Eat As Often As You Want And Stay Slim

Who says you shouldn't eat between meals? Time-honored admonitions to this effect turn out not to be true at all.

How can you make the limited calories of your reducing diet linger with you longer? Spread them out into five or even six meals a day. The break up of your diet into breakfast, lunch, and dinner is purely conventional. As long as you do not exceed your total calories, you can rearrange the order of the day's food intake, and the frequency of eating, within wide limits.

Suppose you save a slice of toast and a piece of fruit for a mid-morning snack, some orange juice and a couple of soda crackers for 4 p.m., and a glass of milk before bedtime, subtracting these items from the other three meals of the day. What happens? You are more satisfied with your reducing diet, full of pep and ginger, rambunctious and rarin' to go.

The direct relationship between food intake and muscular efficiency has  been  studied  by  Dr.  Howard  A. Haggard and Dr. Leon A. Greenberg of Yale University, among others. They recorded the results of frequent feedings on factory workers. Most accidents and errors in the factory were occurring shortly before noon and before the evening whistle. By the simple expedient of allowing the workers a mid-morning and a mid-afternoon snack hour, their output was surprisingly increased and there was a substantial drop in errors.

On such a schedule—and this is the part that will fascinate reducers—the workers were satisfied with smaller lunches and dinners.

Shortly after a meal, your muscular efficiency increases about 30%—that is, you are able to get more work out of the same amount of calories, or you are able to perform the same amount of work with less fatigue. Starches and sugars are most quickly converted into usable energy; hence the advisability of reserving sweetened fruit juices, toast, milk, or fresh fruit for your "extra" meals.

"But doesn't my stomach need a rest?" you may be wondering. "Won't five meals a day overwork it?"

Stomachs live to work. When they're empty they invest their energy in hunger contractions as a signal for you to renew the supply of raw materials. Several light meals keep your stomach happy, whereas a large, heavy meal wins only a gastric groan. So important is it to keep an empty stomach from terrifying itself by its own voracity that a standard treatment for stomach ulcer calls for practically continuous milk feedings.

Many reducers are victims of the grand matinal delusion that they're off to a splendid day if they confine breakfast to a cup of coffee. Perhaps they go lightly on lunch too, so by evening their appetite is way out of bounds and they stow away a lumberman's dinner— at just the time of day when they need it least. Moreover, they have gone through the working day at a low pitch of energy, wondering why they're tired out and "dopey" when the trouble simply is that they're hungry. These remarks do not apply to overweight persons on short-term diets who have to cut down on calories all through the day.

Get up a little earlier, leave the dishes unwashed, take your shower the night before—anything to save time for breakfast. You are most rested and free from physical fatigue when you get up in the morning, but your muscular efficiency is at its lowest because it is 10 or 12 hours since you ate anything. A skimpy breakfast, except for short-term reducers, is an invitation to that tired feeling to dog you all day, with its unhappy by-products of jitteriness and irritability.

Let a couple of boiled eggs and maybe a slice of ham lick the no-breakfast blues. You'll even find it easier to got along with your boss or your husband or wife.

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