The Second Meal of the Day

Meal #2 should follow 2 ½ -3 hours after breakfast, which in most schedules falls around 9-10:30AM. This meal is important; it will keep you from overeating at lunch. Now I don’t advise anyone to call any meal a snack, because you will be consuming an amount that resembles your other meals. No matter what time of day you want your plate to have:
Lean protein (4-6 oz) – Meats, fish, beans
Fibrous carbs (4-6 oz) - Vegetables
Starchy carbs (4-6 oz) – Potatoes, rice, pasta

Now this is where things can get tricky if you are not prepared. So just think for a minute, do you still feel like breakfast food at 9AM or can you stand eating something that you might have for lunch or dinner? There is no wrong answer; I just want you to have all the little bits of information about yourself. Me, I could go either way. Oatmeal and almonds sound good, but so does salmon and broccoli. If you still have breakfast on the mind maybe you should eat some of the left over breakfast that you did not throw away, but packed in a nice little container for just such an occasion. Now if breakfast is you thing I suggest making extra in the morning (*time saver*) pack it up and take it with you if you are at work or out and about making those deals.

Now say you are not a breakfast eater so eating it twice is not your cup of tea. My next suggestion is to eat the left overs from last night’s dinner (*time saver*). You will learn that making just a little extra will be a bonus for a following meal. Maybe last night you ate out and you were served a plate of food and you’re not sure what 4-6 oz of food looks like. Well you do, you just don’t know you do. 4-6 oz of food looks like the size of a deck of playing cards. So if you eat out most restaurants will serve an 8 oz serving. Cut that in half and now you have made two meals. Ask for a “to go” box with your dinner, put half in the box and the other half you eat there (I have the patent on this move). Now you have something for your second meal of the day.

The key thing to start reminding yourself to read labels. Find out how much a serving size is for whatever it is you are eating. It takes 20 minutes for the stomach to signal the brain that we are full. Most of our lives are so busy that if we took twenty minutes to eat 5 -6 a day, we might as well pack up our gear and go home, because that would mean game over, some one else beat us to the punch. But if you have a pre-measured serving size then there are no worries about time or overeating.