A popular and confusing area in the fitness industry is how many meals a day do you actually need to help you reach your goal.
It’s a question that has been answered in many ways, to over complicated research papers to the super simple layman’s explanation.
You will be happy to know, it is simple to answer, but not everyone is going to have the same answer. Confused yet? Let me clear things up a little. Two people who were identical in height, weight, strength, hormone levels etc you name it - they need the exact same stimulus and energy requirement to reach the same goal would still both lose weight eating the same calories regardless of if they ate 3 or 6 meals a day.
I’m going to use a calorie deficit to explain this a little further, as most people can relate to wanting to lose some weight in their life at one point or another.
Let’s say we have a woman who wants to lose weight, let's call her Mary. Mary is presented with two different diet approaches to lose weight. Mary needs to eat 1800 calories a day to lose 2lb of fat a week.
Option 1 – spreading the 1800 calories across 3 even meals throughout the day, making each meal 600 calories. This will typically fall into the standard breakfast, lunch and dinner most people are used to.
Option 2 – spreading the 1800 calories across 6 meals throughout the day, making each meal 300 calories. This would still include a breakfast lunch and dinner, but with snacks in between each.
Which option would warrant the best result?
The answer is either would work perfectly fine, as long as Mary could stick to it consistently. She could do one option one week and the other the next, she would still lose weight.
What really matters is the total of calories you have consumed in one week.
Take a look at the graph below. Mary eats a different number of calories each day (blue), yet for the week her average intake (orange) per day is still 1800. This would also result in a weight loss at the end of the week. It’s probably more of an accurate representation of the population also. We tend to eat more on a weekend.
The take away from this then is that you should eat to suit your lifestyle.
At the end of the day/week, the amount of weight you have either gained or lost is going to be down to 1 thing – your calorie intake.
How you fit these calories in is going to depend on your lifestyle. A few things to consider are:
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Are you always on the move and busy?
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Are you based in an office where you can eat at your desk with a bit of freedom?
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Are you good at planning your meals or do you eat sporadically?
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How big is your appetite?
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Are you single or do you have a family?
As you can see, there are many factors that can affect how consistently you are able to eat.
There is also no magic number, it doesn’t have to be 3 or 6. It could be any number, if your calories are the same at the end of the day/week.
Find what works for you and stick to it, don’t worry about what anyone else is doing.
