Do you eat regularly?

"War is war, and dinner is according to schedule" - said the Prussian king Friedrich Wilhelm I, known as the "soldier king", and science agrees with him. The 4 cornerstones of health are nutrition, physical activity, sleep, work and rest. A routine is a constant (daily) predictable sequence of actions. Our body compares and plans activity according to circadian rhythms and likes predictability, this allows it to adjust and adapt with less stress. When we eat more or less at the same time, stable conditional reflexes are formed in our digestive system.

If earlier our food schedule was surprisingly constant and the same for the whole family, now everything is chaotic - which depends on many random factors. Chaotic irregular meals negatively affect health. Researchers have established that irregular nutrition has a negative effect on cognitive functions, increases the risk of metabolic syndrome and the risk of cardiovascular diseases, and increases blood pressure.

A study, when people changed their eating schedule from a regular to an irregular one, showed that after 2 weeks, the level of insulin, total cholesterol, and HDL significantly changes. Chaos in the question can be permanent or periodic. Food jet lag, even only on weekends, can increase the risk of obesity. Chaotic nutrition even increases the risk of gastritis with Helicobacter pylori (HP)! Skipping meals can lead to late overeating, increase the risk of diabetes, and reduce energy levels. Irregular nutrition reduces insulin sensitivity and increases your waistline, cholesterol, triglyceride levels, affects hunger and satiety in people with normal and overweight weight.

What to do? It will increase the regularity of feeding. Eat regularly, at the same time. To do this, you need to realize that your productivity is based on taking care of your physiology, that the regime of nutrition, sports, sleep and work is the foundation of everything else. Therefore, start planning the week by putting in the diary and calendar the time for eating, and only then - work. Plan meals with family or friends at your usual time, create your own traditions. Increasing the regularity of meals helps to control hunger, facilitate weight loss, and improve biomarkers. Keeping a food diary will help assess the regularity of your diet.

Do you eat regularly?

Meal irregularity and cardiometabolic consequences: results from observational and intervention studies Proceedings of the Nutrition Society Volume 75 Issue 4

Eating Meals Irregularly: A Novel Environmental Risk Factor for the Metabolic Syndrome Obesity (2008) 16, 1302–1307.

Eating Jet Lag: A Marker of the Variability in Meal Timing and Its Association with Body Mass Index Nutrients 2019 Dec 6;11(12):2980.

Irregular consumption of energy intake in meals is associated with a higher cardiometabolic risk in adults of a British birth cohort International Journal of Obesity volume 38, pages1518–1524 (2014)

Regular meal frequency creates more appropriate insulin sensitivity and lipid profiles compared with irregular meal frequency in healthy lean women European Journal of Clinical Nutrition volume 58, pages1071–1077 (2004)

Irregular Meal Timing Is Associated with Helicobacter pylori Infection and Gastritis

Irregular meal-pattern effects on energy expenditure, metabolism, and appetite regulation: a randomized controlled trial in healthy normal-weight women The American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, Volume 104, Issue 1, July 2016, Pages 21–32.

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