Fitness boot camps are so popular that there are classes or courses just for women; just for men; just for youth; for sports-specific training; and even just for senior citizens.

The explosion of fitness boot camps can be explained by several factors.

They are big money savers for clients. In a fitness boot camp, the participant is taken through all kinds of training modalities: weight-bearing with implements, bodyweight-only, fast cardio, slow cardio, agility drills and jumping, among others.

So in that single session, the participant gets the equivalent or better of a one-on-one personal training session. So why pay enormous fees for personal training, when one can get a vigorous, full-body blast in a fitness boot camp?

Private instructors make more money. It is much easier for the fitness boot camp instructor to recruit 20 people for a boot camp class, than it is to get 20 people to sign up for personal training.

For that one hour fitness boot camp class, the instructor will earn significantly more money than from a one-hour personal training session with just one client. As fitness boot camps increase in popularity, savvy private instructors take advantage of this and advertise for courses, knowing that people will always sign up.

It’s a circular effect: As people sign up, word gets out at how great fitness boot camps are. As demand for fitness boot camps increases, instructors create more classes.

They promote adherence because they are often a prepay situation. Some fitness boot camp courses require upfront pay for the entire course. If a person has paid a personal trainer upfront for a series of sessions, then cancels, this client often gets to reschedule (depending on the flexibility of the trainer).

If a person misses a fitness boot camp session, there is no rescheduling and he or she is out cold. So when one prepays for a fitness boot camp, adherence is stronger than in personal training, and people really do want to stick to an exercise program.

Increased awareness of the importance of exercise. Information pertaining to the criticality of exercise has been exponential over the past 20 years, due to several factors such as the advent of the Internet and of fitness cable channels and popular shows like “The Biggest Loser,” advances in medical technology, and the progression of Baby Boomers into the senior citizen age bracket.

As a result, the topics of fitness, health and weight loss rank consistently at the top in popularity. With a peaked interest in fitness and weight loss, the masses have been investigating the many group exercise options out there.

Let’s face it: Something about the name “boot camp” is very alluring. Which brings up the next reason why fitness boot camps are so popular.

Increased media coverage of our troops. Many fitness boot camps are led by current or former military personnel such as the Marines. People already know that military cadets go through “boot camp” training. This has an almost exotic appeal to many civilians.

So when they hear about an exercise class or course that has “boot camp” in its title, this grabs their attention, as they figure that many of the drills will mirror what soldiers endure in their special training.

Adding to this element of excitement is when the fitness boot camp is instructed by an actual soldier or former Marine. Many people lack motivation to either stick to an exercise program or, once in the setting, lack the drive to push hard. They know that a course that’s instructed by someone associated with the military will keep them hopping high and hard.

Finally, simple networking explains the ever-growing popularity of fitness boot camps. As more and more people take these classes, more and more people hear about how fantastic they are for whipping weak, flabby, tired bodies into the best shape of their lives.

Ab Exercises with Chino Hills Personal Trainer Cara Eckerman

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How a Chino Hills Personal Trainer Can Help You Get the Body You Want

The health and fitness of your body are one of the most important things in your life, so it only makes smart sense to hire a personal trainer to teach you the fastest, safest and most effective approaches to reaching all of your goals.

What is your goal?

• Lose 20 lbs?
• Lose 50 lbs? 100 lbs?
• Tone and firm?
• Lose the “love handles”?
• Lose upper arm flab?
• Build big guns, broad shoulders, a solid chest?
• Turn stick legs into strong & sleek legs?
• Get a six-pack?
• Get a shapelier bottom?
• Get rid of back pain?
• Improve athletic skills?

Or maybe you just want to get in the best shape possible and lower your risk of illnesses like brittle bones, type 2 diabetes, heart disease and cancer. Whether fat loss is your primary goal, building as much muscle as possible or something in between, it’s time to hire a personal trainer.

Why do you need a Chino Hills personal trainer?

Because physique and fitness transformation isn’t something that people have automatic built-in knowledge of. It must be learned.

Just like learning computer programming, playing a musical instrument or mastering golf require expert instruction, so does mastering the craft of knowing how to turn your body into a fat-burning machine bursting with energy and health.

