Eating frequently (every 3-4 hours) has many benefits, including preventing the agonizing effects of insane hunger.

Eating every 3-4 hours:

·        keeps metabolism up.  Every time you eat, your metabolism revs up.  Going longer than 4 hours without eating will result in your metabolism slowing to protect itself from expending too much energy to carry out normal bodily functions, like breathing.

·        keeps muscle on your body.  After 3-4 hours after a reasonably sized meal, your blood sugar will start to drop.  If you do not stabilize the blood sugar with nutrition, your body will do so by breaking down proteins (i.e. the muscle you worked so hard in the gym to build).

·        prevents getting insanely hungery.  One of the biggest effects of insane hunger is a diminished ability to make an intelligent decision.

Essentially, when you are insanely hunger, you will eat anything in sight to relieve the hunger pangs.  This tends to set off a snowball effect: you are insanely hungry, so you eat things you would otherwise not eat, you, then, eat too fast and too much, finally, you feel horrible and end up with an upset stomach.

This can all be prevented by listening to your body and eating when you start to get hungry, rather than ignoring the feeling.

As a side note, eating every 3-4 hours assumes that you are consuming about 5-6 meals of equal size (rather than one or two large meals a day).  To determine how much you should eat at each meal:

1.  Calculate the number of calories you should eat in a day (visit: http://www.mypyramid.gov/mypyramid/index.aspx and enter your age, height, weight, and activity level)

2.  Divide your daily caloric needs by 5 or 6, depending on how many meals you plan to eat in a day.  The result will be the approximate number of calories per meal you should consume.

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