Recipe For Success
Forget only three square meals a day. Forget between meal snacking.
Your new recipe for healthy eating: Six is better than three (six mini meals, that is).
It sounds like a contradiction, but with a focus on diversity and proper portion size, eating six mini meals instead of three large meals each day will add variety to your diet and can help you feel fuller and be healthier overall.
Ditch the Word “Snack”
Your first step in eating six diverse meals is to kick the word “snack” out of your vocabulary. It often conjures up images of low-nutrition or high-fat items such as chips, pretzels, or ice cream. These types of snacks are empty calories and void of nutrition.
Your second step is to focus on size. Doubling your number of meals shouldn’t double the food you eat each day. Instead, your three big meals become six mini meals. You should continue to take in roughly the same number of calories each day, assuming you are not currently overeating.
Finally, make each mini meal an opportunity to vary and balance your diet to include the proper amount of protein, complex carbohydrates, and healthy fats as well as important vitamins and minerals.
More Is Less
The health bonuses of eating more meals are varied. Studies show that people who eat more meals tend to eat a greater variety of foods and are more likely to meet their daily nutritional needs.
Eating frequently may also help control your appetite, which in turn could help you control your weight. And by breaking up your three big meals into six smaller meals spaced evenly throughout the day, you may also lower your blood cholesterol and your risk of heart disease.
Don’t Space Out
With just three meals a day, meals tend to be too far apart, which allows blood sugar levels to drop down low. When this happens, the urge to reach for unhealthful snacks in order to satisfy cravings can get you into trouble.
Grabbing a quick high-carbohydrate snack may bring your blood sugar level up quickly, but most likely too quickly, after which it could simply crash once again, leaving you searching for your next food fix.
Eating many small meals throughout the day — as long as the meals are balanced — can help stabilize your blood sugar, so you don’t get energy highs and lows. This is key to feeling optimal!
The key to the mini-meal approach is to pack your meals with enough nutritional punch and fiber to sustain yourself without adding a lot of unnecessary saturated fat and calories.
Choose Foods Your Body Can Use
To keep your blood glucose levels steady throughout the day, focus on foods that will increase blood sugar levels slowly and stably. Try to include a fiber-rich item, a protein-rich item, or a bit of healthy unsaturated fat in every mini meal in order to sustain your energy over a longer period of time. These kinds of food items digest more slowly and raise blood sugar levels more steadily.
Also, keep your focus on diversity with each mini meal. While you balance your intake of lean protein, complex carbohydrates, and healthy fats throughout the day, your goal should be to enjoy a number of different items from each food group.
If your morning meal contained protein-rich dairy, get your protein from another source in the afternoon. Try lean meats such as canned tuna, or vegetable sources such as coconut milk, almonds, or red beans. If the fiber-rich carbohydrate in your midday meal was a gluten free grain (i.e. buckwheat or quinoa), get your next fiber fix from a piece of fruit. Fruits high in fiber include figs, dates, raspberries, raisins, and kiwifruit.
Dynamic Dietary Duos
Your mini meals will be more diverse if you try to include items from at least two food groups in every meal. Serving at least one fruit or a vegetable in each mini meal not only ensures variety but also helps you meet your requirements of four fruit and five vegetable servings a day. Avoid mini meals that contain only a single kind of food.
Pairing certain foods can help maximize the benefits of the six-meal lifestyle. Here are a few examples of great pairings:
- Couple your vegetables with a bit of healthy fat to help your body better absorb the vitamins and minerals. For example, a drizzle of olive oil on a salad of mixed greens and sliced tomatoes makes it easier for your body to absorb the lutein in the greens and the lycopene in the tomatoes.
- Pair complex carbohydrates with a protein or healthful fat. The addition of a protein or healthy fat slows down the rate of digestion even more than a complex carbohydrate alone. Try banana with natural almond butter, or dip your whole-grain crackers into spicy hummus. Or add walnuts to a fruit salad, which will help your body use any carotenoids in the fruit.
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