Читать книгу The Renaissance Diet 2.0 - Mike Israetel, James Hoffmann - Страница 72

According to the hierarchy of diet principles, poor nutrient timing schemes can result in 10% loss in performance and body composition results. Poor meal timing can also lead to issues with diet adherence, at further detriment to results. For example, if your muscle-gain diet requires 4,000+ calories per day, and you choose to eat two meals per day, those are 2,000-calorie meals. This might sound fun at the tail end of a fat-loss phase, but after several weeks of eating at a surplus, taking in meals of this size will become extremely difficult. Splitting the eating burden into four or five 800- to 1,000-calorie meals is much more sustainable. On the opposite end of the calorie spectrum, hypocaloric diets make people feel hungry. Outside of risking breaks in adherence (cheating on the diet), prolonged hunger can add to stress and fatigue levels that impact performance and decrease muscle retention. There are two kinds of timing extremes that needlessly increase hunger on a fat-loss diet. First is the very low frequency approach in which you spend most of your day starving and then indulge in a few large meals. Pulses of food-mediated pleasure can promote food craving and unhealthy relationships with food that last beyond the diet phase. On the other end, very high frequencies of feeding (10+ tiny meals per day) can result in never feeling that you have eaten a real meal and increase likelihood of off-diet eating.

The best recommendation for timing with relation to hunger and fullness is to eat four to eight evenly spaced meals of similar calorie content per day and avoid extremes outside of those boundaries. Biasing meal size a bit according to intermeal interval can be a good idea if schedules prevent evenly spaced meals (figure 4.1). Conveniently, these recommendations fit with protein frequency and proportion recommendations, which we will discuss shortly.

Figure 4.1 Point A marks your first meal of the day. Points B, C, and D mark when you would eat your second meal if (B) your first meal were smaller (absorbed in around 3 hours), (C) moderately sized (absorbed in around 5 hours), or (D) very large (absorbed in around 7 hours). In all these cases, a steady stream of nutrients is delivered across intermeal periods thanks to appropriate meal sizing.