The Hunger Games
Many years back the release of a movie trilogy with a haunting name, The Hunger Games, caught the attention of movie goers young and old. I recall thinking about the movie’s thought-provoking title one day while eating breakfast and grinned to myself because it dawned on me that there was nothing new about “the hunger games”—people have been playing that game for decades!
The game begins like this: You want to lose some weight and one way to do that is to cut down on calorie intake. So, you skip an entire meal—say breakfast—happy about all those calories which’ll never get to pass from your lips to your hips!
Unfortunately, meal skipping can have the reverse effect on weight loss.
Your metabolism can be likened to a campfire. At night, while you sleep (and fast), your metabolic “fire” burns way down until all that’s left is “glowing embers”. In the morning, you were designed to begin to stir up those embers by breaking your nighttime fast with break-fast. By fueling your body in the early part of the day, you place “kindling”, if you will, on those hot embers enabling your daily metabolic fire to roar back to life. With a food-stoked metabolic fire ablaze, subsequent meals and (hopefully healthy) snacks can be readily burned.
However, if you skip breakfast altogether in lieu of some later-in-the-day fueling, it’s similar to placing full-sized logs on top of glowing embers—the burn potential is poor. Your body, which believes it’s in starvation mode, has a tendency to store away ingested calories as fat to be used for anticipated “calorie emergencies”—which in our culture, never actually come.
The best way not to play a role in your own metabolic Hunger Games is to eat three, moderately sized, nutritionally sound meals and two small, blood sugar stabilizing snacks in between.
How to Lose Weight by Eating More…now, that sounds like it could be a best-selling book!