Eating when hungry not when it's "meal time"

I eat when I am hungry. Some mornings this means I drink a cup of coffee at 5 am and don’t eat until 9-10am. Other mornings I might actually be hungry at 6 or 7am. Sometimes this is tied to when my last meal/snack was the night before. If I stopped eating at 6pm than I am more likely to want breakfast, but if the last thing I ate was around 10pm I am more likely to skip breakfast. I still have to watch portion sizes, but forcing myself to eat when I am not hungry causes me to over eat.

I changed my meal names in my food diary to “Meal 1,” “Meal 2,” etc. to help get me out of the traditional breakfast/lunch/dinner mindset.

When I saw “dinner,” I would think, “it’s 6pm—time to eat.” Even if I wasn’t really hungry. Same thing for other meals.

Simple trick, but for me, effective. The generic meal names also made it not matter what was a “meal” and what was a “snack” and in what order they occurred.

For me, a lot of weight loss (and maintenance) is a mental game.

lauragreenbaum wrote: »

In the US, the standard accepted meal pattern is breakfast, lunch and dinner, with dinner being the largest meal. I have realized we all accept this as the norm, but my body's hunger doesn't work that way. I am never hungry before 10 am, so tend to skip breakfast and just have juice with my fiber supplement. I am hungriest right around 11 am-12pm and want my largest meal then. I'm usually only mildly hungry at "dinner time" so have a small dinner, not the big dinners I grew up with. I feel like I grew up thinking I had to adjust my body to the norm- breakfast right after waking up, medium sized lunch, big dinner. I now adjust the meals to my hunger level and I don't worry about what time it is and that it's "too early" for lunch, or that I can't have eggs for dinner. Sometimes I eat a very large lunch and don't eat dinner at all. I know some of it is societal- we eat meals together as families or groups so some set times make sense. But I'm trying to pay attention to my body's hunger and not eat out of habit because it's "time" for lunch or dinner. Anyone else doing this?

This seems like a very sensible approach to me. We are all different and there is no one size fits all when it comes to meal timing and size. I do much better with 5 smaller meals a day rather than the standard 3, but others would hate this way of eating.

lauragreenbaum wrote: »

In the US, the standard accepted meal pattern is breakfast, lunch and dinner, with dinner being the largest meal. I have realized we all accept this as the norm, but my body's hunger doesn't work that way. I am never hungry before 10 am, so tend to skip breakfast and just have juice with my fiber supplement. I am hungriest right around 11 am-12pm and want my largest meal then. I'm usually only mildly hungry at "dinner time" so have a small dinner, not the big dinners I grew up with. I feel like I grew up thinking I had to adjust my body to the norm- breakfast right after waking up, medium sized lunch, big dinner. I now adjust the meals to my hunger level and I don't worry about what time it is and that it's "too early" for lunch, or that I can't have eggs for dinner. Sometimes I eat a very large lunch and don't eat dinner at all. I know some of it is societal- we eat meals together as families or groups so some set times make sense. But I'm trying to pay attention to my body's hunger and not eat out of habit because it's "time" for lunch or dinner. Anyone else doing this?

You can anything(within reason) whenever you want to... I have eggs for dinner occasionally( "breakfast for dinner " bacon, eggs, pancakes or hash)

Don't feel like you can only eat at certain times. Listening to your body is best! I never used to be a breakfast person. I now have a yogurt and some fruit early, because I can't work out on a empty stomach. On days I don't go to the gym, I often wait a few hours before having anything.

I eat 4 meals most days. Usually a small breakfast, a moderate to large sized lunch, a moderate sized "early dinner" and a moderate to large sized "late dinner". I've scheduled like that mostly to work with my gym time, which is a class from 7:00pm-8:30pm.

Meal times are largely built around the traditional work week. Breakfast before you go to work, lunch during your one hour break from work, and dinner after you get home from work. But they don't need to be that way. It can be whenever best fits you.

One caution I would give about "whenever you are hungry" is that it's totally fine from a timing perspective, but make sure you are still eating enough calories even on days you don't feel particularly hungry. Your body's hunger indicators are not always a good barometer of whether you are giving yourself enough energy or not, so make sure that you are doing that each day.

Now that I work from home I've found that shifting all my meals forward a bit works the best for me. I tend to eat breakfast at around 9-10am, lunch at 2pm and dinner at 8pm. When I was in an office I felt like I had to eat lunch at 12pm to be sociable and I'd never really be hungry then but be starving at around 3-4pm with ages to wait until dinner. Shifiting my meal times just a few hours forward has completely eliminated snacking.

Because I eat so frequently (bulking atm) I kinda need to eat at set times otherwise it's difficult eating the number of cals I need to in a day. Of course there are times when I can't do that and have to join two meals together but that's tough to get through so I avoid it when I can.

I try to do this, and eat according to my hunger cues. I'm trying to get more into "inuitive" eating like this, to transition away from calorie counting. I have lost weight before with this method, but went to calorie counting for a more consistant way to track and eat. It's not something I want to do forever (counting calories).

I try to hold off on eating my first meal until I get hungry, which is around 10am. Then I have a small breakfast, a small to medium lunch, snack if I need one, and a larger dinner. On the weekends it tends to be a big brunch, a midafternoon snack, and then dinner. I do okay with listening to my body's hunger cues, but sometimes it's challenging. For example: Just now, we got our Monday morning donuts in, and even though I wasn't hungry yet I opted to go ahead and snag one while the selection was still good, and not wait until my normal hungry time, around 10. Stopping before I get too full is another challenge. Especially if the food is really tasty.

I would reccomend counting for a while though. I feel like it has helped me with this technique. I can set my limit to X number of calories, and pay attention to how I feel through the day. It also helped me see what my macros should look like in a day, which also helped me deal with hunger cues. If I was starving despite having enough calories, I could look and see I was usually low in protien. So, then I would add in something higher in protien in my diet to get my protien levels up, and the hunger would taper off. But now I know what that looks like for me for the most part. Aside from a few calorie spot checks here and there.

I maintained August-December eating this way. Then counted through January the first half of Feb to get my bearings back on trying to lose weight. I am going to try losing this way too for a while and see how I do. If I stall out, gain, or lose too fast It'll probably be back to counting for me.