5 Reasons Why Eating Healthy, Regular Meals Is So Important For Your Body

Whether you’re trying to lose weight, gain muscle or simply live a healthier lifestyle, when it comes to eating food the rule stays the same – eat regular, small meals!

Unless you are an elite athlete or following a tailored meal plan designed by a dietician to achieve a certain result, your body needs regular meals in order to run at its optimum efficiency. We just aren’t built to run off an empty stomach!

Here are the top 5 reasons why you need to keep refuelling your stomach.

• Your Body Needs Energy To Run

This may sound pretty simple, but it’s something (especially dieters) tend to forget! In order to perform everyday functions, your body needs a certain amount of fuel (or calories). This amount is dependant on each person individually, the amount of exercise they do and their muscle mass in relation to their body dimensions.

The average woman’s basal metabolic rate (the number of calories required during the day, before considering expenditure such as exercise is around 1,493 calories. Taking into consideration activities such as exercise, walking to work, or simply taking a shower, means to maintain their weight the average woman requires about 2,000 calories per day. For men these numbers are slightly higher – the average basal metabolic rate is 1,662 calories, and daily nutrient requirements around 2,500 calories.

Just remember – these numbers are averages and will differ between each person!

• It Helps Ensure You Reach Your Daily Nutrient Requirements

As discussed, your body needs a certain amount of caloric fuel to operate. But clearly, this needs to be broken down into balanced amounts of protein, carbohydrate, fats, minerals, vitamins and more.

By eating regular, varied, balanced meals you not only ensure enough nutrients are going into your body – but that you’re getting enough essential ingredients into your body as well.

• It Keeps Your Blood Sugar (And Therefore Energy) Levels Constant

Eating regular meals that include a source of carbohydrate is the best way to ensure you don’t experience severe energy swings during the day. As the body is continually absorbing food and changing this into glucose, your blood sugar (glucose) are able to remain relatively constant throughout the day. When you don’t eat regular meals, but instead binge – followed by long periods of non-eating – you experience sharp spikes and falls in your blood sugar levels, which translates to energy.

• It’ll Boost Your Metabolism, Helping It Run Efficiently

Want a faster, more efficient metabolism? Then start eating regularly!

When you don’t eat at regular times throughout the day your body begins following a binge to starve to binge pattern. Over time this will negatively affect your metabolism, as you train your body to operate in ‘starvation mode’. This means your body will begin ‘grabbing’ onto food as it comes and storing it as fat, and digest food more slowly so as to conserve energy.

• Big Gaps Between Meals Means Big Hunger Pangs, Followed By Overindulgence And Binge Eating

This is just bad news all around!

Binge eating is never a good idea, even if it’s on healthy food. Again, this sort of behaviour will have a negative effect on your metabolism and leave your body worse for wear. It’ll also play havoc with your digestion as your body will struggle to digest large volumes of food in short periods of time. Finally, even if you strive to binge on healthy food, you’re still most likely going to sneak in high calorie, sugary and/or unnutritious food.