The Right Time for Meal Times

When we eat is just as important as what we eat. Skipping meals habits or erratic eating  undermines our energy levels. To get the most out of eating the right foods in the right proportions, we have to eat at the right times of the day too.

Food variety is key to maintaining our energy, sleep patterns, moods and lowering those junk food spending habits. To ensure we have covered the nutritional bases each day, we should eat a large variety of energy and nutrient packed foods including fruits, vegetables, whole grains, colorful salads, legumes, seeds, nuts, meat and dairy products. Variety also means eating something raw at each meal–raw nuts or seeds, a celery stalk or salsa.

Eating appropriately sized meals so you feel full for three hours after each meal and not hungry before then is also important. This means our appetite-control hormones are balanced and we won’t crave foods we don’t need, nor will we feel compelled to binge.

Benefits of Breakfast
There is much wisdom in the adage that breakfast is the most important meal of the day. Refuelling in the morning when we wake up is important. A good night’s sleep will raise dopamine and cortisol hormonal levels which help wake us up in the morning. Then while brushing teeth and changing clothes, we’re using a short-term fat storage fuel mix of glycogen stored in our muscles and liver to get us physically going. By mid-morning these stores are running out of gas and energy levels fade. We know the feeling–drowsiness, irritability, making lots of mistakes and clumsiness. The right foods for breakfast is one answer to fighting depression, stress, lack of energy, concentration and an inability to fall asleep quickly at night.

Dr. Wayne Callaway at George Washington University observes that breakfast increases the metabolic rate by 25 percent and made the participants in his study feel good. The best energy-boosting breakfasts include one part protein to two parts complex carbohydrates with some omega-3 essential fatty acids. If you exercise before hitting the breakfast table, the best energy-boosting breakfast is one part protein to four parts complex carbohydrates, again, with omega-3 fats.

Lunch and Dinner
Lunch should be eaten around noon, or two hours after a mid-morning snack. Whether we’re at school, skipping school, working outdoors, at home, eating at a restaurant or whatever, this is the meal at which we should eat more lean protein and complex carbohydrates that are as close to the raw state as possible.

If we’re taking a lunch break in school, by the time we head for the lockers, exchange notes, gossip, by a bus pass, go to the washroom and start to dig into our lunchbags, 10 to 15 minutes may have passed. Raw salads, steamed vegetables and a lean source of protein (yogurt, tofu, lean cuts of meat, milk, cheese) contain enzymes which help speed up digestion before the blood supply is forced to head north to the brain when classes resume after lunch.

Dinner needs to give us a greater proportion of carbohydrates than lunch, a moderate amount of protein, some fat to help digestion and lots of natural fiber. Late night cravings for sweet and creamy foods like ice cream or salty-greasy foods like potato chips or pizza are most common if we skip dinner or the dinner nutritional content is not all that great. Late night cravings also happen if we avoid lunch or eat too many sugary foods throughout the day. These cravings are mostly conditioned responses: the more often we snack at night, the stronger our bodies cravings for late night snacking.

Eating before 7:30pm means our glycogen storage tanks are full before 10pm, which allows our body to make hormones and the regenerative growth hormone (GH) to be secreted while we sleep (that’s the time we get most of our physical growth). This also gives us the tendency to sleep without refuelling during the night. If we eat later than 7:30pm, insulin levels will still be high when we go to bed. High insulin levels, unfortunately, dirve down melatonin and GH levels, so we’re looking older with build up of toxins and we’re not growing in the ways we’re supposed to. Melatonin is a strong anti-cancer hormone and is also a powerful antioxidant.

If you have after school activities that prevent you from eating regular dinners before 7:30pm, the best solution is to eat half of the meal well before the activity starts, then the other half afterwards. For those trying to make the transition of snacking right before bedtime to eating a healthy dinner, we suggest replacing junk foods with something high in complex carbohydrates (important that they are complex carbos, not simple sugars so you don’t get high insuline levels) that’ll make you drowsy, and adding a potassium-rich food.

Some examples of such foods are whole wheat bread with sliced ripe bananas, tomato and lettuce salad with a warm dressing, avocado with lemon or lime, avocado with parsley and warm milk, microwaved asparagus with canned tuna mixed with cream cheese, raw unsalted nuts, crisp jicama matchsticks with a cucumber and mint raita (raita=blended with yogurt) and for some test kitchen staff, cold tomato slices topped with polenta seems to work really well.