Split Meals – Benefits and Downsides

May 13, 2019

Benefits and Downsides of split meals diet — Photo by Timolina

One of the latest trends in the world of nutrition is eating split meals. This is where you change from 3 big meals to multiple, small ones. This trend is being embraced by fitness and nutrition enthusiasts.

Although there are a lot of positive examples of people who managed to lose weight with the help of a split meals diet, some experts say that the clue here is to ensure a calorie deficiency in your overall meals intake. Indeed, for some other people (me included) to eat fewer portions fewer times a day is better in some aspects. Let’s try to explore how split meals can benefit us and what are some downsides.

Why should you consider splitting your meals?

Weight loss

Eating small portioned meals can help you to feel fuller than eating 3 main meals. It has been observed that such a diet can increase satiety and reduce food cravings. That’s because split meals provide your body with small amounts of calories consistently. This results in much less room for extreme hunger or satisfaction and helps you to gradually lose weight.

In this method of eating, you know exactly what you are going to eat and at what time. Measured by portions, this type of diet will hardly give you a chance to overeat.

It helps you to have a better focus on the nutritional content of your food

Eating split meals forces you to split the contents of your meal in half. This creates 6 meals instead of 3. This method of eating ensures that your meals are rich in all necessary nutrients. You are able to balance the carbohydrates with the protein and vitamins. Split meals help you to eat healthy oils and stay hydrated.

It is great for people with active lifestyles

Split meals are perfect for people who do not have enough time to eat 3 big meals each at a time. You can split the meals and pack the small portions for eating on the move. Split meals are small enough to consume in a few minutes. This is perfect for office workers, athletes and students. They are applicable to anyone who works around the clock.

Downsides of eating split meals

Weight gain

If you don’t follow all the necessary split meals routine like arranging your snacks in a correct calorie and nutritional value correlation, you may find yourself gaining more weight instead of losing it. The main reason for it may be in that your meals will leave you unsatisfied and you will be eating fast and unhealthy snacks to fulfil the six dish rule of split meals.

It can lead to low food quality

By eating meals in smaller portions, you can end up reducing the quality of your meals. You can end up with small carbohydrate-rich portions for the last meals of the day. Thus, you might get tempted to replace the nutrients portion with junk food. You can end up reducing the quality of your meals. This, unfortunately, beats the objective of eating split meals for better nutrition.

You might expand the portions to resemble main meals

If it was a stressful day, you might end up expanding the size of your split meals in order to get rid of stress and bad mood. This causes you to gain weight instead of maintaining or losing it. Seeing as many of us live in a pressure-filled society, the emotional toll can cause us to expand the size of the split meal portions. As such, eating split meals increases the risk of unwanted weight.

You better know your body

Despite the recent trend that eating more frequently is said to have more chances to burn calories due to the energy involved in digesting, absorbing and metabolizing food’s nutrients, doing so does not necessarily mean to fit you and enhance your metabolism.

Split meals can help you to develop nutritional discipline. They can also assist you to lose weight over time. Hence, they are a good way to get your daily nutritional requirements. However, I personally know people who got to discover that only two or one meal a day is the best option for them both to get enough nutrients and burn calories considerably. Also, a poll suggests that some individuals would never spend time thinking over several meals for the next day. Most of the time simply because they are either too busy or not willing to bother.

Maybe, the best advice here would be that you need to determine which eating frequency is best for you because, at the end of the day, it is all about how you feel because of your diet.