3 square meals vs. mini meals??

i have heard that eating frequently keeps your metabolism up... with school in the morning and work in the evening with little time in between, its hard to find time to eat six meals that are clean and whole!

Meal timing is irrelevant and it does not "stoke the metabolic fire".

That is what I do.

I believe that it keeps your body working so it won't go in to "starvation mode". If you are on a diet, that is a good thing.
I have heard this keep your metabolism going from many knowledgeable people as well

Please do a little research to find out exactly what starvation mode really is and how it works.

please elaborate on starvation mode, if you wouldn't mind giving your point of view.

To gain fat at say 900 calories, and to do so at any fast rate would imply that daily energy expenditure was significantly less than that. For example, assume that someone eating only 900 calories per day were gaining fat at a rate of 1 pound per week. That would imply a 500 cal/day surplus or a total daily energy expenditure of 400 calories per day.

For an average sized male who started out with a maintenance energy expenditure of 2700 calories per day that would be an 85% reduction. For an smaller female who started with perhaps a 1700 calorie/day maintenance, that would be a 75% reduction from where they started. And simply, that level of reduction is far and beyond everything that’s ever been measured in the history of research on this topic.

Now, some might argue that the stressors of competition dieting haven’t been examined and they’d probably be right; to my knowledge, no-one has examined the metabolic rate of a bodybuilder following an extreme contest diet. Quite in fact, most studies don’t examine lean individuals at all but there is one study that is possibly relevant which is the seminal Minnesota Semi-Starvation Study.

I’ve talked about this study before and it represents one of the most massively well-controlled studies on the topic ever done (or that will ever be done). In it, war objectors were placed on approximately a 50% reduction from maintenance calories (which only put them around 1500 calories/day or thereabouts in the first place) and were held there for 6 straight months. Activity (walking) was enforced and most men reached the lower limits of body fat percentage by the end of it. I’d note that only men were studied so it’s possible that women, who are prone to showing more resistance to fat loss, could show a differential response.

And the total reduction in daily energy expenditure only amounted to 40% (of which the majority of that was due to the weight loss). Weight and fat loss had basically stopped at the end of the study which makes sense; the original 50% deficit had been reduced to at most 10% due to the 40% reduction in metabolic rate.

The bottom line is that no study I’ve ever seen has suggested that total daily energy expenditure could be reduced to the levels that are implied by ‘gaining fat rapidly at 700-900 calories/day’.