This is not something you can just magically learn on your own – unless you want to spend years at a mind-bending trial-and-error game before you finally get it. A personal trainer is your short-cut to your goals.

Even if you just want to lose a stubborn 10 pounds, this can take years to figure out; it’s just as difficult to permanently rid 10 pounds as it is 100 pounds.

Ask yourself how many people you know who’ve been struggling to lose—and keep off—only 10 pounds, and though they’ve achieved this goal (many times!), the results are never permanent and they always gain back the weight. Getting permanent fitness results is obviously not an easy task.

You yourself already know that, or you wouldn’t be reading this article. You have an unmet fitness goal (s).

• Perhaps you’ve been going to the gym for years, and you still look pretty much the same.
• Maybe you’ve convinced yourself that you’re not blessed with “the right genes,” and that no exercise program can outwit the genes that your parents passed on to you.
• Maybe you believe that some people just weren’t meant to be lean and buff.
• Maybe you’ve reached a point where you’re pretending that you can be fat AND healthy.

This kind of thinking will keep you in a rut forever. A personal trainer will pull you out of this rut and show you workout approaches and techniques that you’ve never even considered or even known about; strategies that have never occurred to you, even though you’ve been working out for years, even if you’ve “tried everything” or “tried every diet.”

There is a famous saying: “Insanity is doing the same thing over and over yet expecting a different outcome.” Does this sound like your training regimen? You keep doing the same thing over and over at the gym, always thinking that THIS time, you’ll finally get results?

Or perhaps THIS time, the new diet, or that new exercise gadget that fits in your travel bag, will work?

How is THIS time going to be any different from all those other times that you swore you finally found a plan that will work—only to end up frustrated and confused, back to Square One?

Ever wonder what a personal trainer can teach you that you don’t already know? Are you sure you know all you need to know about fitness, exercise and nutrition?

Let’s take a classic example: abdominal fat.

Go into any gym and see who’s doing lots of abdominal routines like crunches, side bends and twisting motions. Who camps out at the crunch machines or spends quite a bit of time on the floor “doing abs”?

Notice anything peculiar? Most of the ab-routine camp are overweight—some very overweight.

Now, look at the people at the gym who have killer bodies: abs of steel, perfectly flat and tight tummies, beautifully sculpted muscle. How come you rarely see them doing tons of crunches, sit-ups or twists?

There is a reason for this. It’s because abdominal routines—even 1,000 crunches a day—will never, ever slash fat in your belly or waist!

A personal trainer will explain to you why this is, and which exercises really DO smoke out the fat in one’s stomach.

A personal trainer will also help you understand why hours and hours of lengthy boring cardio sessions will have only a limited effect on fat loss, and how to tweak your cardio workouts so that they REALLY bust up stubborn fat—with far fewer, and shorter, workouts.

Motivation!

Knowledge has little power if you lack motivation to use it! A personal trainer will give you incredible motivation and a winning attitude towards every one of your guided workouts, as well as the power to keep charging on non-session days.

Safety!

Nobody has built-in knowledge of how to perform every strength training routine safely. You may think what you’re doing is safe and efficient, when in actuality it’s setting you up for future repetitive stress injury, shoulder damage or a dead-end.

Let’s look at another example. Do you use a treadmill incline? Where are your hands while you’re walking that incline? The vast majority of people, perhaps you yourself, hold onto the treadmill, believing that this is the most effective way to walk.

A personal trainer will tell you that holding on disrupts reaching your goals and burns 20 percent fewer calories than if you weren’t holding on, and that the calorie display is based on only the speed and incline, not the user’s unique metabolism!

A fitness professional will show you how to burn the most calories—in the shortest amount of time possible—on any cardio equipment.

Copycatting Can Backfire!

You cannot depend upon what you see other people doing at the gym to learn proper or effective technique.

It’s tempting to say, “Okay, I’m going to watch a few people today who have great bodies and see what they do, then copy them.”

The problem here is that what you see them doing is only a snapshot in time. You may be witnessing their warm-up and never know it. Maybe they’re doing something wrong but do the other 90 percent of their program correctly and that’s why they look so good. Perhaps they’re doing something that takes quite a while to get conditioned for.

