One of the most important keys to building muscle, losing body fat, and feeling energetic throughout the day is controlling your metabolism. Metabolism is the rate at which the nutrients in your food are processed once eaten. Those nutrients will be absorbed and assimilated into the body, converted and used for energy, or excreted as waste.
Build Muscle – Burn Fat
Eating meals throughout the day at specific times helps you engineer a more efficient, smoother running metabolism. If you can increase the efficiency of your metabolism, you will have a better chance of packing on more muscle and fending off more body fat over time. The “mass” you eat will have a better chance to turn into “mass” on your body in the form of high-quality muscle instead of fat.
Famine Defense Mechanism
The human body’s “famine defense mechanism” (what it does to avoid dying in the event there’s a long period without food) is to hold on to some body fat and keep it as a safety reserve at all times. If you can increase the efficiency of your metabolism, your body will become conditioned to lower levels of body fat. Think of your body telling itself, “I get fed so well, and on a consistent basis, I don’t need to carry around this extra body fat. I won’t ever need it!”
Depending on how efficiently you feed the body, you will either increase its metabolic rate to supply you with more energy throughout your day or slow it down to conserve what little energy it has left. And if your body isn’t supplied with a steady stream of nutrients to use as energy, it will start shutting itself down, by giving your body less and less energy to work with. Your body uses this built-in safety mechanism to keep itself alive.
Whatever challenges your regular life or job schedule may create, a workable eating plan is indeed possible. You just need to make sure you begin each day with a specific plan-of-attack for the times you will eat each day.
Not Feeling Hungry?
If you are not feeling hungry when it’s time to eat your scheduled meal, it does not necessarily mean that you are eating too much food. When many people begin a well-structured diet consisting of the proper amount of calories, they often feel like they are eating too much food. Many times when you haven’t eaten enough food to meet your body’s requirements, your metabolism begins to run less efficiently. As a defense mechanism against depleting itself, your metabolism will slow down to match the amount of food you are eating.
Persistence
Stick with your regimen of eating 5 to 7 meals a day as you have intelligently planned. It may take a couple of weeks for your metabolism to speed up to the efficiency it should be operating at to meet your training goals. If you are persistent with your nutrition plan, your metabolism will eventually adjust to the increase in food that you are eating. The amount of food you are eating may make you feel full right now, but it will soon feel like it’s not enough food. You’ll actually be hungry and anticipate when you get to eat your next scheduled meal.
