Don't Buy Into These Persistent Myths About Eating and Your Metabolism

Despite the recent popularity of intermittent fasting, there's still a widespread belief that eating several small meals a day promotes weight loss by stoking your metabolism. Or that going too long between meals will cause your metabolism to slow down. I think one of the reasons that these notions have gotten so much traction is that people haul out some very scientific-sounding explanations that seem, well, very scientific and, therefore, believable.

There are two basic arguments and we’ll tackle them one at a time:

Does your body go into "starvation mode" and slow your metabolism?

THE MYTH

Your body, when deprived of food for a period of time, will go into “starvation mode” and slow your metabolism. The prevailing nutrition myth suggests that eating smaller, more frequent meals will prevent this.

WHY THE MYTH EXISTS

"Starvation mode" is when the body burns fewer calories in order to conserve energy, just in case the food shortage continues. During a famine, you’d need to live on your stored fat. Down-regulating your metabolism is a way to make those fat stores go a bit further.

We've come to believe that the trick to keeping our metabolisms reved up is to reassure our bodies that there is no shortage of food by eating every few hours.

It’s similar to the way your laptop adjusts its energy usage when it’s running on batteries, by making the screen a little dimmer, for example. When food is plentiful again, your metabolism goes back to normal, just the way your screen gets brighter when you plug your laptop back in.

If there were actually a famine, you’d be glad your body is designed this way. But, if you’re trying to lose weight, the last thing you want is increased fuel efficiency. You want to be burning through stored fat like an RV burns through a tank of gas.

So, we've come to believe that the trick to keeping our metabolisms reved up is to reassure our bodies that there is no shortage of food by eating every few hours. Your body will oblige you by continuing to burn calories with reckless metabolic abandon. Or so the story goes.

THE NUTRITION FACTS

This idea that you should eat more frequently so your body doesn't react by slowing your metabolism makes sense, doesn’t it? And it's rooted in at least some truth. Your body does respond to a prolonged fast by slowing your metabolism to conserve energy.

Your body doesn’t go into starvation mode if you go four hours without food. In fact, it takes about three days of fasting or serious caloric restriction for your body to respond.

Here’s...

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