It’s also possible that your secret role model looks fabulous because she’s been playing tennis for years, and in fact, she may be clueless when it comes to strength training or cardio.

You cannot rely upon snapshots in time. A personal trainer will give you one-on-one attention and empower you with knowledge, motivation and confidence to smash through the finish line once and for all, regardless of how many failed attempts you’ve suffered over the years.

Are you ready to get the body you’ve always wanted? Are you ready to put all your frustrations and self-doubts in a safe, lock it and throw away the key? Your best body, your best health and fitness, all begin with hiring a personal trainer from Chino Hills like Cara Eckerman.

Breakfast replenishes a carbohydrate-starved body. Overnight, the body goes a long time without food. So by the time you awaken in the morning, your body is in a carbohydrate-depleted state (unless you literally loaded up on very high carb foods right before going to bed).

For a person who eats sensibly, the body will be in a carb-depleted state come morning. Though at this point, the body is drawing largely on fat reserves for sustenance, it’s still important to consume some food within an hour of exiting bed.

Otherwise, you may feel less energetic. Another important point is that if you delay eating until several hours after awakening, this means that your body will have gone at least 11 or 12 hours without food – and that’s if you slept about eight hours and ate something right before you went to bed.

If you snacked two hours before going to bed, slept for eight hours, then ate your first meal of the day three hours after awakening, that would be 13 hours without food – and on a routine basis, this practice can stunt metabolism. Eating breakfast will jumpstart metabolism by giving the body work to do: digestion.

A healthful breakfast sets the tone for the day as far as health habits. If you start the day with an all-natural breakfast loaded with nutrients, this will have a psychological effect that will more likely lead to continued healthful eating for the remainder of the day, as well as sticking to predetermined exercise sessions.

Start the day with no breakfast or a junk food breakfast, and you’re likely to repeat unfavorable actions throughout the day, like bingeing on donuts or skipping a planned treadmill workout.

Breakfast is an excellent combatant against overeating during mid-morning or at lunchtime. If you skip breakfast, you may end up extra hungry at some point mid-morning and go overboard at the vending machine at work.

Or if you wait until lunchtime to eat, you may still overeat due to excessive hunger, or, due to feeling entitled to overeating because you missed breakfast.

Many people will overestimate just how many calories they’re entitled to and end up eating more calories at lunch in this case, than the total calories they’d typically consume with a breakfast and then lunch.

If you eat breakfast, especially one high in protein, you’ll more likely consume fewer calories by bedtime than if you skip breakfast. A study by Leidy et al demonstrated this phenomenon. Study participants who ate a high protein breakfast, and the group who ate a more standard breakfast, had fewer cravings later on and snacked less throughout the day, than did the third group who had no breakfast, during the study’s course.

Breakfast enhances concentration skills on the job or at school. Many investigations into the effects of breakfast, vs. skipping breakfast, on school performance (such as the national MBF Healthwatch survey in Australia) show that skipping the morning meal has an adverse effect on concentration skills, along with attentiveness and even figuring skills. Other studies show the same decreased cognitive abilities in adults on the job or at college.

It’s just plain common sense: A person is much better off eating breakfast than skipping this meal. However, breakfast doesn’t have to be a major production or four-course cooked meal. A bowl of whole-grain, no-sugar-added cereal will do. Or a bowl of yogurt and a glass of juice. Your brain will thank you for it!

This kind of activity is called steady state cardio, and there is a reason why you have not lost much weight, why your belly is just as big now as it was six months ago when you took up jogging and step aerobics classes.

There are several reasons why steady state cardio is a poor choice for weight loss. Steady state cardio is also known as long duration cardio; this activity is endurance in nature. Endurance activity recruits slow-twitch muscle fibers. Slow twitch fibers are designed by nature for endurance activities.

The other kind of muscle fiber, fast-twitch, is designed for brief, speed- or power-based activities. Slow-twitch fibers burn fewer calories than do fast-twitch fibers. So right off the bat, you now know one of the reasons why steady state cardio fails as a weight loss vixen.

