Our trainers at Cynergi have come up with the perfect timetable for you to follow should you want to lose weight.
We always worry about what to eat but we rarely consider when to eat our meals throughout the day. Should we be eating 3 meals, 5 meals or maybe just the 1 meal? It’s the age-old question that has a variety of answers. We are on hand to give you the best possible advice out there According to medical research, how we choose the times to eat could have a huge positive or negative impact on your journey to reach your goal.
Breakfast: Just after 7am
Lunch: Sooner rather than later, so aim to eat just after half past noon!
Dinner: An early dinner is advisable – aim to eat by 6.30pm at the latest. Our heartrate and ability to digest food drops significantly as you enter the evening hours
Research has shown that you can be gaining an average of 2 inches if you continue to eat your dinners after 8pm. That is 2 dress sizes for women.
What about snacking?
These would take place in between your meals, something small and healthy to keep you going until your next meals.
An additional 600 calories can be consumed at 11am, 3:15pm and 830pm. These are the times your willpower may fail you. So ideally if you can avoid these times to be idle and keep yourself busy – make sure you do so. Or plan healthy snacks to keep you occupied during these periods.
These are the times that effectively ruin your diets, so think twice before you want to snack!
Skipping meals – what’s the harm?
It’s also worth noting that six out of ten respondents in the Forza research said that weight loss would be even more difficult if meals were missed. An alarming number of people fall into the diet trap of thinking that more meals missed will mean more pounds lost, but this is a huge weight-loss myth.
If your body isn’t getting food then it isn’t getting nourishment, so it stores fat as your metabolism slows down to reserve energy. You could initially lose weight, but you will just end up eating more later on and putting all the weight back on. Three meals a day with healthy snacks in-between is still the optimum way to lose the pounds and keep them off too.
So what should a day’s diet look like?
NHS recommends that for women wanting to lose weight, you should stick to an allowance of 1,400 calories a day. When considering the best time to eat breakfast, lunch, and dinner, it’s important to start the day off with a good breakfast (just after 7am), so try hitting 400 calories if you can. All these tasty breakfast options are 400 cals or less!
At lunchtime (between 12.30pm and 1pm) we’d recommend sticking to no more than 400 calories here too. You’ll need a boost halfway through the day to get you through to dinner and it’s important to give your body the nutrients and protein it needs. Opt for complex instead of refined carbohydrates such as those found in white pasta, rice and bread, so you stay fuller for longer and don’t experience an energy drop a couple of hours after lunch.
Dinner (between 6pm and 6.30pm) can be fewer calories, so aim for around 300. You don’t want to feel too full before bed so go sparingly on the carbohydrates and fill up on protein (especially that found in chicken which aids sleep) and vegetables.
If you stick to 400 calories for breakfast, 400 for lunch and 300 for dinner then you’ll be able to treat yourself to two 100 calorie snacks throughout the day and still leave an extra 100 for any milk in tea and coffee throughout the day, and fruit too (there are 52 calories in a small apple, 53 in a pear, 59 in an orange and 89 in a banana).
You can pick two of any of these snacks under 100 calories, from jaffa cakes and a glass of wine, to yogurt and pretzels!
Our Cynergi professional personal trainers can guide you for a more individual and personalized based workout and meal plan to get you one step closer to your goals
