Hello and welcome to the Nutrition Divopod Past. I'm your host, Monica Reinigel, and this

week we're talking about whether eating more often can help you burn more calories. Despite

the recent popularity of intermittent fasting, there's still a widespread belief that eating

every two or three hours will help you lose weight by keeping your metabolism stoked up,

conversely, that going too long between meals will cause your metabolism to slow down. I think one

of the reasons that these notions have gotten so much traction is that people haul out some really

scientific sounding explanations that seem well very scientific and therefore believable. There are

two basic arguments that you'll hear to support this claim and we'll tackle them one at a time.

The first goes like this. Your body, when deprived of food for a period of time, will go into

quote-unquote starvation mode. This is when the body burns fewer calories in order to conserve

energy just in case the food shortage continues. Now, during a famine, you'd need to live on your

stored fat and down regulating your metabolism is a way to make those fat stores go a bit further.

It's sort of similar to the way your laptop adjusts its energy usage when it's running on batteries

by making your screen a little bit dimmer, for example. When food is plentiful again, your metabolism

goes back to normal just the way your screen gets brighter when you plug your laptop back in.

If there were actually a famine, you'd be so glad that your body is designed this way. But if you're

trying to lose weight, the last thing you want is increased fuel efficiency. You want to be burning

through stored fat like an RV burns through a tank of gas. So the trick is to reassure your body

that there is no shortage of food by eating every few hours. And then your body will oblige you

by continuing to burn calories with reckless metabolic abandon. Or so the story goes. It makes sense,

doesn't it? And it's sort of true. Your body does respond to a prolonged fast by slowing your

metabolism to conserve energy. Here's the thing though, your body doesn't go into starvation mode

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