Eating at different times of day- DOES IT MATTER?

To help control blood sugar and insulin levels it its important to eat several times throughout the day, including breakfast. If you divide breakfast into two works it becomes a BREAK from your FAST. So yes, it does matter.

I admit that I'm no expert and am new to all this also but it seems to make sense that you would want to eat the bulk of your calories during the day when you're more active and able to "burn them off" even through just normal activity. I would think that if you ate a few hundred calories and then went to bed, they wouldn't get burned off. Does this explanation make sense? It makes sense in my head but I'm not sure how to put it into words!

According to what I have read the latest science says no.
Your body is smart. It knows how much energy you give it not just today but generally. If there is no fuel it quite happily switches to stored fuel (glycogen and fat) for a while without freaking out on you. If you eat the same amount of calories late at night compared to early in the morning this is what happens, when you wake up, you start moving, the blood gets flowing, this tells your body to ramp up metabolism, you get out of bed too and to warm you up the body is forced to again heat you up a bit (that said if you are prone to feeling cold even an hour after waking up if you don't eat, eating a bit to warm you up is a good idea). Until you eat, it uses stored calories, when you finally eat it for the most part replenishes the stores with that food, and burns a little bit of the food.

Eating late at night is not bad as people think, what happens is that people who eat a lot at night often ate also during the day, and then they're bored at night and spend the whole time nibbling, its the total calories that matters. Likewise with breakfast, if you eat a bit of breakfast that might help get you going IF you are the kind of person who needs it, but if you don't feel hungry in the mornings and don't need food to warm you up, its fine not to eat until you do feel hungry.

If you didn't eat much in the day then have lots of food after 8pm or whatever, all that happens is the energy used in the day from stores is restored from the food (as much as is contained in the food). If you'd eaten earlier instead you'd have used that energy instead of taking it from storage, so its the same either way.

personally I don't think it matters. I have lost weight even with eating right before bed. The calories matter more than what time but a nutrionist did say to me that it is best to eat every 2 to 3 hours to keep your body full and going.

My take is this, in the big picture it does not matter. The ONLY thing that matters is what works for you and what you can sustain for enough time to lose the weight you want and then maintain that lose over your lifetime. You can get into all the specifics of blood sugar and this and that, but I have done a ridulous amount of research and for every credible article you can find me that tells you X I can find another credible article that tells you Y, it's ridiculous.

So seriously find a system that works for you, don't question it and rock on! Good luck!

I think that, and people not bothering to look at the research that makes people say "In my opinion" so much in answer to these questions.

No, it is my opinion because it is what worked for me. I used to be one of those people who didn't eat anything until the end of the day due to my work schedule. It was that eating pattern which put 33 pounds on my small frame. It may not work for everyone to break their meals out into smaller portions throughout the day... thus the reference to "my opinion". For every research article written which says it doesn't matter, there are equally as many that say the opposite. With that said, I agree that each individual must experiment with what kind of meal plan works for them.