Why is eating frequent meals so important? While one of the goals of your eating endeavors is to get as much “good food” as you can past your fat cells and into your lean muscle tissue, you must be wary: Your lean muscle tissue can handle only a certain amount of food at a time.

In other words, after you eat that amount, the cells in your muscles shut their doors and don’t allow any more food in, no matter how nutritious it is, until it has burned up the food already there. So where does the excess food go? You guessed it. Straight to your fat cells.

Let’s look at an example of what we’re talking about. Let’s say it’s lunchtime, and you have the type of body that needs 300-400 calories to keep functioning until your next meal. But then you sit down at lunch and ingest enough food to add up to 1,000 calories. That excess 600-700 calories (no matter where it is coming from chicken, fruit, or cookies) is most likely to be stored as fat.   Read more...