Doctors today say that the best diet - as in way to eat - is to eat six small meals a day. This helps keep your body going throughout the day & spaces out the intake of needed vitamins & nutrients. No matter what, you need to eat at least three solid meals a day or you set yourself up for metabolic problems. I know you didn't ask but I want to share my own story with you in order to highlight what can happen if you don't eat enough...it should help you to understand how important it is:
I've been overweight most of my life but, until a few years ago, did not know that this was due to a metabolic condition rather than just eating too much. My problem was that I would literally forget to eat &, on a normal day, could only be counted on to eat one meal. Though I was extremely overweight, I was never hungry & always thought that if I ate less meals, I would shock my system into losing weight.
Well, I shocked my system alright. Not only did I develop diabetes as an outgrowth of the other metabolic conditions but I messed up my system so bad that there is a chance I will never be able to have children. Why? Because I starved my body of the proper proteins & nutrients for so long that it might not ever recover. The effects of years of mistreating my body in this manner - without even realizing I was doing it - even extend to the fact that I recently had to have all of my teeth pulled; having not gotten the proper balance of proteins, etc over all of those years, my teeth literally wasted away in my mouth! I can assure you that none of this has been fun & I am not making a single thing up just to get my point across.
It has taken my literally years now to even attempt to get myself back in shape. The diagnosis of diabetes scared me silly & I knew I needed to make some significant changes to take whatever precautions I could to live a long & happy life with my husband. I've since learned that you have to eat to live & be healthy. I eat anything I want, including sugar, but I do so in moderation & always with a mind to what I am eating & when I get full. It took me years to teach myself how to know when I was hungry &, honestly, I still have some times that I eat only because I know I need to do so. I have lost over 150 lbs. in the past few years doing just this & the effects have been amazing. I no longer show any signs of diabetes &, although I miscarried, actually got pregnant & kept it for a number of months. At this point we are hoping that my body heals itself in enough time to beat the ticking of my biological clock :)
The point here is that you can do some terrible things to your body without even realizing it & the effects of these things can be much more far-reaching than you might ever think. If you want to live a nice long life, have children & be healthy, you need to start taking control of it now. Not doing this same thing when I was younger has caused me more heartache than I ever considered possible. Had I not ignored the signs of what was happening to me - through missed periods & feeling tired all of the time - I might not be in the recovery stage that I am today. Please don't let the same thing happen to you...