Bad Diet advice (courtesy U.S.news) Bad advice: Start your morning with a low-calorie, high-protein breakfast. The reality: Your low-calorie, low-carb breakfast is undermining your weight-loss efforts. You wake up motivated to start the day off right, so you are “really good” at breakfast and choose a super low-calorie option: an egg white omelet with spinach (no toast), an 80-calorie light yogurt or a lone banana. When hunger inevitably sets in by 10 a.m., you push through until lunch and make another “good” choice – like a giant salad. But then it all falls apart. At 3 p.m., you’re raiding the vending machine, foraging through your officemate’s candy jar or pounding coffee to stifle the hunger. By dinnertime, you’re so starving that you can’t control portions, and all you crave is carby rice or pasta dishes. Even though you just ate a big dinner, you still need “something sweet” after dinner, and wind up grazing right up until bedtime. Why does it all fall apart for you at 3 p.m. and onward? Three words: low blood sugar. Waking up after an overnight fast, your body has depleted most or all of its temporary carbohydrate stores, so blood sugar is at a low. Denying your body the calories and readily accessible energy (carbs!) it needs to confront its most active time of day produces a deficit. Your body will demand re-payment of this deficit later on in the day – in the form of extreme hunger and intense cravings for carbs that hit you at precisely the time of day your body is least efficient at burning it: at night, in front of the TV. Anything less than 300 high-quality calories for breakfast isn’t breakfast and probably won’t help you lose weight. Moreover, breakfast is not the time of day to skimp on carbs – dinner is. A good breakfast should hold your hunger at bay for at least a solid three hours
Posted on: Thu, 10 Apr 2014 12:15:46 +0000