Horn of Plenty
Why some slimming strategies backfire — and fixes to help reach your goal
You save your calories for a big dinner
Yes, cutting total calories leads to weight loss. But bank most of those calories for the end of the day and your hunger hormones will go haywire, making you eat more. Middle-aged men and women who ate their daily number of calories in one supersize supper produced more ghrelin, a hormone that causes hunger, than when they ate the same number of calories in three square meals, found researchers at the National Institute on Aging.
Smarter move: Front-load your calories. Overeating at night keeps you from being hungry in the morning, setting off a vicious cycle in which you’re never interested in breakfast but always starving by dinner. The key is to rebalance your day so you don’t set yourself up for an evening binge. To get your appetite back in the morning, cut your evening meal in half. Then eat a breakfast of about 450 calories, such as a scrambled egg with low-fat cheese on a whole wheat English muffin with an 8-ounce glass of juice — an amount that should keep you satisfied until lunch, says George L. Blackburn, MD, PhD, associate director of the division of nutrition at Harvard Medical School and author of “Break Through Your Set Point.” Once your appetite adjusts, don’t go more than 5 hours without another meal of roughly the same size.
Read more by clicking the blue link above, like You graze instead of eating regularly scheduled meals.
Brick ONeil 