The next reason is that steady state cardio does not create what’s known as an after-burn. An after-burn is when you continue burning calories at an accelerated rate even though you have ceased the exercise.

During steady state cardio, your metabolism (rate at which you burn calories) is elevated. When the activity stops, metabolism then returns to normal. So if your steady state cardio session was for one hour, your metabolism was elevated for just one hour, maybe a tiny bit longer, but that’s it.

So you can see why even steady state sessions of 90 minutes (be they jogging or cycling outdoors, or using several cardio machines at the gym) aren’t very effective for weight loss. The reasons why steady state cardio are not effective for losing weight don’t end there, either.

The problem with steady state cardio (whether it is in the form of incline walking, aerobics or spin classes, swimming, hiking or jogging) is that it fails to produce a particular hormonal response.  Hormones are extremely important when it comes to weight loss, because circulating hormones determine your resting metabolism, as well as metabolism while you are exercising, and while you are sleeping.

While performing steady state cardio that is of a low intensity pace, there is very little hormonal response. Not a whole lot happens on the hormonal front.

Examples of low intensity steady state cardio would be walking on flat or mildly inclined ground; riding a bicycle around the town; comfortably inline skating around a lake or the neighborhood where there aren’t any hills; swimming leisurely laps; slow jogging; low impact aerobics classes; and any pace on cardio equipment that you can maintain for extended periods without being uncomfortable or breathing heavily.

One level up from low intensity steady state cardio is moderate intensity aerobics. Though the exertion is now moderate rather than low or mild, you can still sustain this level of work, though it now makes you breathe noticeably heavier. You may break a sweat. You will feel that your body is working, yet at the same time, you can carry on a conversation.

This higher level of steady state cardio will still fail you when it comes to weight loss. In fact, it may fail you even worse than will low intensity steady state cardio. This is because moderate intensity aerobics stimulates increased production of a hormone called cortisol. Cortisol is also known as the “stress hormone,” and excess cortisol promotes fat storage in the abdomen!

Examples of moderate intensity steady state cardio would be jogging fast; slow jogging on a mild incline; fast walking on a medium incline; slow walking on a high incline; high impact aerobics; step aerobics (depending on how elevated your stepper platform is); fast pedaling; or anything that, again, makes you feel like you are working, but you are still able to sustain the work effort and carry on a conversation, though it may not be comfortable carrying on a conversation.

You have this extra cortisol running around in your body that has the potential to promote fat storage in the very area that you are seeking to lose fat.

The biggest downfall of steady state cardio, when it comes to being ineffective for weight loss, is that it fails to generate a fat-burning hormonal response. There are three hormones that promote fat-burning: human growth hormone, testosterone and lactic acid.

Long duration cardio, steady state cardio, sustained aerobics – call it what you wish – will not generate increased production of these fat-burning hormones.

A non-scientific way of looking at this situation is to think of steady state cardio as something your body can easily adapt to. You are just jogging and jogging and jogging on a treadmill. Or just walking and walking, or stepping about in a step class. Or pedaling like an automaton on a bike while watching TV or reading.

This kind of activity is easy for your body to handle. There is nothing about this kind of exercise that shocks your body and forces adaptation. Your body is used to walking on a treadmill while you support yourself by holding onto the rails. This will not shock your body into adapting, and as a result, calorie-burn will not be sufficient to strip away excess fat in your legs or stomach.

You are not doing anything that makes your body think, “Hey, this is really hard; I better burn a lot of fat because I’m gonna need all the fuel I can get.”

Steady state cardio is a “ho hum” type of workout that just will not shock the body into a fuel-burning mode, because there is no need to burn significant fuel if you are doing something that’s easy enough to sustain for an hour. Steady state cardio has been proven by research to be inferior to other forms of exercise for weight loss.

A flat stomach is the result of low body fat in that area. People believe that to flatten an area on the body or make it smaller, the exercise must target that area. This is true if you want to make the area bigger in muscle, as in pumping up a biceps muscle. But as far as shrinking an area by reducing its fat content, you cannot “spot reduce” by isolating that area with exercise.

Thousands of crunches will not burn enough stored fat to result in a smaller or flatter stomach. The act of crunching is quite easy to perform. Even an overweight person who has never exercised before can do many crunching motions in a row if body position is modified enough.

