Meal Timing
What you eat, and how much are definitely important, but when you eat can be pretty crucial as well. Just like when you’re driving your car, you want a smooth steady flow of fuel, not a deficit or huge spike in order to keep things running properly. If you take three people with the same calorie requirements, let’s say 2000 calories for the sake of argument, and put them on different meal plans, you’ll get different results:
1) Person #1 eats one meal a day of 2000 calories, and gains weight, even though he’s theoretically at maintenance.
2) Person #2 eats three meals a day totaling 2000 calories, and stays the same weight.
3) Person #3 eats six meals a day totaling 2000 calories, and loses weight.
Why does person #3 do so much better than person #1 when they’re eating the same number of calories? By spreading out your energy intake, you minimize the effect of insulin spikes, and maximize the chance that your body will use the energy intake for tissue repair and other bodily processes instead of storing it.
Two meals are massively better than one, three meals are much better than two, four meals are quite a bit better than three, five meals are somewhat better than four, and six meals are slightly better than five, anything after that and you’re getting diminishing returns (not much additional benefit for the effort involved). Basically you’re going to want to eat once every three hours or so.
At first, trying to eat every three hours is fairly difficult, most people are used to eating a few larger meals, rather than more smaller ones. I know that I used to eat only twice a day, lunch and dinner. The solution is to cook things ahead of time and pre-package them. My fridge is full of ziploc bags and disposable plastic containers with all my meals for the next few days. Once you get used to it, it’s actually less work to cook this way.
One of the nicer side effects is that you don’t get hungry very often, even when on a calorie deficit, since your last meal was never more than three hours ago, and if you do, there is another meal coming up shortly.