The Importance of Three Square Meals a Day

Breakfast

It’s an interesting fact that if you had a plate of cereal for your evening meal you’d think you hadn’t eaten much. Yet people often tell me that they have a bowl of cornflakes for breakfast every morning, maybe even followed by a piece of fruit, and – 10 and behold! – they’re hungry again by mid-morning! Is anybody surprised?

Breakfast is a main meal. You probably don’t allow the same time for it that you do for dinner, but you should. Those extra minutes in bed aren’t needed if you eat properly the night before, and if you can’t wake up in the morning and feel woolly-headed, you didn’t eat enough the night before. Low blood sugar is a prime cause of restlessness in the early hours and the inability to wake up in the morning. If you eat two good meals a day, you won’t suffer this again.

Breakfast is your high-carbohydrate, high-protein first main meal of the day and you must eat within an hour of waking. This is what I recommend:

Bread – eat bread at this meal, but not at any other. You can only have it with a protein addition like an egg or some cheese. You should also have a banana.

Oats – you can have oats in any form, but you need to add nuts, seeds and banana to an oat-based cereal.

Don’t try to last out on a quick slice of toast and marmalade. If you’re rushing, get up twenty minutes earlier. If you can’t get up early because you’re always shattered from the night before, go to bed earlier!

Lunch

‘Lunch is for wimps’ was a popular cry of the swaggering classes in the 1980s and 90s. It sounded clever, and anyway, they never actually went without lunch; they were usually found some time later on the city streets, slurping something from a can, a paper wrapper round their cheeks as they crammed in a gargantuan sandwich. They didn’t miss lunch. They were just too scared of their reputations as hard men to be seen eating it.

Always stop for lunch. People often complain that they don’t have time for lunch, but that is putting yourself and your physical needs second, or even third, in your priorities, and you mustn’t do that.

Lunch is a light meal, high in fibre and water content – these are the most important weapons against cellulite. You have two main choices for lunch, the Cellulite Buster Big Salad or cottage cheese and fruit salad. The basic Big Salad has a list of protein additions which you can rotate according to your mood. You’ll can assemble the basic ingredients at the weekend, and then simply scoop out your lunch serving every day. It is an easy meal to transport in snap-shut containers to eat at work, on a train, in the park or, of course, you can eat it at home in the usual way. Cottage cheese and fruit salad works in the same way and, as you will have had a good breakfast, this meal simply keeps you going for those few hours in the afternoon and early evening before you have dinner, without burdening you with calories or indigestible fats and sugars. You won’t get the 4 o’clock slumps with a Big Salad!

Make sure you drink at least a large glass of water as well as your normal tea or coffee or whatever you like to have with lunch. But you won’t feel hungry because of your substantial breakfast and the promise of dinner. Don’t munch on something while continuing to work.

Dinner

Dinner is your re-fueling meal. Your stocks of fuel are kept in your muscles, primed for the next bit of action. At the end of the day your stocks are empty, like the supermarket shelves after a busy Saturday. Eating now will re-stock, just as a delivery in the supermarket will go straight to the shelves, not the storeroom. You might be relaxing, but while you catch up on the TV programmes, your body is re-fueling as fast as it can. It has to see you through the evening and right through the night, and waking in the night is often a sign that you didn’t re-stock properly, with a good, mixed carbohydrate and protein meal.

Your dinner isn’t massive, but it is substantial. You can eat potatoes at this meal if you choose. If you prefer other starchy vegetables, fine, and if you can go through the night without needing extra carbohydrate fine too. When you get to Phase Two you’ll find it still allows for.some potatoes, but it’s up to you whether you have them or not. Dinner will also contain one very high protein element, such as salmon or chicken. Sugar and sweet desserts are completely banned, but there’s a pleasant surprise in the addition of a cheese course.

Dinner has two courses as you would expect, but there are three options:

- savoury starter and main course

- main course and pudding

- main course and savoury afters with an optional extra dessert course for special occasions or waning willpower!