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| What is the most appropriate way to
supply nutrients to our bodies? |
To be slim we must be on a low calorie diet! No doubt about that, but
unfortunately, staying on a low calorie diet can be incredibly
difficult. This is why it is very important to learn how to supply
nutrients to our bodies. Eating the wrong way will inevitably lead to a
failure to stick to a low calorie diet, while eating the right way will
guarantee complete success.
Why do we need to eat? The answer is very
simple: we need to supply building material and energy to our bodies.
Our bodies require nutrients, and particularly energy, every single
moment of the day. In theory, we should not be overweight or obese. When
we eat a large meal, part of the calories should be burned straight away
and the rest should be stored. Then, when no more calories are absorbed
from the meal, the body should release back those nutrients that have
been stored. Once all of them have been used, we should feel hungry and
we should have another meal. So technically, we should not be fat at
all!
This unfortunately only works in |
theory, with the reality being a little bit
more complicated.
As we said before, when we absorb nutrients from food, some of them are
burned straight away, while the excess is stored. When we do not absorb
nutrients any more the body starts to release them back into the blood
from its stores. Unfortunately, at the same time it sends a sense of
hunger.
Our bodies do not like to use their reserves. There is a good reason for
that. Suppose the body does not send the hunger signal when no more
nutrients are absorbed from the digestive tract. Because we have plenty
of stored nutrients we will not feel the need to eat, therefore those
stored nutrients will be used. But what will happen when all of them
have been consumed? Well, we should have another meal.
Suppose that you are living in the wilderness. You don’t have a fridge a
few metres away to get some food, but you have to hunt for hours or even
days before managing to get any prey.
In that case you will not have
sufficient energy to sustain the large quantity of energy required for
the hunt, therefore you will die!
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This is why our bodies send a sense of hunger even if we have plenty of
energy stored in our adipose tissue.
It
does not want to take a risk. It does not know that if we need food we
just need to open a fridge, and we do not need to hunt or look for food.
The body thinks that it will take a lot of time for us to manage to get
something to eat, therefore it sends the message well in advance just to
stay on the safe side.
How can we cope with this survival mechanism? The answer is very simple:
we need to learn to supply our bodies with exactly the quantity of
energy they are going to use in the next few hours, and in this way no
calories will be stored in the adipose tissue.
How can we plan our food intake in order to satisfy this condition?
First of all we need to keep in consideration that the absorption of
nutrients from our food in the small intestine is not instantaneous.
Normally it will take between two and three hours to be completed. We
can draw a graph to show the trend of nutrient absorption after a meal. |
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We
need to have a clear picture of digestion in order to understand the
absorption of nutrients. In the mouth, oesophagus and stomach a partial
digestion occurs, but little or no absorption takes place. The outcome
of this is that when food is in these parts of the digestive tract,
nutrients like amino acids, carbohydrates and fat are not absorbed at
all. Therefore, when we eat, it will take a few minutes before the body
will start to absorb nutrients. The majority of the nutrients will be
absorbed when food reaches the small intestine.
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Once food arrives in the large intestine, the absorption of nutrients
can be considered over. Now we are in a position to understand the graph.
The red arrow indicates the time we had our meal. For a few minutes we
do not have absorption at all, then, a few minutes later, when the food
starts to reach the small intestine, absorption takes place, indicated
by the blue line. It peaks about 45-60 minutes after a meal and then it
starts to run out. In about 2 hours, the process of absorption is over.
The food has reached the large intestine where no |
further absorption occurs. When the absorption of nutrients from food is
finished, our bodies have to release into the blood-flow nutrients from
their own reserves. That
means sometimes the nutrients present in the blood come from food and
sometimes from these reserves.
The moral of the story is that each
instant of the day we need to have nutrients in our blood. If we would
like to track the concentration of nutrients in our blood during the day
we would get a graph like this one: |
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The graph shows a typical situation when a person has two meals.
Soon after the first meal, the concentration of nutrients (blue line) in
the blood starts to rise. After a while, typically 2-3 hours, all
nutrients have been absorbed. Therefore the concentration in the blood
drops. When this happens, the body has to release nutrients from storage
to keep the concentration at a minimum level. If it drops to zero we
die. Therefore the blue line becomes flat from one meal to the other
because the body keeps pumping in nutrients.
Now we can imagine that there is an ideal value for the concentration of
nutrients in our blood, depicted in the graph by the red dotted line. |
If the concentration of nutrients in the blood is above this line
(wellbeing line) we feel energetic, but in the opposite case, when the
concentration is below the wellbeing line, we feel hungry, tired and
lethargic.
Probably the body intentionally releases a quantity of nutrients below
that line, or maybe it produces some signal to inform us that we need to
eat, because the body has started to use its own reserve of energy,
something that it deeply dislikes. This could be a simple visualisation
of why we feel hungry a few hours after a meal.
Now that we know this phenomenon, we can start planning an optimised
food intake to prevent fat deposition. |
If
we manage to keep the concentration of nutrients just above the
wellbeing line we will not experience hunger at all! To do that we need
to stick to the following maxims:
1) Small numerous meals are better than a big meal.
The graph below shows a typical situation where someone
consumes three meals, at the rate of one meal every two hours. As we can
easily see, the nutrients concentration line (blue line) does not go
below the wellbeing line. Therefore, in these six hours we do not feel
hungry at all. The graph shows another line. |
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| The magenta line – called the
immediate-use line – is a line that indicates the level of energy
(quantity of nutrients)
required by our bodies every second of our lives. When the quantity of
nutrients (calories) is below that line, the calories are used
immediately. This means that those nutrients in the blood are not going
to be stored in the adipose tissue but they will burned straightaway. |
A
completely different situation occurs when we eat the same quantity of
nutrients / calories in one sitting. In this case, we can see that the
nutrient concentration in the blood rises dramatically for 2-3 hours
after a meal (see next graph). The quantity of energy is larger than the
quantity our bodies are able to burn in those 2-3 hours, therefore the
quantity above the |
immediate-use line will be stored. When all nutrients have been
absorbed, the nutrient concentration drops below the wellbeing line.
Consequently, we start to feel hungry. The blood nutrient concentration
keeps falling hour after hour so the sense of hunger grows by the hour.
These concepts are represented in the next graph.
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