Your biggest meal of the day ?

I tend to have big dinners but thats how it was growing up. I'm trying to transition to smaller dinners and make better use of my calories. Making lunches bigger to support me through my early evening work out.

I think your biggest meal should be breakfast, that way you will burn it off during the day and it gets your body up and running. If you make your dinner the biggest meal, you wont burn as much calorie because following dinner its usually bedtime...

I'd say yes, make your earlier meals bigger so you can digest and burn them off during the day.

I have noticed that I have been making dinner my biggest meal of the day.
Normally I get home and still have 800-900 calories remaining.
So I end up using them up for dinner and snacks.

I am wondering if it would be better to use up more of those calories before I get home, so it forces me to have a smaller dinner and less snacks before bed time.

Thoughts?

Your metabolism slows down at night especially when you are sleeping. I try to keep the day balanced (more or less an OCD symptom) however I would consider a few things when approaching this topic. Are you going hungry throughout the day, or are you eating those remaining calories just because you have them to spare? Maybe neither applies to you, but if nighttime is your favored time of consuming, try to make those calories the healthy ones.

I would agree, I try to eat most of my calories for breakfast and lunch and have a smaller meal for dinner and try not to have any evening snacks. My nutritionist told me that I should try to not eat after 6PM and that it will really boost weight loss (which is not always feasable for me because sometimes I don't get home until 6:30 or 7:00) but I try my best to make it work.

Hope that helps! :flowerforyou:

I always had this problem bc I have little time for lunch at work. But since I started using this website to calculate my calories I try to eat a bigger meal for lunch & it helps me that I work ten hour days so I have little time to eat when I get home bc I have to do my workout. I've only been working on my weight for two weeks now so I'm not sure if it makes a difference but I seem to be loosing weight. Good luck

Timing of meals/calories is far, far less important than meeting your calorie goal and macros for the day. Let me see if I can find the article for you....

Mine is dinner, but it is not really my ideal. Big breakfasts or lunches work best for me individually. However, it doesn't work that way for DH, so we try and compromise a few days a week. Depends on activities for the day.

Mine are generally spread pretty evenly throughout the day. I just eat every couple of hours. I don't go any longer than 3 hours without snacking on something otherwise I don't feel right and become sluggish.

I've had the most success when lunch is my biggest meal. I eat breakfast and that gets me thru my workout, then a small snack and at mid day I have a big lunch. It feels so good to feel like I worked for something big and something that I really enjoy.... Then I have a small dinner. Lately it's just been a protein shake for dinner. There are a couple more snacks in between there. I think I've trained myself not to be that hungry at dinner time, and the pounds are coming off much better than ever before. Also, my workouts are more productive and I wake up feeling great about myself.

Dinner is my biggest meal. I'm pretty sure this is not the healthiest choice. Some of this is because I am trying to eat my exercise calories on the day I burn them and I don't always know the if/when/how long when the day starts. If I know I am going to burn 600+ calories in a day I eat a much more caloric breakfast. I also eat dinner with the family and it is hard not to eat most of what they are eating and they are eating foods higher in calories. I snack much more on days I exercise to spread the calories out.

I always struggled making it from a bowl of cereal to snack time three hour later. So I made breakfast bigger. A full breakfast meal has been my best dieting tool. I'm barely hungry by time for snack, so I eat less. Which makes me eat less at lunch...and so on throughout the day.

I don't always have time to make a full breakfast, so I've begun scrambling a dozen eggs on Sunday and eating a 2 egg size portion off of them for the whole week. Add in a little turkey sausage or bacon and that protein will keep you going for awhile. :-)

I spread my calories out during the day but dinner is my biggest meal. I eat "regular" food with my family and it hasn't hurt me any and since my son doesn't get home from swim practice until 7:15, we often don't eat until 7:30 at night. I'm usually finished eating for the day by 8:30.

Mine are generally spread pretty evenly throughout the day.

Same here, and I exercise at night so even if I decided to have a larger meal for dinner, I wouldn't see a problem with it.

I think this is personal choice/preference as well as what works for you. I tend to have my biggest meal at the end of the day, the caveat being, not eating after 6:30. If there are situations where I know I'm going to have a bigger lunch, then my dinner will be smaller and vice versa. I hear people say that breakfast should be the biggest meal but I also think that has to be dependent on what you do in the day. I think having a desk job, if breakfast were my biggest meal, it would be the kiss of death. So, you may want to experiment and see if one way works better for you than another.