With the arrival of spring, diets become the order of the day and, with it, tips to lose weight in a more efficient and healthy way (in most cases). Contrary to the popular suggestion that it is better to eat a small amount of food but in frequent periods throughout the day, a recent study affirms that this advice is not a panacea, since it does not increase metabolism or promote weight loss .
The study, published in the journal of the Society for Endocrinology and conducted by a team of researchers from the University of Warwick (United Kingdom), aimed to analyze whether eating often would be more or less beneficial for people’s health. Thus, they examined 24 thin and obese women for several days, controlling their meals: on alternate days they received two meals a day or five meals a day . The total number of calories for each day was exactly the same.
After analyzing their energy expenditure, the results of the study revealed that women who ate twice a day or five times a day had no change in the calories they had burned each day, that is, the calories burned were exactly the same while eating two or five times a day .
What was alarming is that the group of obese women who ate five meals a day had significantly higher levels of endotoxins (linked to an increased risk of cardiovascular disease and type 2 diabetes) at the end of each day, compared to when they only had two meals a day.
The final conclusion determines that counting the calories of what we eat is what really matters when it comes to losing weight, since the size or frequency of the food does not affect the calories we burn in a day.
