How would you like to become that skinny person who says “I eat all day long and never gain a pound.”?

It's true that for some people, that way of life is so natural that they never even realized that they were doing anything right. We ask them their secrets and ultimately we chalk it up to the mystery of a “great metabolism,” and wish that we had one too.

It's not a mystery.

The truth is that anyone can maximize their metabolism not just personal trainers if they just learn to eat like a skinny person. We're not talking about a lifelong sentence of salads and carrot sticks. We're talking about eating little meals all day long.

From a health standpoint, one of the worst things that happened to us as a society was the advent of the three meal day that came with industrialization. The problem with eating three times a day (or fewer for some of us), is that it allows too much time to pass between meals. We let ourselves get too hungry, and then eat to overcome that sensation.

We are just innocently eating the way we were taught. Meanwhile, we are sending signals to our bodies that are not so innocent. We get overly hungry and that tells our body that there is a shortage of food; it's time to store fat just in case. Then, we get so hungry, we eat more calories in one sitting than our body can process. Our bodies can't discern how much to feed itself. It just knows that it can't process it all and dumps everything we've eaten to fat storage as well.

The key is to eat five, small meals throughout the day to avoid the valleys and peaks of hunger and fullness (see Live's sample nutrition plan). By providing enough calories for your metabolism to burn at a steady rate throughout the day, you are telling your body that there will always be enough food for it to burn at a higher rate and feed off of the stored fat in your body as well as the food you consume. When you combine this eating plan with exercise, you will be able to raise your metabolism even further, making you that skinny person who eats all day and never gains a pound.

Copyright (c) 2007 Charles Carter