It may sound like the latest diet fad, but it’s anything but that. The new science of losing weight has hit the streets, and it flies in the face of everything our mothers taught us about three square meals a day. Because when it comes to healthy eating, especially eating with a view toward losing weight, the news is in: the best route to that goal is through the speeding up on one’s metabolism, rather than a focus on calorie reduction. Because metabolism embraces both sides of the calories equation – reducing what comes in, and increasing the rate at which we burn what comes in. Here’s the skinny on how to become skinny doing it this way:

There’s no mystery about how to lose weight: you need to consume fewer calories each day than you burn during that day. And there are only three choices available to get the job done – you can reduce the calories you take in, or you can increase your activity so you will burn more calories. The third choice is to do both, and in this case one plus one definitely equals three.

The new conventional wisdom of losing weight is to eat five or six healthy but smaller meals per day instead of the three squares we are used to eating. By spacing these meals two to three hours apart, and by making sure each meal offers a balance of protein, complex carbohydrates and good fats, the body undergoes a metabolic shift that results in quicker and easier weight loss and a more efficient weight management challenge going forward.

When someone decides to lose body fat whether it is for summer, an event or simply to improve their health, one of the first changes they consider making is to their eating habits. Once the decision is made, the next step taken is to research their possible diet options. This may involve speaking with people, reading magazine articles or visiting their local book store in order to find the ‘holy grail’ of diets- the diet that is guaranteed to shed fat off their body quickly and with little effort.

The human body is a incredibly good at adapting to change. It does what it needs to do to protect and heal itself. Understanding this is the key to everything about losing weight. Because weight loss and weight gain are both adaptations on the part of the body to a change in what it is used to. What changes is the amount of calories that arrive to provide the requisite nutrition, and when the body perceives the pipeline is shutting down, it wants to hoard its fat stores in case of impending starvation. It follows, then, that if we could change the manner in which the body makes these adaptive changes, in addition to managing the calories themselves, we would once and for all be able to stop dieting and simply manage our weight through our ability to adapt to the amount and quality of the food we take in.