But no matter how many crunches you do, no matter how often per week, they will never require enough energy to burn away the fat in your abdomen. This is the actual reason – and it is a simple one – why crunches will not give you a flat stomach.

And this begs a follow-up question: Why don’t tons of crunches burn the fat away in the abdomen? The answer, quite simply, is: The muscles that generate the crunching motion are too small and naturally weak to require large amounts of energy.

The muscles that enable you to crunch are called stabilizers. They make up your “core,” those muscles that control trunk movement. Stabilizer muscles enable you to stand straight, to bend forwards, backwards and to the sides, to fold your body up in a chair, to sit up in bed.

These actions have one thing in common: They don’t require any force or much effort for generally healthy people. Te joint actions that stabilizer muscles allow you to perform are non-force related. This means that these muscles don’t feed off of much energy (which includes energy in the form of stored body fat).

So no matter how much your brain instructs these core muscles to move your body in a crunching motion, these small muscles will do the job just fine on only very small amounts of energy. Only negligible amounts of body fat will be used – not enough to flatten your stomach or even shrink it any.

Here are the questions you are wondering about right now:

#1. If crunches cannot flatten my stomach, then why do so many infomercials advertise crunch gadgets and claim that they can give you six-pack abs?

#2. How come the people in these commercials always have perfect abs and tight waistlines?

#3. Why do fitness magazines frequently show people with killer abs doing crunches?

Here are the answers:

For No. 1, the infomercials word their sales pitch very carefully. Next time you catch one of these ads, listen carefully and you will hear that the crunch device is part of a bigger plan—a plan of dieting and exercise for the entire body.

Every single one of these gadgets comes “complete with” an entire exercise and diet program. In fact, sometimes the plan is a small mountain of exercise and cooking DVDs. You then see that the gadget is but a tiny part of a giant equation.

For No. 2, the buff six-pack models are hired models from talent agencies. When people claim to be an actual success story, they probably are, but their success was the result of that bigger plan just previously explained: the gadget, plus a change in diet, plus exercise for the entire body.

Finally, fitness magazines run photos that are the most captivating. Few photos are more attention-getting than a buff athlete with ripped abs doing crunches. Furthermore, this pose is among one of the easiest and cheapest for professional photographers to make perfect for magazine production.

The only way to flatten your stomach is to lose overall body fat. Certainly you have heard this before, but continue to be confused by all the information out there that strongly indicates that you can flatten your stomach with just crunching.

Crunching is one of the most common types of exercise, so no matter what the truth about this is, you will always hear about and see crunching. It requires no equipment. It requires no special skill. Just about anybody with a pulse can perform crunches. They can be done anywhere. How much more convenient can an exercise be?

Yet at the same time, as simple and as easy as crunches are, they really do improve core strength and core conditioning. They strengthen those stabilizer muscles.

However, this does not mean they burn away fat in the stomach! When a muscle is worked, it will get stronger. Crunches work the abdominal and lower back muscles, and as a result, they get stronger. This is not synonymous with fat loss!

The abdominal and lower back muscles are very small and lack the ability to generate force. They generate movement and stabilization of the spine. But this is not the same as force generation. It is the force-generating muscles (big muscles like those in the legs, back and chest) that, when exercised rigorously, will burn significant amounts of overall body fat.

When substantial amounts of overall body fat are burned, your stomach will begin to shrink, because these larger muscles require enough energy (some of which comes from stored body fat) to pull this energy from your stomach. So if you subject large, force-generating muscles to a vigorous workout, these muscles will require a lot of energy to recover.

Some of this energy will be taken from stored body fat, which includes the fat in one’s stomach. Crunching can be part of an overall training program for core strengthening, but when it comes to flattening the stomach, crunching will not work.

A fitness boot camp can be offered in a variety of designs, such as an ongoing class offered at a gym or health club at the same time and day every week, and participants simply drop in.  Check out our Chino Hills boot camp for the complete experience.

Another format may be a several-week course, in which the class meets once or twice a week, sometimes indoors and sometimes outdoors, and sometimes both.

