How Often Should I Eat?
Eating every 2 hours for fat loss is actually wrong for most people!
How many times have you heard that if you want to lose weight, you need to eat all the time? The rationale behind this is that frequent meals rev up your metabolism and that they help you avoid overeating at your next meal.
There are certain times you may want to eat every 2 – 3 hours, particularly for people who are working out a ton, eating for performance, or working on significant muscle gains. But, like all things with our bodies, just because something works in one situation does NOT mean that it works in ALL situations.
Just because your friend who is doing a fitness competition and has a six-pack is eating every 2 hours doesn’t mean you should!
We need to look at what our own goals are and what’s going on with our bodies to decide how often we should eat. For most people…
This seems completely backward from what’s been beaten into our heads for years. Hang with me and we’ll dive into a few of the issues surrounding this.
Does eating frequently fire up your metabolism?
Eating all day long may increase your metabolism slightly, and that’s a big fat maybe since most studies show that it does NOT change your metabolism in either direction. Here is a couple of examples for those of you who like to look at studies…
Many people who are eating small frequent meals throughout the day end up consuming more calories than those eating more infrequent meals. The minimal bump in metabolism is not enough to burn through the extra food consumed. At best, it’s a net equal. At worst, you’ve consumed more than the increase in metabolism can adjust for. So, as far as metabolism is concerned, there is no reason to eat more frequently.
To add to this point, your metabolism does not slow down after a few hours without food. We don’t fully understand this in my opinion, but there is some thought that you may see a minor decrease in metabolism after about 16 hours without food, but that it goes back up once you start eating again. The typical “slowing metabolism” that we think of from dieting can be a real issue, but this is not from going a few hours without food.
One study had participants eat in only a four-hour window each day with no notable decrease in metabolism. In fact, they were eating the same amount of calories as the control group but still lost more weight. In this instance, it showed a weight loss benefit to eating fewer meals even when eating the same amount of food.
Do frequent meals prevent binging?
If you are overly hungry, will you eat more food at your next meal? Maybe, maybe not. This is where planning comes in!
If you are running around busy and thinking about food all day, you’re likely to grab the first convenience food you can find and smash it. That is an entirely different situation than you planning to eat 2 or 3 meals a day. When you know when your next meal is coming, and what it will be, you will be more likely to stick to your planned out meal and feel totally satisfied.
Many people report feeling more satisfied when they switch to this eating schedule and note a lessened desire for constant snacking. Having a large amount of protein, some healthy fat, and some healthy slow-burning carbs in a large meal can be very filling and keep you fueled for a large part of the day.
When eating small frequent amounts, some people report feeling more full, but also dislike the constant planning and thinking about food. Food becomes an all-consuming chore throughout the day and is less enjoyable.
Is eating frequently good for your health?
Our bodies were not designed to be eating constantly. From an evolutionary standpoint, we would have eaten larger meals spread apart. One cool thing about consuming food all day is that it can stimulate a little extra muscle growth. But this is also thought to stimulate inflammation in the body. If the goal is to be as jacked as possible and you want to be a bodybuilder, it may be beneficial to stimulate this process. But, if the goal is to lose body fat, it is counterproductive for your health and your body composition goas as it also makes fat loss harder.
Use hormones to work for you, not against you
This next point will not apply to everyone, but let’s talk about insulin resistance. You may be thinking, “but I’m not diabetic so I don’t have that.” It’s true that type II diabetes is insulin resistance, but there is a whole spectrum of insulin resistance that exists before someone reaches the diagnosis of diabetes.
Some signs that you may have insulin resistance:
>>> you’re hangry after a few hours without food
>>> waistline over 40 inches in men and 35 inches in women (WebMD)
>>> fasting blood sugar over 100 (WebMD)
>>> fasting triglycerides over 150 (WebMD)
None of these things can definitively say you have it, that would require blood work. These are hints that you may have some insulin resistance going on.
Insulin resistance in varying degrees is quite common in people who are overweight, particularly if the extra weight is in the abdominal area. Factoring in any insulin resistance might be pretty important for food timing. Here’s why…
When you eat, you stimulate insulin production. That’s a good and necessary thing. But think of insulin as a storage hormone. When your insulin levels are up, your body is in storage mode. We need the insulin to go down to start dipping into our stored energy (body fat). The more insulin resistant we become, the longer it takes insulin to go down after a meal.
