Why you might need to rethink eating 6 meals per day!

I eat 5 meals a day. Not because I think that magically boosts my metabolism or makes it so I lose weight faster compared to if I had eaten the same amount of food in two meals...no. I eat 5 meals a day because that is what makes me most comfortable and satiated throughout the day.

Its personal preference and no in my case I don't have to rethink it.

You seem to be using a study in which people ate over maintenance to compare to a group of people who are eating under maintenance. I don't see the relevance.

I can understand how you missed it in that wall of text, but you're incorrect:

Yet studies show no advantage to frequent grazing. One eight-week study in The British Journal of Nutrition divided 16 obese men and women into two camps. Both received the same number of calories daily. One group ate those calories as three meals and three snacks. The other ate them as three meals but no snacks.

I believe in CICO, but I find these kinds of studies interesting.

I am not incorrect you misunderstood my post. When I said "a group eating below maintenance" the group I was referring to was us. The study was two groups both eating ABOVE maintenance. I was saying it was a mistake to suggest a study of people above maintenance would be meaningful for those below maintenance.

A study recently published in the journal Hepatology increased caloric intake of 36 lean, healthy men a whopping 40 percent for six weeks. These men received those increased calories through meal size or meal frequency. In other words, some men ate bigger meals, and others got those excess calories through smaller meals and snacking.

I did not say both groups didn't receive the same calorically, I said they both ate over maintenance because they did. The study was a study of people eating over maintenance. You cannot just assume the same applies to people eating under maintenance.

Apparently, I skimmed too. I didn't see the first study.

I think the second study is more valid though since they had both groups eating the same amount, but just spaced the eating differently. It's kind of obvious in the first study that if people are eating over maintenance, they will gain weight.

But the result of that study was just good ole CICO as far as I can tell, meaning for weight loss meal timing doesn't matter.

Being a reduced-calorie diet, both groups lost weight. However, researchers found no fat loss advantage to eating more often.

I'm not saying studies aren't interesting, I'm just meaning there is nothing particularly new here. That result is what you would predict from CICO and CICO is pretty much what MFP is based on and what I think we are all essentially doing here.

The other studies talking about "increased hunger" which is going to be subjective and personal and cannot just be applied to everyone.

I eat 5 meals a day. Not because I think that magically boosts my metabolism or makes it so I lose weight faster compared to if I had eaten the same amount of food in two meals...no. I eat 5 meals a day because that is what makes me most comfortable and satiated throughout the day.

Its personal preference and no in my case I don't have to rethink it.

You seem to be using a study in which people ate over maintenance to compare to a group of people who are eating under maintenance. I don't see the relevance.

I can understand how you missed it in that wall of text, but you're incorrect:

Yet studies show no advantage to frequent grazing. One eight-week study in The British Journal of Nutrition divided 16 obese men and women into two camps. Both received the same number of calories daily. One group ate those calories as three meals and three snacks. The other ate them as three meals but no snacks.

I believe in CICO, but I find these kinds of studies interesting.

So the TL;DR is: do what works for you?

Unfortunately the truth of healthy weight loss is pitifully boring.

All things in moderation, get your nutrients, eat at a calorie deficit, exercise for fitness. This is far to boring to hold most peoples attention (I include myself in that most people) so we complicate things and microanalyze things. I might learn new things daily or come to question things I previously thought were true but at the end of the day i will still be eating at a calorie deficit and exercising.

Eating smaller meals works for me. It helps me avoid binging because I am never starving for food. I do ensure I eat healthy snacks such as fruit/veggies/low fat yogurt etc.. That being said I see a lot of people snacking on what they think is healthy food such as granols bars and such and I can surely see that they would eat their calorie allowance up fairly quick . What people snack on is important but I also believe that doing what works for you is what everyone needs to do.

The whole idea that hunger is bad and dangerous and that you should be eating all throughout the day is junk science and has been from the get go.

So are many other dieting "truths". But hey, Big Food makes a killing off perpetuating the myth that the average person needs snacks and "mini-meals" to survive throughout their day. And people who love to eat are only too happy to oblige.

When I am on my period, I eat 5-6 smaller meals, because if I don't, I get too lightheaded. I have lost 34 pounds, and have about 13 to go.

I dislike studies like this, because they don't seem scientific. I'm waiting for one that says "Overweight people drink water, so water causes weight gain"

So, I'm gonna keep on keepin' on, because it works for me.

We had a guest lecturer in a nutrition class whose study wasn't published yet that said the opposite for female Olympic figure skaters. Just yesterday I rewatched the video and was reading thru the notes and slides. I'll post some later.

My name is Dan Benardot.
I'm a professor in the Department of
Nutrition at Georgia State University

let's look at what the science says
about strategies for decreasing body fat.
First, let's think about some realities.
Body weight and body fat are very tightly
regulated.
Recent energy regulation research reveals
that the role of insulin, the hormone
leptin, and the hormone ghrelin are very
important in energy regulation.
Insulin is a long-term regulator of
energy balance, food intake, and fatness,
adiposity.
And, glucose metabolism in adipose tissue
plays a role in leptin concentrations.
Deficits in the production of leptin,
have been shown to increase fatness, or
adiposity in humans.
And the enteric hormone ghrelin acts as
an appetite stimulating hormone and has
been implicated in both short and
long-term appetite, food intake, and body
weight regulation.

blah blah

it's been found that subject who skip
breakfast as adults had significantly
higher waist circumference and body mass
indexes.

blah blah

We're going to look at how energy
imbalances during the day can impact
weight.
The traditional view is that you would
look at the total energy consumed.
That is, the total energy caloric
consumption over 24 hours of a person,
than you'd look at the total energy
expenditure over that same 24 hours for a
person, and look at the ratio of those
two values.
If over the course of the day, 24 hours a
person consume, let's say 2,000 calories
and they burn 2,000 calories, then you
would say they are in perfect energy
balance.

When you look at energy balance, but in a
more microeconomic view instead of the
macroeconomic view of the full 24 hours
in the day.
In fact, when you take a microeconomic
view, you realize that what you're
assessing is one simple transitional
point over the course of a day.
You're not measuring what happens to
energy balance at all over the course of
the day, you're just taking one point in
the day and saying, this point will tell
us everything we need to know about a
person's energy balance.

blah

we've been studying the time that a
person spends in an energy deficit, the
time that a person spends in an energy
balance surplus, how big the energy
surplus is or how big the energy balance
deficit is.
And what we found is that the time spent
in an energy deficit and the magnitude of
that deficit, the time spent in an energy
balance surplus and how big the surplus
is, it's a very big difference in what
the obesity outcomes will be for that
person.

This guy talked for 2.5 hours and was monotone. The information was amazing. He concentrated on athletes but addressed the obesity epidemic and had an interesting study on people in a retirement home. I just wish I was able to attend the office hours and ask questions.

I highly recommend taking online nutrition classes. This one was from Vanderbilt on Coursera.org

edit to fix img

Food for thought.
Thanks for posting this. :flowerforyou:

Currently, I'm eating an average of 4 meals per day but I'm going to try eating 3. I'll just add what I eat at my 4th meal to lunch or dinner and extend the time between my meals.

Much of my need to eat stems from food cues and not actual hunger.