A third format is when a personal trainer recruits a small group and runs a fitness boot camp every week or twice a week just for this group, and the sessions may take place outdoors or inside on the gym floor (and its track).

What goes on during a fitness boot camp?

The exciting thing about a fitness boot camp is the variety of drills and the never-a-dull-moment atmosphere. Typical boot camp indoor routines include:

• Quick change-of-direction drills such as wind sprints. The participant runs as fast as possible to a given point, then sprints back in the opposite direction, then runs back to a further point, and so on.
• Agility drills such as weaving between cones, stutter steps, running backwards, bear-crawling, crab-walking, and leaping onto unstable surfaces and then off of them
• Jumping drills (plyometrics). These may combine agility, such as leaping off of unstable surfaces (such as BOSU boards), or lateral hopping over objects. Often, jumping drills involve hopping over a series of obstacles, and other exercises such as pushups may be thrown in between jumps. Other plyometrics may involve squat jumps, hopping on one leg and successive broad jumps.
• Bodyweight drills, such as pushups and wall-sits. Participants may be instructed to sprint from one end of a gymnasium to the other, then do a series of pushups at the end, then sprint back and conclude with a set of squat-jumps.
• Stepping routines, such as stepping onto and off of a high stool
• Weights. Dumbbells, kettlebells and even light barbells may be used while the participant runs, steps or jumps, though traditional weight routines are also sometimes incorporated, like dumbbell shoulder presses in between other drills.
• Abdominal routines

An outdoor fitness boot camp can get more creative:

• Pull-ups done off of sturdy tree branches or playground bars
• Plyometrics involving hills or natural obstacles like boulders (leaping onto and off; or leaping from one boulder in a manmade lineup to the next)
• Sprinting up and down hills
• Other hill workouts such as going up and down sideways; hopping up and down; going up and down while in a squatting position, etc.
• Staircase drills. Many architecturally rich areas are loaded with all sorts of stairs that can be run up and down, or hopped up and down.
• Climbing. The boot camp instructor needs to be careful about climbing assignments in particular, since climbing is not as innate an ability as is running or jumping. A boot camp class may include climbing trees or large rock structures, while keeping relatively close to the ground. These kind of drills are not common, however, in a boot camp, due to the safety factor.

Often in a fitness boot camp, participants work in pairs or small teams. Some examples:

• Leap frogging
• Running side-by-side while throwing a medicine ball back and forth
• Races in which one person holds a partner’s legs, while the other person walks on hands to the finish line
• Relay races that can consist of straight sprinting; bear-crawling; duck-walking; burlap-bag hopping, or whatever the instructor thinks up of

It’s very common for a fitness boot camp class to include races in every session, either on an individual level or in a group set-up. Obstacle courses are also common, and may include an obstacle that is to be vaulted over.

The atmosphere of a fitness boot camp class tends to be very supportive and highly motivating, since many of the drills are reminiscent of childhood activities (e.g., racing, jumping, throwing), and often, a boot camp class or course is comprised of a variety of fitness levels.

People who are not in the best physical condition can still participate in a fitness boot camp session. Instructors, though usually hard-driven, loud and the “in-your-face” type, also realize that the No. 1 reason people sign up for boot camp classes is to lose fat and/or get “whipped” into shape.

So if a participant lags behind the others (runs slow, must step off to the side often to catch his or her breath, can’t make the jumps), the instructor – as well as fitter participants – fully understand that not everyone will be in tip top condition, and there is no judging or penalties.

However, there are fitness boot camps, courses or week-to-week sessions that are designated for beginners, intermediate and advanced. Some boot camps also specialize in certain exercises, or place extra emphasis on them, such as an all-lower body boot camp; or one with a heavy focus on agility and speed.

A fitness boot camp may also be aimed towards preparation for a specific sport, such as a boot camp designed to get participants in condition for skiing or for triathlon competition. Drills in these classes will be sports-specific, such as using unstable surfaces for a ski conditioning class.

Do not let the term “boot camp” intimidate you. Think of it as a way to really get your money’s worth and be surrounded by excitement, fun and participants who will motivate and encourage you. After a fitness boot camp class, you will feel very worked, yet very energized and will want to keep coming back.

