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Originally Posted by buxiaohui
Meal composition: Do I have to have protein AND carbs in EACH of the 4-5 daily meals?? For example, I’ve always heard eating a piece of fruit was healthy, but since it’s carbs, is that not good?! Seems unnatural, and an apple + eggs doesn’t sound really appetizing! I read a post that said for snack you could eat veggies, but that doesn’t have protein, either! Someone help!
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Nope, you do not have to have protein AND carbs at every meal. The idea of not eating a piece of fruit by itelf is because when you eat something like a high glycemic carb (eg. fruit, juice, candy) all by itself, it creates a steep insulin spike.
[Okay let's see how good my noodle is workign today LOL]
Your body wants your blood sugar level to be maintained at a relatively steady level or at least within a fairly narrow range. This is definitely one reason why you want to eat every 2-3 hours...because beyond that, your blood glucose levels start to drop (and then you get grumpy and irritable ;-P).
When you eat food, essentially you are increasing your blood glucose level. Now you have all this glucose floating around and in order to store it your body secretes insulin (many cells in the body cannot access the glucose without the aid of insulin). Insulin is like the dump truck that carries the dirt (aka glucose) to the construction site (muslces, fat).
High glucose is what stimulates your pancreas to release insulin. Now, for instance, you eat a banana (and nothing else). Wham. Blood glucose is up. Now suddenly you have a bunch of dirt that needs to be hauled to the construction site. So the foreman [pancreas] send out the dump trucks. Now there is a panic because of the sudden increase of dirt, so the foreman sends out a LOT of extra dump trucks. Since there are sooo many dump trucks working, they move the dirt relatively quickly, and suddenly, the foreman has 50 dump trucks with no dirt to haul. So the dump truck drivers get p*ssed off and start complaining that they need more dirt.
The foreman doesn't like having 50 dump truck drivers with nothing to do, so he places an order for more dirt [this means you get hungry really fast again]. He orders more dirt, and starts to send a few dump trucks home for the day. Then he sees that lots of dirt is efficiently arriving to the site, so he sends home a few more dump trucks. But he didn't actually stop placing the order for dirt [meaning, you will typically end up over eating even after finally getting blood glucose back to normal levels].
Geeze i hope that kind of made sense LOL. The idea of not eating a piece of fruit by itself is not becaue the fruit is unhealthy, it's because of the frenzy it causes on your hormones. Adding something like a protein shake with your banana slows down the glucose being deposited into your blood stream (because it takes longer to get it there through digestion). So rather than dumping a massive load of dirt and suddenly creative havoc trying to move it, you slowly increase the dirt (and therefore don't have to send out 50 dump trucks all at once).
Vegetables are generally low-glycemic (they don't cause an insulin spike like high glycemic foods do (being fruit, juice, sugar, candy, etc)).
My philosophy is that if you need to "snack"...you probably actually need to eat. A snack can be a mini-meal. However.... If you just feel the need to "snack" because you are bored, stressed, feeling emotional, or watching tv, then that is a WHOLE other issue. When i find myself in those circumstances, i chew sugar-free gum. I know, booooring! LOL..