If you are insulin resistant and eating every two hours, your insulin levels are always up, there’s never a good drop to promote fat burning. In this situation, snacking and frequent meals are probably the worst way to try and lose weight! The Obesity Code by Dr. Jason Fung gives a very in-depth explanation of this and gives examples of how he uses fasting protocols with his kidney disease patients to promote weight loss, with great success. It’s a great read!
Keep in mind, that isn’t true for everyone. If you’re someone trying to lose the last few pounds and are already quite lean, the whole insulin hypothesis may not be relevant to you at all. Again, we have to look at our own situation, goals, and body type to determine what is best for us.
Robb Wolf does a fantastic job explaining how eating every 2-3 hours may even burn out the pancreas which would set you up for further insulin resistance and diabetes. You can check out that article here.
Eat like grandma
When in doubt, do what leaner generations of people did! I love science, but we only have so much figured out. Nutritional research is very hard to do, and we don’t have great studies. When we have living case studies of people who had the results we want, looking at how they ate and lived can give us some good clues.
In our very distant past, before agriculture and refrigeration, humans would have experienced times of feast and famine. You kill a large animal, and the tribe eats like kings. Then you starve or live off whatever plant matter you find edible until the next big kill.
Ok – so what? We’re not hunter-gathers, and we’re obviously not going to replicate this lifestyle. I just want to point out that we weren’t always in this world of abundant food choices at every moment of our lives, and there weren’t fat hunter-gathers so take from that what you will.
But, we have some “ancestors” of our not so recent past that didn’t have nearly the obesity rates seen today, and this was just a generation or two ago. Maybe it was your own parents, maybe it was your grandparents, maybe your great-grandparents. I’m just going to say grandma because that’s right in the middle and it’s true for me, but prior to the 1970s obesity wasn’t really an issue.
Did grandma and grandpa eat all the time? No! They were busy hard-working people. They didn’t have time to eat all the time! Breakfast, lunch, dinner – the end!
Eating between meals is completely unnecessary and wasn’t a thing in the good ol’ days. Then somewhere along the lines, we were told we needed a snack before school, a snack halfway throughout our day, a snack after the workday, and an after-dinner snack.
Holy moly that is a lot of added food!!! And what do most of us snack on? It’s not more healthy food, it’s something processed. We’ve been conditioned by the food industry that we need something that comes in foil or plastic in our hands between every meal. Brilliant marketing! Well done. They’ve made a lot of money, and our waistlines are paying the real price of this non-sense.
Snacking has made the food industry a lot of money and it’s made us fat, inflamed, and sick.
One of the first things people ask me when cleaning up their diet is “but what can I snack on?” This idea is very ingrained in how we think of eating.
Getting rid of the snacking between meals may be the trick that gets your waistline shrinking. I know it can be hard to re-wire your brain, but there’s a great PDF over in the resource library that might help you out with this.
Small frequent meals, just say no
I don’t know your unique situation and cannot tell you how often you personally should be eating. (This is not medical or dietary advice).
What I do know is that for most people, it is going to give you better results to eat fewer times in the day. And that it’s much more enjoyable. Eating every two hours feels like a full-time job. People become burnt out on this very quickly, and it’s a very tricky thing to achieve if you have a full schedule.
Evenly spaced meals with no snacking worked for grandma, it works great for me personally, and I’ve seen it work over and over again with women who are trying to lose weight. I hope you take this news with a sense of relief.
Eating in a way that fuels your body, heals your body, and produces long-lasting fat loss should not feel cumbersome. It needs to fit into your life, with a little planning and purpose of course.
A Better Plan
>>> 2 -4 evenly spaced meals with minimal snacking
>>> Have at least 12 hours between dinner and breakfast the next day
>>> If you need a snack, make it something whole food, not something from a package. If packaged food is necessary (in the real world sometimes it just is) check labels for added sugars and transfats.
This works better, is less time-consuming, and less stressful!