Long periods of time in between meals or snacks will slow down your metabolism. This is why you probably know a lot of people who insist that they eat only one or two meals a day, yet can’t shed a single pound and remain much overweight.

It is not always true that such men and women eat one or two gargantuan meals a day. Many actually eat normal portions at their one or two meals, yet remain plus-sized, husky or suffer with rolls of fat in their middles.

It is a proven fact: Eating every two to three hours is necessary for optimizing your resting metabolism. It seems natural to skip meals if you want to lose weight, especially if you became hefty from frequent snacking.

But it is not the frequency that made you fat. It is the total amount of food consumed; too many calories for your activity level, and those unused calories ended up getting stored as fat.

Does eating every two to three hours mean shove anything down your throat as long as you don’t let more than three hours lapse in between eating?

If you are going to eat every two to three hours, it is by far best to do this with a solid game plan behind it. The recommendation of eating every two to three hours is not a green light for habitually snacking on ice cream bars, brownies, candy, sodas, fast food and potato chips.

If you eat every two to three hours, this will reduce your cravings for nutrient-scarce high-calorie foods like cupcakes, cookies and processed junk foods like frozen pancakes.

Why does eating every two to three hours result in a faster resting metabolism?

Metabolism is your body’s use of oxygen to carry out all sorts of physiological processes. To do this, the body requires energy, and this comes from food. Too much food means unused energy that is stored as fat.

Or, to put it another way, too slow of a resting metabolic rate means unused energy being converted to fat – even if you are not eating that much!

It works like this: When you eat every two to three hours, the body learns to expect food on a recurring, frequent basis. The body knows that food is coming soon. Therefore, the body doesn’t mind releasing stored fat in the form of energy. There is no need to hang onto stored fat (fuel source), if the body knows that another feeding is just around the corner.

And to the body, “just around the corner” means within three hours.

However, suppose you let long periods of time slide in between eating. Your body will think that a famine is occurring and will cling tightly to stored fat – stored fat in your stomach, thighs and anywhere where fat has a tendency to build up in your body.

So even though YOU know that at 8 p.m. you will finally be able to sit down to a meal (your last feeding was at 1 p.m.), your body has no idea that food eventually will be coming. Your body then goes into what is known as starvation mode, and will not want to let go or release any stored fuel (body fat).

As a result, a person who skips meals and goes for long periods of time without so much as an apple or cup of yogurt will end up suffering from a slowed-down resting metabolism.

Many people in this predicament will not understand what is going on, and will go even longer without food, thinking that will correct the problem. Instead it will make it even worse. You end up hungry all the time, miserable and staying fat.

Now, some dieters report not being very hungry and for that reason, will figure why not go ahead and skip meals. But even if you are not hungry, you need to eat every two or three hours!

It may seem that the slowed metabolism is a flaw in the way the human body works. Actually, this is an ingenious move by nature to protect the human body from the ravages of a real famine. Primitive man ate very irregularly and unpredictably because he had to hunt for his food.

The human machine learned to adapt to this by holding onto stored fat, so that during times of famine, the body had some fuel reserves from which to subsist on—until the next hunting trip was successful.

This is one reason that early mankind survived, because early mankind was continuously faced with long periods of no food.

This clever design by nature, however, is a curse to modern-day peoples. The modern human body is identical to that of early man and woman. It remains hardwired to hold onto fat reserves (i.e., a slower metabolism) when food intake is unpredictable.

Modern man becomes overweight as a result of going long stretches in between eating, because our industrialized lifestyle is characterized by excessive sitting and few moments of physical exercise! In the case of ancient peoples, their lifestyle of generous physical activity offset any slowed metabolisms!

Eating every two to three hours will keep the fire stoked. Going long periods of time without eating will make the fire sizzle out.

Eating every two to three hours means reasonably portioned helpings of nutritious food, rather than mindless indulging. Most of the feedings should consist of fruits, vegetables and whole-grain-based foods.

Eating every two to three hours begins with breakfast, but the breakfast should not be one of those giant meals you see advertised by dining chains on TV.

If you are struggling to lose weight, start eating every two to three hours and you’ll love what happens.

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