How Many Meals A Day For Weight Loss?
How many meals should you eat per day to lose weight?
Is it two?
Three?!
Four?!?
Five?!?!
One-hundred thousand and seventy-seven billion?!?!?!
Given the look on your face, you don’t know the answer. There are a lot of people making different claims about the exact number of times you should eat for optimal weight loss results, so your confusion is understandable. Most central to many of these claims is the idea that it’s better to eat more frequent meals of smaller size, with the argument going that eating often boosts the metabolism so you increase the number of calories you burn by way of the thermic effect of food (TEF), which is the amount of energy it takes to digest, absorb, and make use of the nutrients in whatever it is that you eat. So what does the science say about this?
Ha, science says “GTFOH!!!”
There have been numerous studies conducted on meal frequency and meal size. The findings show that there’s no significant difference in the metabolic rate when eating three meals of 700 calories and five meals of 420 calories, for example.1In one study, obese adults were split into two groups, with one receiving three meals per day and the other three meals and three snacks. After 8 weeks, both groups experienced a similar decrease in body weight, fat mass, lean body mass, and body mass index. This and the presence of no significant difference in other measures, such as appetite control and gut peptides, led researchers to conclude that a high meal frequency doesn’t have a greater effect on weight loss than a low meal frequency.
In another study, subjects ate three meals per day for four days. After a one- or two-week washout period, they then ate six meals per day for another four days. No difference in energy expenditure or fat oxidization was observed in either meal pattern. Interestingly, the researchers also observed that when subjects ate more frequent meals, their subjective ratings of hunger and the “desire to eat” were greater than when they ate less frequently.
Finally, a review of eight epidemiological studies consisting of 69 total subjects failed to find a significant relationship between feeding frequency and weight loss. And in those studies in which a relationship between weight loss and increased meal frequency was observed, the findings are more than likely due to methodological errors that produced the relationship, such as people underreporting what they ate and post hoc changes to dietary patterns in response to weight gain by people skipping meals, for example. Based on these results that show weight loss is neither helped nor hurt by meal size and frequency, all that appears to matter for weight loss is meeting your total daily calorie requirement and not exceeding it. So in the grand scheme of things, if 2100 calories is the amount you’re supposed to eat to place you in a deficit for weight loss, it doesn’t matter if it takes you one large 2100 calorie meal or 100 small meals each containing 21 calories. As such, because the creation and maintenance of a calorie deficit is the driving force of weight loss, the number of meals you eat per day in satisfaction of that deficit comes down to preference and what’s most convenient for you.
For weight loss, there’s no definitive number of meals you should eat per day, let alone a range, as the evidence leans strongly in favor of multiple small meals not being better than fewer but larger meals and vice versa. Now, with that said that there’s no physiological advantage to eating more frequent meals, I strongly advise people to spread out their food intake for practical reasons.
(1) Eating more meals may be better because people who eat fewer meals throughout the day tend to consume most of their calories in the evening, when it’s too late to burn the excess calories that are then stored as fat overnight if they happen to go over their nutritional needs for the day.
(2) Eating more often may have the effect of staving off hunger so that when your blood sugar drops, you don’t end up making bad decisions and eating whatever you can get your grubby little hands on later in the evening to refuel.2The keyword here is “may”. Some studies suggest that eating larger but less frequent meals does a better job of stabilizing blood sugar levels throughout the day than more frequent feedings. That coincides and possibly helps explain what was mentioned in an earlier footnote, which is that people who eat less often experience reduced hunger and increased satiety to a greater degree than those who eat multiple meals.
(3) It’s a lot easier to meet all your nutritional needs when you have more feeding opportunities to do so.3For example, who do you think is going to have an easier time eating 2100 calories per day and providing the body with the energy it needs to burn fat while performing other vital functions: someone who has to eat six 350 calorie meals or someone who has to eat 1050 calories in two separate sittings?
Spreading out food intake across fairly small meals throughout the day has its clear advantages but you most certainly don’t have to. If finding time to eat less but larger meals is easier on your schedule than finding time to eat more but smaller meals, then go ahead. Doing so isn’t going to break you.
NOTE: Although weight loss is the topic here, what’s written also applies to eating to gain and maintain weight.
Glossary: caloric deficit, calories, fat, metabolism
