- “You need to eat every three hours to keep your metabolism up.”
- “Fasting for 16 hours a day will help you lose weight.”
- “Don’t eat right before bed or your body will store it as fat.”
How many of these diet tips have you heard at some point or another? It seems as if everyone has an opinion on how to time your eating habits, whether it’s three square meals a day or six mini meals. But does timing really have any serious effect on weight loss?
Well, kind of. While dietitians agree that weight loss and weight gain ultimately come down to the calories you consume and the calories you burn (and that consuming fewer calories than you burn means you’ll lose weight), the timing of when you eat influences the way you feel.
Less Hunger, More Healthy Food Some people are under the impression that if you are feeding your body more often, it will speed up your metabolism, making it easier for you to burn more calories and lose weight. It’s not clear how that misconception got started, but it’s not true.
That’s not to suggest that eating smaller, more frequent meals doesn’t have its benefits. Eating this way keeps you feeling satisfied and less likely to get too hungry, so there’s less risk of losing self-control and overeating.
Think of it this way—you come in the door from a long day, and it’s been five or six hours since you’ve last eaten. You then eat whatever is most convenient, even if it isn’t a very healthy option. And because you’re so hungry, you eat too quickly, not recognizing a feeling of satiety until you’ve eaten more than you need to.
On the other hand, if you had a healthy snack within the past two hours, you’re not so starving when you get home. You have the self-control to make yourself a healthy meal and savor it. You don’t feel the need to eat past the point of satiety because you know that, if you’re still hungry in a little while, you can simply have a healthy snack an hour or two after dinner. The Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics recommends healthy snacking as a way of getting additional nutritious foods into your diet beyond what you get at mealtimes—more fruits and veggies, more lean sources of protein, more whole grains.
Keeping your blood sugar steady and your energy level up also means you will be more inclined to exercise, an important part of any weight-loss effort.
Don’t Be So Fast to Fast Some people swear by intermittent fasting, which encourages eating during a specified window of time and fasting for the rest of a 24-hour period. If a person is eating only within an eight-hour period of time, they might eat between 10 a.m. and 6 p.m., and then fast between 6 p.m. until 10 a.m. the next day. The Cleveland Clinic notes that focusing on eating within a smaller window of time can reduce cravings and decrease your appetite, and if you strictly cut yourself off from eating after 6 p.m., then you won’t be doing any mindless snacking late at night. All of that said, your body won’t start automatically shedding fat simply because you’re consuming all your calories within an eight-hour window.
What is More Important than When The challenge with focusing too much on when you eat is that some people think it’s a free ticket to eat whatever they want. “I’m supposed to snack frequently,” they think. “It’s good for me.”
The American Society for Nutrition explains that snacks are good for reducing hunger and getting more nutrients, but people can easily take in too many calories, especially if they aren’t being realistic about their portion sizes.
Another problem is that snacking is often a matter of convenience. People turn to packaged processed foods, usually refined carbohydrates with few nutrients.
What matters more in terms of weight loss and overall health is the total number of calories and the nutritional quality of those calories. If you opt to graze throughout the day or eat five to six smaller meals, try keeping a food journal for the first few days so that you can track what you’re eating. You might surprise yourself that you’re consuming too many calories or convenience foods.
One way to avoid taking in too many calories, even if you’re eating frequently, is to consider the energy density of the foods you’re eating. Because the volume of your food, not its actual calorie count, is what affects satiety (that is, it’s the amount of food you’re eating that makes you feel full), you can fill up faster without overeating if you’re snacking on low-calorie, high-volume food like fruits and vegetables. A cup of grapes and a cup of potato chips take up the same amount of room in your stomach, but the cup of grapes has 60 calories and the cup of potato chips has 140 calories.
And don’t think that eating late at night is going to derail your weight-loss efforts. A calorie at 8 in the evening is the same as a calorie at 8 in the morning. The problem is that most people tend to snack mindlessly in the evening, thus taking in more calories than they need. According to an April 2015 study, “The Health Impact of Nighttime Eating: Old and New Perspectives,” published in the journal Nutrients, a small snack before bed might benefit muscle protein synthesis and cardiometabolic health.
Find Your Right Schedule As with many other aspects of dieting, you need to find the schedule that works best for you and your lifestyle. If you get too hungry waiting hours between meals, then have mini meals and snacks throughout the day. If you find that you’re never fully satiated unless you have a square meal, then eating three times a day without grazing on snacks might be the better option.
As a general guideline, Kylene Bogden, registered dietitian with the Department of Nutrition Therapy at the Cleveland Clinic, recommends most people should eat at least every four hours and should avoid eating within two hours of going to bed so that their digestion doesn’t affect their sleep.
If you know that you’re going to be eating on the go and want healthy snacks, try setting aside an hour or two on the weekend to meal prep or snack prep. Wash and chop fruits and vegetables so you can divvy them up into plastic containers or zip-close baggies. Hard boil a few eggs to have on hand, or chop up a block of low-fat cheese into single servings that you can wrap in wax paper. You can also try making a healthy casserole and putting individual portions in plastic containers so you can heat and eat at your convenience.
