If you’ve been trying to lose weight and you’re confused about how many meals or snacks to be eating per day, then this episode of the Smart Nutrition Made Simple Show is for you…
For those of you that don’t know me, my name is Ben Brown and I’m the owner of BSL Nutrition. We are an online nutrition and fitness coaching company that helps you change your belief system around what it means to be healthy…
And in this particular case, it’s time to put to rest some of the conventional beliefs surrounding meal frequency and fat loss.
In this episode we’re going to discuss:
Before we move further, I think it’s important to acknowledge why this even matters…?
I mean we’ve talked ad nauseum about the importance of just needing to create a calorie deficit for weight loss and so, it shouldn’t matter how many times per day we eat, whether it’s 2 or it’s 10, as long as we’re in a deficit, we’ll lose weight…right?!
And while theoretically this makes sense, in practice, it becomes a different story, because behaviorally, there are limitations to what we can realistically commit to WHICH IS WHAT MATTERS MOST.
Put differently, even if the science said that eating 6x a day was best, it wouldn’t matter because it's just not practical for the vast majority of us… and so, it’s important for us to titrate down the science to reasonable actions that help us develop skills to make consistent progress … which is what we’re all about here at BSL Nutrition.
So, back to the conventional wisdom…
We’ve heard that you need to eat 6x per day to “stoke the metabolism”
We’ve heard that you need to graze on small portions so you don’t over eat
We’ve heard that you shouldn’t eat breakfast
We’ve heard that breakfast is the most important meal of the day
We’ve heard that you should intermittent fast daily
We’ve heard that we should just have bars for breakfast and lunch and then have a “sensible dinner”
And the list goes on and on…
So it’s no surprise that we’re confused about which direction to go so we can finally figure out how to lose the weight once and for all.
And this is where we need to move from understanding the data to real-world decision-making.
For most of us listening to this podcast, there are a few fundamental things that are relevant when it comes to long-term weight loss and behavior change: