3 big meals - the truth

[Leanstrong]

We're not in disagreement. I agree that smaller meals can control binge eating and have some other benefits. But saying it boosts your metabolism is a flat out lie, and people need to stop saying it

[chris7687]

We're not in disagreement. I agree that smaller meals can control binge eating and have some other benefits. But saying it boosts your metabolism is a flat out lie, and people need to stop saying it

I wouldn't say it's a flat out lie. The point of breakfast is to break our fast, and kick start our metabolism.

I think eating multiple spaced out meals allows your body to properly digest everything, where as eating large amounts of food in a sitting won't allow your body to digest everything. Continuing to eat large meals backs up your system, as you now have a lot of undigested food sitting around, killing your energy as well as your metabolism rate I would imagine.

However, this is all speculation, and I don't have any scientific evidence backing this up. Just my take on the whole situation.

[Cleave]

For Starters, can we agree that a snack is a meal? It's still food in, right?

Let's look at it this way. Think about an old steam locomotive. The fireman has to stoke the fire with coal to keep the train running. He has a big pile of coal that has to get him through his journey. What would happen if he put his whole supply on the fire at one time? It would overload the fire box and bog down the fire. It wouldn't burn efficiently and there would be a lot of waste clogging up the fire box. At some point there would be a big fire but it wouldn't last because it wouldn't have enough room to burn effectively in the fire box since the coal is packed in there so tightly. After that short burst of energy you'd be left with a lot of wasted scorched coal clogging up the furnace preventing the rest of the coal from burning, leaving the engine to limp along at a reduced pace.

But what if the fireman started his trip with just a few shovels of coal and got it burning nice and even? The engine starts chugging along nicely and all the coal is burning efficiently with very little waste. Just as the fire is starting to go down the fireman puts another shovel of coal on the fire keeping the engine chugging along. There's no waste to bog down the fire and the engine never has to slow down because it has a constant supply of fuel.

You body works in a similar way. Stoke your fire and get it going first thing in the morning (the start of your journey) and fuel your engine every few hours with small meals throughout your day keeping your metabolism at a fat burning muscle building pace throughout your journey. Your body is never without fuel, never wanting or needing and never bogged down from too much fuel at one time. Do this and you've built an efficient engine giving you energy when you need it and efficiently burning fat and fuel.

Cleave

[Leanstrong]

For Starters, can we agree that a snack is a meal? It's still food in, right?
Stoke your fire and get it going first thing in the morning (the start of your journey) and fuel your engine every few hours with small meals throughout your day keeping your metabolism at a fat burning muscle building pace throughout your journey.

Cleave-
That is the common metaphor used to justify eating 6 smaller meals versus three big ones. It is, however, an unsubstantiated argument. I could make up a million metaphors to try to explain my body functions, but that still doesn't mean I actually know what is going on. The "fire stroke" that you refer to is called the thermic effect of food. It has been proven to be proportional to meal size. So, if you ate all your calories in one large meal, your "fire" would burn very hot for a couple hours, and if you ate a bunch of small meals, your "fire" would burn at a smaller amount for a longer period. Either way, they both burn the same number of total calories throughout the day. I have yet to see any study where total energy expenditure was higher with meal frequency being the only difference. Meal frequency does not increase metabolism.

[jester87]

well one thing is for sure:
you have to proportion your meals so that your body can best and most effectively take up the nutritions. so either you are bulking or cutting its still probably best to eat many meals a day. (or do the fasted thing where you eat a bunchload and then fast for like 36hours and eat again, read a new research on this some months ago).

i read alot of places that the body cant process more than about 50g proteins at a time. so eating like 100g proteins in one sitting is kinda of a waste, unless your only goal is to gain weight, in which case it doesnt matter. but if you want to cut for instance, eating 100g proteins will make half of that stored as fat instead, or burned immedietaly (the goal was feeding your muscles). i only read it though, so it might be false information.

[satyricon]

so like i said if you want to lose weight eat small meals like a small animal and if you want to get big and strong eat big.if you eat too many meals thruout your day your body can never have enough time to assimilate the nutrients and you wind up shitting 10 times a day(like a bird or a rat). you can eat big meals less frequently and still get all your protein fat and carbs just throw in some enzymes.

[Jerzi78]

so like i said if you want to lose weight eat small meals like a small animal and if you want to get big and strong eat big.if you eat too many meals thruout your day your body can never have enough time to assimilate the nutrients and you wind up shitting 10 times a day(like a bird or a rat). you can eat big meals less frequently and still get all your protein fat and carbs just throw in some enzymes.

Gorillas maintain a 7 meal a day diet and they are the strongest animal pound for pound so I don't know how you came to this conclusion.

If your 7 meals a day contained the same amount of Calories,fats,protein, carbs as the 3 meals a day you're saying the human body can't assimilate the nutrients in each meal effectively as a 3 meal a day diet?

[Jerzi78]

A large rat also has the strength of a small cat, so I would say that's pretty strong.

[Love_Deadlifts]

so like i said if you want to lose weight eat small meals like a small animal and if you want to get big and strong eat big.if you eat too many meals thruout your day your body can never have enough time to assimilate the nutrients and you wind up shitting 10 times a day(like a bird or a rat). you can eat big meals less frequently and still get all your protein fat and carbs just throw in some enzymes.

I never noticed a difference in how often i took a shit when i was eating 6-7 meals a day.

[alzheik]

i read alot of places that the body cant process more than about 50g proteins at a time.

This idea never sat right with me. It seems to me that humankind wouldn't survived this long if that were the case. I mean, back when we were hunter-gatherers, we didn't have the luxury of eating our protein in small, separate portions. We hunted, and when we caught something (which probably wasn't all that often), we gorged and moved on. I really don't think that our bodies evolved to throw away such a valuable resource, you know? Granted, this is all conjecture on my part.

[Jerzi78]

i read alot of places that the body cant process more than about 50g proteins at a time.

This idea never sat right with me. It seems to me that humankind wouldn't survived this long if that were the case. I mean, back when we were hunter-gatherers, we didn't have the luxury of eating our protein in small, separate portions. We hunted, and when we caught something (which probably wasn't all that often), we gorged and moved on. I really don't think that our bodies evolved to throw away such a valuable resource, you know? Granted, this is all conjecture on my part.

There is a long list of protein rich foods that didn't run from you that we also ate. It's not like we hunted once a day for a deer and that's the only meal we had for the entire day.


The reason why I don't eat Large meals is because of the tryptophan produced from Amino Acids and carbs make it more avaliable to the brain with protein being the building blocks. I think I just answered my question of why the low carb high protein/fat causes less sleepiness. If you are sleepy I would say that would decrease your activity which would decrease your metabolism by the actions you perform. This is why people enjoy a protein/carb mixture before bed, to induce sleepiness.

I can't count how many times I had a huge meal and felt like taking a nap.

[jester87]

i read alot of places that the body cant process more than about 50g proteins at a time.

This idea never sat right with me. It seems to me that humankind wouldn't survived this long if that were the case. I mean, back when we were hunter-gatherers, we didn't have the luxury of eating our protein in small, separate portions. We hunted, and when we caught something (which probably wasn't all that often), we gorged and moved on. I really don't think that our bodies evolved to throw away such a valuable resource, you know? Granted, this is all conjecture on my part.

as jerzi said, stuff like nuts are great man. also the protein isnt what gives you energy, its the fat they gorge on. which is what is used as energy until the next gorge (unless they had sufficient carbs inbetween). so they gorge and build up their bodyfat, so it can be used in times of need. protein just builds and sustains your muscle, so the idea should seem right to you
but as mentioned, overeating of protein leads to it being broken down to something i dont remember and stored as fat instead. so even if the prey they caught had little fat, they still got their fat-reserves up...

[darcnite201]

What I take from this thread can be expressed with one word: minutia.

So far we have scientific evidence within this thread supporting the idea that meal frequency is biophysically irrelevant. We also have a tremendous amount of anecdotal evidence implying that many small "eating periods" is more efficient, at the very least for psychological reasons.

If you're here, you either want to lose fat or gain muscle. People have done both with wonderful success eating any number of meals. We should focus more on what and how much we eat.

I've experimented with both methods. Both have worked for me. If you feel that one works for you and the other does not, than the answer posed in the title of this thread has already been answered. For you.

For me, however, the truth of meal frequency is that its significance is inconsequential compared to caloric intake, caloric source, and your chosen mode of caloric expenditure.

[tomfrench]

Has anyone read the newest books EODD and Eat, Stop Eat?

I ask because
a) there are advertisements on this site from one of the authors
b) the ideas behind these books would seem to contradict "Eat meat, poultry, fish, eggs or whey every 3 hours" which is recommended here...

[Mehdi]

I remember this from Lyle McDonald - who's imo one of the people you should listen most to when it comes down to nutrition. Human beings originally didn't eat for long period of time, until we killed the next mammoth. Think warrior diet: long periods of no eating followed by big meals where we overeat. In between some seeds/fruits maybe, but that's it. The 50g protein per meal doesn't make sense for that reason.

Problem is that our body might not have changed to frequent meals, but our lifestyle has completely changed. We've got fridges now. And food is everywhere. Lots of people snack for hundreds of reasons (social, passing time, emotional eating, etc). Within that context increasing meal frequency makes sense, since it does prevent unhealthy food choices.

Benefits of frequent meals
* No more hungry, stabilized blood sugar. Lots of people overeat because they ended up hungry because they were without food for too long.
* Decreased stomach size compared to big meals. Means you'll feel full sooner.
* Less binging: whenever someone proposes you something to eat, you know you got a healthy meal within 3 hours anyway, so psychologically it helps staying off it.