Good Morning! How are you all doing today? I'm doing pretty well, just woke up and decided I'd do my blog entry, checked on Facebook to see what's going on - and saw a couple more comments about my refresher.
One of the comments was about how my Doctor had screwed me up a little last year by telling me the number of pounds I had lost between visits with him. I was at a 6 week follow up, and he was concerned that I was losing weight too fast and "skipping meals". It wasn't a substantial amount. It was a double digit number, but not a high one, and would have been considered a normal weight loss if he'd done some math and realized the pounds per week weren't even what a normal dieter would consider good progress.
I was, and still am at this point, overweight by quite a bit. I have enough energy stored that I can afford to miss a meal or two once in a while. One of the rules of the plan is not to eat if you are not hungry, and the other is not to eat on a schedule as much as you can. So if I wake up on the weekend, and I'm not hungry to eat anything substantial until, let's say, 11:30 a.m., I don't eat. I do drink some water, and have a cup of coffee, but that's because I'm thirsty. When I do get hungry, I will eat what appeals to me, whether it's an omelet or a tuna salad or a burger. I may go as much as 8 hours before I get hungry again. It really depends on my activity level for the day (physical and mental) and when I start noticing I'm a bit peckish.
So the "three square meals, 3 to 4 hours apart" plan doesn't really work for me. It would be more needful if I was doing more physical labor, which burns up a lot of the caloric intake. The days I do more physical things, such as shoveling and roof-raking, cleaning up my son's old room, or cleaning off the front porch, require more food than the days I spend knitting or sitting in front of the computer working on a newsletter. The days I'm at work require slightly more food because I am constantly up and down from my chair, working on huge spreadsheets, doing the monthly inventory, and generally using more calories than on my "lazy" days off.
So, the topic is grazing. There are suggestions out there that eating 6 small meals a day can help you stave off hunger and keep on track for a low-calorie diet. The reason that works is because if your diet includes things with sugar and starch, your blood sugar will remain more stable if you are constantly "grazing" small amounts of food rather than eating three normal size meals.
Where it falls down is people don't really know what a normal size meal is. We've been inundated with the huge plates of food at restaurants, over-sized bagels and muffins at our snack shops, huge cups of soda at the convenience store. We, as a nation, do not know what a normal serving size is. If we go somewhere fancier, where they don't load the plate up with sub-standard, cheap food, we get a little bent about how "skimpy" the meal was for the price. So we try the "six small meals a day" route, and we don't actually measure the food that's going on the plate, we just take about half of what we would eat at a normal meal.
For example, I sometimes eat at a burger establishment that has a really nice tex-mex chicken dinner. It's two chicken breast halves, grilled and covered with fresh pico de gallo, served with a side salad covered in tortilla strips. They are pretty good about not putting the strips on the plate for me, so I don't have to play with my food before I eat it. Now, we are talking 8 to 12 ounces of meat on the plate, depending on how big a chicken breast half they are using. It's generally a 6 ounce breast, so 12 ounces of meat on the plate. The salad portion takes up the other half of the plate. (oh, there are three cups of different dressings. The cups are made from tortilla chips. I usually pour the dressings on the salad and toss the cups.)
The above described meal is actually TWO servings of food for me. It's dinner that night and part of lunch or breakfast the next day. So if that dinner is really TWO dinners, then it should make up FOUR small meals, correct? Well, that's the problem now. Most people won't look at that and say, "This is really two dinners on my plate, so I'm only going to eat a quarter of the plate now, and then I'll eat another quarter in a couple of hours, and so on until I've had four small meals out of this." They will eat half of the food on their plate, think they are eating a "small meal" and eat the other half in a couple of hours. Now it's a good meal, it's got lean protein and lots of vegetables and very little in the way of carbs, so all in all it's pretty healthy. Skip the ranch dressing if you're concerned about the fat content.
So imagine a whole day where you are eating six "small meals" a day. Instead of eating 12 to 18 ounces of lean protein, you are eating more like 24 to 36 ounces of protein. Now add in the starch and vegetables to go with it. That's a lot of food in one day!
There are guidelines as to what a "serving" of protein is. An easy way to remember is that a serving of protein is about the size of a normal deck of playing cards. So if you are doing the six small meals, and having protein with every meal, you are eating about 2 ounces of protein, or half a deck of playing cards. That's a hard boiled egg for every meal. Or about 1 normal sized McDonald's burger patty (they are about 1.7 ounces, precooked, if I recall correctly), without the bun and condiments.
Does this sound like too much work to you? It sure sounds like a lot of work to me! If you are going to follow the grazing your way through the day thing, you need to know serving sizes and do math and pack accordingly. I know I'm not good at only eating half of what's in the container and leaving the rest for later (Thank you Grandma and the Clean Plate Club!) and I'm fairly certain others have a similar issue with it. So now you are washing twice as many dishes, cleaning twice as many food containers (unless you dish it out at work instead of eating out of the container.) and measuring everything until you can eyeball the serving size correctly.
I'm not saying it's a bad program to follow. If you have the kind of life that affords you to eat frequently, and you can understand portion control, proper nutrition, and can actually DO it, then it can work for you. I'm saying that grazing doesn't work for me, and if I am "skipping" a meal, it's because I am not, at that time, hungry enough to need to eat.
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