Don't eat between meals - for weight and teeth

Old Mother Hen says "Don't eat between meals!"

This "eat lots of small meals all day" business? For the birds! Three meals a day is plenty - just like your mom (or grandma) used to say. Even fewer might be better. Think insulin and saliva, i.e. weight and teeth.

First insulin. When you eat, your pancreas sends out a surge of insulin to take care of the glucose in your blood. Insulin tells your body to store sugars as fats. The more insulin you send through your bloodstream, the more fat your body wants to keep on hand.

If you go several hours between meals, you have a chance to switch from insulin-propelled fat storage to fat burning. This is normal and healthy, and the fat is after all there to be burned as fuel.

If your insulin levels never drop, i.e. because you are eating every two or three hours, then you stay in fat storage mode and never let your body access those stored calories. That makes it much harder to lose weight or even just to avoid gaining. (Of course, some sources claiming that eating just one meal a day causes high insulin levels. Not sure how that works, but it buys into what fasting proponents consider the myths of fasting and a misunderstanding of the thermic effect of food.)

Lots of experts insist that if you go too long between meals, you will get so hungry that you will lose all self-control and wolf down anything in sight in huge quantities. OMH wonders if there is empirical evidence to support that claim. There is certainly evidence contradicting it. ("We conclude that increasing MF does not promote greater body weight loss under the conditions described in the present study.") Nutritionists are now suggesting that there is no good evidence to support the recommendation of several small meals a day, and point out that that practice specifically curtails fasting duration - and fasting has benefits for most healthy patients. Frequent meals also apparently cause higher levels of inflammation.

Certainly plenty of people manage to skip meals all the time without turning into ravening barbarians. Muslims fast every day for a month every year. Christians and Jews have traditionally followed fasting protocols without ill effect, and without losing all self-control. Skipping breakfast is not bad for weight loss, and in fact that it can HELP people lose weight.

Second, saliva. Saliva remineralizes tooth enamel. Right after eating, mouth pH drops, and acidic environments cause demineralization. Snacking throughout the day is particularly bad for teeth because it keeps the mouth acidic for long periods. It takes a good two hours after eating for the mouth to restore the enamel after eating or drinking.

Constant snacking = environment that contributes to tooth decay.

Why, oh why, then, do the "experts" tell us to eat all the darn time? Why are preschoolers issued permanent snack cups and sippy cups? Why do first graders get a mid-morning snack before their 11:00 lunch? Why do dieticians insist that "grazing" was the way we were "designed to eat"
? (Designed? By whom?)

OMH wishes she knew. Could it be big sugar, big food, and the nefarious conspiracy to get people to eat lots and lots of carbs? Mebbe. What is certainly true is that people do not have to eat all the time, and they certainly don't need lots of carbs to "keep up their blood sugar."

Grandma knew what she was talking about.

I can skip breakfast!

In my quest to maintain a desirable weight without having to track every calorie I consume, I've been experimenting with a low carb high fat (LCHF) diet. (The Diet Doctor has lots of good information about this, along with nice recipes.) Do I want to do this my whole life? Well, I don't know; I do love the bread in France. But it seems to work, and goodness knows it would be nice to have a way to quickly shed those pounds that sometimes accumulate during travel or holidays.

To make it even easier - I hope! - I've just started tossing in intermittent fasting. This has become a thing of the past couple of years, with lots of books tossed into the ring. They all say basically the same thing - fasting is a really good way to lose weight.

Dr. Jason Fung's book The Complete Guide to Fasting has a really good explanation of how fasting works. In essence, fasting reduces insulin levels. Insulin is what stores away sugar as fat. Insulin rises after eating, and then drops several hours later. When insulin levels are high, you store fat. When they are low, you burn it as fuel. The longer you go between meals, the longer insulin levels stay low and the longer you are a fat-burning machine.

He debunks lots of the myths about fasting, in particular the notion that not eating will cause your metabolism to drop. Apparently that does not happen; reducing calories will drop your metabolism, but irregular fasting won't.

My biggest worry was that I wouldn't be able to do it. All my life I've heard that we have to eat three meals a day, plus snacks in between. Nutritionists still tell us to eat frequently to "keep up our blood sugar." Back in law school I worked with a trainer using an adapted Zone diet, and she had me eating three meals plus two snacks every day - with carefully balanced carbs, fats, and protein, and every single bit recorded and added up to hit a calorie count around 1630. It worked - I lost a pound a week easily - but was it really necessary?

I really don't want to have to track every calorie. Been there, done that, it worked, but I just don't feel like it.

So... a month ago I started skipping breakfast occasionally. Just to see if I could. It was a leap of faith, I tell you. After all, my whole life I've heard that breakfast is the most important meal of the day. It kick-starts your metabolism! Skipping breakfast could lead to a dead brain, low energy, weight gain - who knows?

And the thing is, I used to always be hungry in the morning. I WANTED to eat breakfast.

I know lots of people supposedly are not hungry first thing. It would be nice to be one of them.

But Dr. Fung says you can "fast" by drinking coffee with a teaspoon or so of cream in it. So I tried that one day. I got up, drank coffee with cream, and then went to a 10:00 yoga class. I was shaky, but I didn't die. At lunchtime I ate a no-carb lunch. And that was that.

So I kept doing it. The mornings when I went to yoga at 9 or 10, I just had coffee, and then lunch. We eat dinner pretty late, around 8:45, but that still makes for a 15 or 16-hour fast, especially if I can push lunch til 1.

And you know what? It's okay! Doing yoga has gotten easier. Some days I try to fit in an hour of walking before lunch too - really maximize the fat-burning machine benefits, ya know! The keto crowd insists that we can use our stored fat as fuel - and my goodness, isn't that what it's for? Even the leanest of us supposedly has enough fat to power a marathon. So I should be able to manage an hour of hot yoga and a 3.5-mile walk without breakfast.

And I can. It's not even hard. I don't feel weak or shaky. I'm not even hungry much of the time.

I find it impossible to believe that I'm in some way harming myself by skipping breakfast.

Oh, and the mornings I don't do yoga? I eat bacon and eggs. It's awesome.