing a tasty meal or suffering the consequences.
Today, let's discuss a conventional diet "no-no" which is considered one of the worst diet heresies: Skipping Breakfasts. In our experience, it does the trick after a cheating day or when you temporarily stall. Some of our dieters do this regularly, often twice a week, and some do this even every day.
Why is breakfast called the most important part of the day to start with? This is the most typical among *reasonable* explanations:

"By the time you awaken, 12 hours or more have passed
since your last meal. As a result, your supply of
blood sugar has dropped to a near-low point. So you
need food to produce a steady stream of glucose to
fuel every cell in your body. "

But wait a minute! This is exactly what we are
trying to avoid on any low carb diet! Low carbers
are not relying on glucose for fuel, we use ketone
bodies instead, and this fuel is most abundant exactly
in the morning.

Look at this picture: (if you can't see the picture, view it at:
https://dietandbody.com/pics/ketones.jpg)



Any breakfasts, not only the ones rich in
carbohydrates, quickly reverse the picture: glucose
rises and ketones fall. For the lucky ones among us
that is more or less OK, but for many of us it is not good --
because of the insulin resistance or
exaggerated response to the taste of any food, or for
some other reasons. The fact is, skipping breakfast
does wonders in many tough cases of stalled weight
loss.

There are at least two famous health
systems known to me that employed this principle: one of them is
Paul Bragg's (check it out at bragg.com) and another
is the Dr. Shatalova's Very Low Calorie Diet (it's free: click here).

One more success story is that of Rachael Heller, the author of "The
Carbohydrate Addict's Diet: The Lifelong Solution to
Yo-Yo Dieting." Skipping breakfast just once, by
accident, she discovered a way to fight her
carbohydrate addiction.

Is there a concensus about timing and meal frequences? Looks like there is not.

Ever thought what makes you start and finish eating? Right, hunger makes you start and feeling full makes you stop. But how about breakfast? They say it's the most important part of your meal plan and you eat it just for the sake of it. How about snacking, should you have snacks? How often? Don't we take for granted that skipping breakfasts and having two square meals a day is bad for you? Bad for what exactly? Let's see if there's any rationale behind.

Studies have demonstrated that a good breakfast is usually associated with an improvement in mental tasks performance later in the morning, while lunch does exactly the opposite, plus it has rather negative effects on mood. Late in the afternoon, meals appear to have a positive effect on tasks involving sustained attention or memory. (British Journal of Nutrition. 77 Suppl 1:S105-18, 1997)

Recently, researchers in Johannesburg, South Africa, reported that frequent meals reduced appetite by 27%! This is how they figured it out. One group of healthy overweight men had a big breakfast, then next meal only after 5 hours when they had nothing to eat. Another group ate the same amount of same food but divided in 5 hourly meals. Guess who ate more when after these 5 hours they had an "all you can eat" meal? Yes, the gorgers did. What's more, compared to them, the nibblers had much more favorable insulin and blood glucose profiles. (International Journal of Obesity & Related Metabolic Disorders. 23(11):1151-9, 1999).

These favorable blood readings can explain the fact that more frequent meals can be protective against cardiovascular diseases. For example, in the Department of Vascular Surgery, Charing Cross Hospital, London, doctors investigated how habitual meal frequency influenced atherosclerosis. After they made the necessary adjustment for 120 patients' age, sex, smoking, diabetes, blood pressure, and body mass index, the odds for peripheral arterial disease among those eating between meals (grazing) compared with those who did not, was 1:2. (Journal of Cardiovascular Risk. 6(1):19-22, 1999)

Now, how about weight loss? Scandinavian researchers reported that competitive boxers who tried to lose weight by reducing their calorie intake, lost same amount of body weight, but it was mostly lean body mass loss in those who had their ration in two square meals compared with those who had 6 meals a day. (Scandinavian Journal of Medicine & Science in Sports. 6(5):265-72, 1996)

To tell you the truth, while dieticians and nutritionists seem to adopt the "nibbling versus gorging" model of daily meal planning, not all doctors agree with it. Many diet reviewers concluded that there's no sufficient long term studies proving the benefits of "nibbling". For example, Nutrition Research Group, University of Surrey, UK, did not confirm that nibbling is beneficial in reducing the concentrations of lipid and hormones on the long run. (European Journal of Clinical Nutrition. 50(8):491-7, 1996).

There can more to this if we look into cancer risks studies. There are many clinical reports about higher risk of many cancers of stomach and intestines in people who are used to eat more meals during the day for many years. For example, a higher daily meal frequency was responsible for 13% of 3350 cases of colorectal cancer in Northern Italy, as reported by National Tumor Institute, Milan, Italy.

It is interesting, that intake of more than two cups of coffee a day had a protective effect against cancer (Nutrition & Cancer. 30(3):182-5, 1998) thus providing a simple measure to counterpart the negative effect while keeping the possible benefits of frequent meals.


We implement several different meal planning techniques in our (92.34% successful! Fat Burning Index™Diet. We do all the calculations, you eat all you want!