Eating Very Little Throughout The Day

Q: hello, Mike... I know you are not gonna like this question, but anyway... I wanna ask if by eating very little but throughout the day, not only once, and exercising, cardio and weights, if there will be a fat loss or just temporary weight loss, if it was performed for some time... I also wanna ask if doing weight training every day could change it to cardio, or if it could become less efficient or so... thank you...

A: Eating small amounts throughout the day can actually work just fine, assuming that altogether they still add up to a reasonable amount of calories and nutrients. If you like and have the time, you can certainly break up your daily intake into 10 or even more meals per day. But the key is to make sure that overall you are still eating enough -- try filling out my Fitness Guide for a ballpark idea of how much you should be eating and then break it up into as many small meals as you like.

As far as doing weight training every day... If you are doing heavy to-failure weight training (12 or fewer reps in set to muscular failure and 10 or more sets per day), then doing it daily will sooner or later lead to overtraining. Your body, both your muscles and your nervous system, need time to recover from heavy weight training bouts and vast majority of people will burn out doing it daily for too long. Overtraining leads to any or all of the following: injuries, loss of strength, loss of appetite, insomnia, irritability, lack of progress in losing fat or building muscle.

In short, you do NOT want to overtrain, so you almost certainly will not want to do heavy weight training daily for any length of time. Even if you do light weight training like circuit training, which is closer to cardio, it is usually still not a good idea to do it daily.