When you eat is as important as what you eat for your body

2017 is the year you get the summer body you have been craving for, and it isn’t as hard as you think it to be. Neither is it difficult to loose the pounds you gained over winter. If you are among those people with weight issues who think weight loss can be solely achieved by eating right, dieting or calorie cutting then are mistaken. You haven’t taken one of the major factors into consideration: the time when you eat.

Hardly anyone these days pays attention to whether they are timing their food consumption right or not. You must have knowledge of what you should eat, but now you must also get your consumption time in the right order. Have you not noticed that when you go to dieticians or nutritionists, they usually give you a timetable of what you should eat and when. That’s because you need to pay close attention to when you are eating as much as what you are eating.

Not very difficult:

The best part about watching the time is, it isn’t difficult to put into action (that is, you need to work just until you can make it a habit). All you need to do is remember when to eat. It isn’t challenging to fit your food schedule into your daily life as it is to control your cravings or pack in your quota of workouts.

Paying attention to when you eat helps your body. A small effort on your part to time your food intake makes a big difference to the work you have been putting for a good body and a healthier life. A simple thing as eating your dinner before 7 p.m. makes a lot of difference in your weight loss program, and this does not require you to exhaust yourself.

Have you not noticed that when you go to dieticians or nutritionists, they usually give you a timetable of what you should eat and when.

Active hours:

It is not just about eating your dinners before 7 p.m. Remember to at least have 2 to 3 hours of gap between your dinner time and sleeping time. Researches on eating time pattern and weight loss/maintenance have shown that our body processes food in different ways at different periods of time i.e. daytime and nighttime. According to the studies, our bodies have a natural clock, and while the daytime is allotted for nourishment, the nighttime is for fasting.

Active hours basically are the hours when we are physically active and our bodies require more energy. The stomach does much of food processing when the body is active.

“Eat your breakfast like a king, lunch like a common man, and dinner like a beggar” this clichéd saying rings true here. You may have dismissed the saying much like how we usually dismiss the superstitions that come our way, but keep this saying close to your heart.

Gut rest: 

Gut rest in simple words means fasting. We do not mean fasting during the day as part of a religious ritual. But rather giving our guts the time to rest by not consuming food for 12 hours. Now while 12 hours might seem like a lot, remember that you spend at least half of these hours asleep. This is why choosing nighttime as fast time doesn’t require much effort on your end. All you need to do is not eat anything till 8 a.m. if you eat your dinner around at 7- 8 p.m.

After your 12 or more hours of gut rest, make sure that you eat only non-oily food for breakfast. “Normally we tend to eat a donut, gwaramari or swari jerry with a cup of milk tea for breakfast. But this will only lead to gastritis problem in the future. As such maintain a little control on the first meal of the day,” says Nutritionist and Dietitian Alisha Karmacharya.

Scheduling them right:

Having a schedule and sticking to it has never been more important. You now understand the diet chart with timetable drawn out by your nutritionist and know why it is the way it is. When you follow the timetable to the T, you are setting a schedule for your body. And in a few days time your body will follow the rhythm and process food more efficiently at those times.

You will also need to make sure you are enjoying your main meals before 2 - 3 p.m. to ensure that your weight loss program is robust. While scheduling your food habits you should put your main meal of the day in the earlier half of the day so that it falls during the time when food processing in the body is most efficient.