It turns out we were doing it all wrong! Study: Eating more small meals can help you lose weight

In the calorie myth article before the One Minute Fitness class, a reader asked a very critical question: "Can eating small and frequent meals reduce insulin secretion?" The bodybuilding community has always believed that eating small and frequent meals can avoid overeating, keep blood sugar and insulin stable, and more importantly: it can help burn fat. Scott used to be a believer in eating small, frequent meals, but unfortunately it was too difficult to carry four or five lunch boxes to work in the hospital, so he never put it into practice (sigh).

But like all scientific theories, the concept of eating small, frequent meals has been severely challenged in recent years. Some studies have found that "eating more small meals" and compressing the daily eating time to a few hours, which is the "intermittent fasting method" that some readers may have heard of, may help people eliminate excess body fat, improve metabolic indicators, and even reverse diabetes.

In the animal research shared today, Scott wants to take everyone to see the effects of "larger portions and smaller meals".

(To avoid misunderstanding, intermittent fasting can be translated into plain language as "not eating at certain times", not "not eating at all" or "eating less". For example, not eating from 8pm to 8am every day, not eating for 24 hours a week, or randomly skipping a meal can all be called intermittent fasting.)

The All-You-Can-Eat Hell of Little Mouse

Imagine if you were kept in a cell with an endless supply of fried chicken, French fries and Coke. Would it be heaven or hell? That’s exactly what today’s experiment does. The study fed 392 laboratory mice an "unlimited" high-fat, high-sugar diet that was "prone to obesity."

The mice were divided into 24-hour groups based on the different meal times: the unlimited fattening "hell" also had unlimited supply, but was only open 15 hours a day. At other times, there is an unlimited supply of food, but it is only open 9 hours a day.

Regardless of whether it was 24 hours or 9 hours, the three groups of mice all consumed similar amounts of calories in the end. This shows that the mice in the 9-hour group also knew that they could not lose money by eating to their heart's content. When the research results came out, everyone was shocked! The weight changes of the three groups of mice were surprisingly different!

(Although the quality and quantity of food eaten were the same, restricting daily eating time significantly mitigated the effects of a high-fat, high-sugar diet on mice)

This group of creative researchers also let the mice imitate the human schedule, eating regularly from Monday to Friday (with only nine hours of eating time on work days), and eating as much as they wanted on Saturdays and Sundays (on weekends, they can have a 24-hour marathon meal with friends and eat as much as they want).

(The two groups ate the same number of calories, but the mice that intermittently fasted Monday through Friday gained 29% more weight, while the mice that had 24-hour unlimited food gained 64%.)

If the mice were already fat, would intermittent fasting help them? Of course!

(The obese mice that switched to intermittent fasting lost 11% of their body weight. The mice that maintained their original diet gained 12% of their body weight.)

In this study, we saw the bloody fact: after adjusting the eating time, although the mice ate the same calories, their weight changes were very different! Not only are all calories not created equal, but when you eat them also matters!

In addition to reducing weight, it can also improve health!

In addition to keeping body weight low, intermittent fasting allowed mice on an unhealthy diet to:

1. Maintain muscle mass but lose body fat.

2. Reduce inflammation in the body.

3. Increase insulin sensitivity (this should not be too surprising to loyal readers of One Minute).

4. Lower blood cholesterol.

5. Better body coordination and endurance.

Study limitations

Okay, now that we have finished talking about the surprising findings of this study, let’s also balance the report by reporting on the shortcomings of this study!

1. The physiological mechanisms of mice and humans are very different, and research findings in mice may not be applicable to humans. For example, mice will gain weight when they eat a high-fat diet, but humans may not.

2. This study deliberately fed mice an "unhealthy" diet to see if intermittent fasting had a protective effect. However, the effectiveness of intermittent fasting in the context of a "healthy" diet cannot be inferred from this study.

3. Current human research cannot draw a "definitive" conclusion to tell us that intermittent fasting is definitely better than the traditional three meals: Scott hopes that there will be better research in the future to give us the answer.

Also, a very important point!

★If you are a diabetic or end-stage liver disease patient and want to try fasting, you must consult a doctor first. These two groups are particularly vulnerable to the dangerous effects of low blood sugar.

Conclusion

At first glance, intermittent fasting may sound extreme and abnormal, and it may even sound like an unscrupulous businessman trying to fool the public. In fact, for a normal person who eats dinner at five o'clock and breakfast at eight o'clock, he is doing intermittent fasting for up to 15 hours every day. (Besides, you can’t make money by asking people not to eat. There is absolutely no fraud in this, please rest assured, dear readers.)

Scott speculates that the idea that eating late-night snacks can make you fat may not necessarily be blamed on late-night eating itself. On the contrary, it may be because the quality of the midnight snack is low (chicken steak, bubble tea...), and it breaks the original "intermittent fasting", which makes people fat so easily.

In fact, intermittent fasting is probably the natural eating pattern of humans. Just imagine that before 7-Eleven and McDonald's took over the streets, human ancestors walked in forests, deserts, swamps, and grasslands. How could they have eaten three meals a day well and fully? Therefore, when the human body faces a short-term food shortage, it has a series of coping mechanisms to maintain physical strength and energy to continue foraging. This eating strategy is likely to be natural, and therefore more likely to maintain a healthy body shape and metabolism.

Furthermore, apart from the need for diabetics to pay attention to hypoglycemia, the side effects of fasting for a period of time each day are minimal, do not incur additional costs, and may also produce the various benefits mentioned above. It is very worth referring to for friends who want to lose fat.

Regarding intermittent fasting, Scott will share more human research and practical methods in the future, so stay tuned.

This article comes from: Dr. Scott's One-Minute Fitness Class

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