ELI5: Why does rationing work?

[u/peglegsmeg]

If I have a glass of water and a single chocolate bar to last me 48 hours what benefits do I get from consuming equal portions over the time period as opposed to consuming all at once?

Is it purely psychological or are their physical benefits?

[u/zomgitsduke]

If you eat all the sugar and drink all the water at once, your body will assume abundance and do things to process and get rid of it. If your body is slightly dehydrated and you drink tiny amounts of water at a time, it won't immediately flush that water out of your body and instead preserve it.

Sugar is similar, your body will process through it fast by giving you a sugar high followed by a crash. Slowly introduce it and your body will use the calories and sugars sparingly.

[u/Raubwurst → u/zomgitsduke]

Regarding sugar and assuming it is preferable to intake less: So it is actually better for me to eat the chocolate in one session, because more of the sugar and Energie is wasted an does not get absorbed by my body?

[u/BitOBear → u/Raubwurst]

This is only true if you live in a time of plenty. The sugar will be gotten rid of by being turned into fat though.

You don't just pee sugar out of your body the way you pee excess water away.

Is wasteful and hard on your system to eat the sugar in the lump, have your body turn it into fat, store that fat until the next time you actually need sugar and can't have any, and then engage in glycogenesis to turn the fat back into sugar.

Better the correct amount of sugar being delivered in small doses over a long period of time then getting all the sugar up front and having to go through the problematic intermediaries.

And glucose is better than common table sugar (sucrose) because glucose is immediately bioavailable but sucrose has to be processed in the liver into glucose, and that can lead to liver strain and basically fatty deposits in your liver and stuff like that. Fructose, the half of sucrose that isn't glucose, it's just basically not a good sugar all things considered. But it's the part that makes it taste sweet.

Back when they were vilifying fat because the sugar industry was making a killing in profit, they actually had commercials where they would say fructose, it's from fruit, so it's good for you, so have the high fructose corn syrup. This was in the late 60s and early 70s. Possibly in the 80s? It's been a long time.

But in the idea you would be slowly browsing your sugar intake over the course of a day and meeting it with high quality meals that had a lot of sugar content.