Much ado is made about what you eat — getting at least five servings (and up to eight if you can) of fruits and vegetables, avoiding sugar and trans and saturated fats, making sure plants fill up half of the plate, but registered dietitian Suzanne Farrell says that keeping track of when you eat can be just as important.
“If someone has gone past four hours of not eating, that affects the choices and the quantity of the foods they reach for,” says Farrell. “I call that being on hunger thin ice, because once your body is physiologically ravenous, then we want those fats and starchy food. And we want a lot of it.”
To keep track, Farrell recommends a food journal — which can be as informal as a small notebook where you jot down the times you eat each day to a more complex app such as Lose It! or My Fitness Pal, which allow you to record calories and plan meals.
“Keeping a journal of some sort has been linked to weight loss,” says Farrell, who owns and counsels clients on weight management as well as disease states and sports nutrition. “We generally underestimate our caloric intake by about 1,000 calories a day, which is significant.”
The other issue, Farrell says, is not eating enough at each meal. “You need to look at your body weight and know how much you should actually be eating at each meal,” she says. “If you get enough calories at each meal, that will keep you from overeating later in the day, which can have a big impact on weight gain. People tend to eat too little at, say, breakfast, and then eat thousands of calories late at night, when it’s not going to get burned off.”
Farrell also strongly encourages assessing your hunger level at each meal and throughout the day, so that you avoid eating for other reasons.
“Are you eating just because you see food?” she says to ask yourself. “For instance, right now I’m not hungry, but if you put a bowl of popcorn in front of me, I would eat it. We eat because someone sets food out on the counter at work, or we eat because we’re sad or bored.”
When you sit down to a meal, gauge your hunger level with a number from 1 to 5, she advises, and plan the next meal accordingly.
“If you’re just in the middle, just medium-hungry,” she says, “then eat that way. Don’t have a full meal. Then know that you need to have a healthy snack in an hour or two to keep yourself from overeating at the next meal.”
