At the most basic level, when you eat has little effect on the math of weight loss. You lose weight by burning more calories over the course of days than you take in by eating. However, psychological and physiological factors that relate to when you eat can make it harder or easier to stick to your diet — which will directly effect the results of your weight-loss efforts.
Cheat Avoidance
The best diet in the world only works if you stick with it. A day that consists of multiple small meals, spaced every few hours throughout the day, can help you stay true to your eating plan. This is because you never have to wait an entire afternoon before your next meal. Resisting temptation for an hour is simply easier than doing so for half of a work shift.
Blood Sugar
When you eat, your body receives energy and pumps glucose into your blood. As you expend that energy, your blood glucose levels go down. Low blood glucose levels mean hunger cravings as your body tells you that it wants more energy. Eating multiple small meals throughout the day evens out your blood glucose levels. You experience lower peaks because each meal is smaller, and you experience less extreme valleys because you don't go as long without eating. This means fewer snack cravings, better adherence to your diet and more weight lost over time.
Energy and Focus
Sticking to your diet requires discipline, focus and an awareness of long-term consequences — all higher-order thinking skills. If your blood glucose level drops below a certain level, your higher-order thinking skills begin to deteriorate. Put another way, if you go too long between meals, you not only experience hunger cravings, you start to lose the mental faculties that can help you resist them.
Example
Everybody has a different schedule, but celebrity personal trainer Bill Philips recommends a diet of six meals each day. They should consist of three small snacks interspersed between three medium-sized meals. According to this plan, you should eat a medium meal for breakfast immediately after you wake up, another for lunch about four to five hours later, and the third for dinner about four to five hours after that. You should eat a snack between breakfast and lunch, another between lunch and dinner. Your third snack should happen between dinner and bedtime. The specific times you eat will depend on your own daily rhythm and work schedule.
Planning
For this eating plan to work, you have to make certain each meal and snack is small enough to keep your calorie and food load within the parameters of your specific diet. This is much easier to do if you plan your meals — and, ideally, prepare your meals — ahead of time. Controlling your portions and nutrition is much more difficult if you make up your meals and snacks "on the fly."
References
- "Body for Life"; Bill Phillips, et al.; 2000
- "You: Losing Weight"; Dr. Michael F. Roizen and Dr. Mehmet C. Oz; 2011
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