Eating often to stay thin?
HEALTH: What you eat more important than how frequently you chow down
The advice is given so often it’s hard not to believe it: If you want to control your appetite, eat small, frequent meals.
The idea is that if you allow too many hours to elapse between meals, you’ll become so ravenous you’ll make bad food choices.
But research suggests you don’t need to eat five to eight meals a day.
For decades, observational studies have noticed that increased meal frequency is associated with a lower likelihood of being overweight, but association doesn’t prove cause and effect.
In fact, several randomized studies conducted in the past decade tell a different story. In a few studies, smaller, more frequent meals helped curb appetite. But mostly, the opposite was true.
A study assessing how eating patterns affect chronic inflammation, published in January in the Journal of Nutrition, included a secondary element in which 12 participants ate breakfast either as one large meal or as two smaller meals about 90 minutes apart.
They were asked to rate their hunger, desire to eat and fullness every 30 minutes, starting before the first meal at 8 a.m. and continuing until noon.
The group who ate one large breakfast had a sharper drop in hunger, then a steady rise in hunger until noon.
Overall, average hunger and desire to eat were highest in those who ate the two smaller breakfasts. The researchers’ firm conclusion: “Higher eating frequency does not decrease appetite in healthy adults.”
A study published in 2011 in the journal Obesity found that among 27 obese men, higher protein intake helped control appetite, but increased meal frequency (three versus six meals per day) did not.
What you eat probably makes more of a difference than how often. If you are making healthful food choices and eating to meet your body’s energy needs and your hunger rarely flares out of control, then worrying about how often you eat is splitting hairs.
Food cravings are a somewhat different matter. Cravings are related to appetite in that they involve a desire to eat, but cravings can happen even when you’re not hungry.
Stress, boredom or strong emotions can produce an urge to eat; for some people, the mere presence of food, especially tasty food, can trigger eating urges.
Because cravings can feel more powerful when you are also hungry, managing hunger and appetite may help reduce cravings, but it often doesn’t eliminate them.
Overall, research has found that increasing meal frequency beyond three meals per day has little to no effect on appetite, despite the argument that decreased hunger may explain observed associations between frequent meals and lower body weight.
On the other hand, eating fewer than three meals per day tends to increase appetite. What does this mean for you? Rather than looking outside for answers to how often you should eat, look inward.
Your ideal meal frequency will give you steady energy throughout the day and let you get hungry enough that you feel ready to eat a nourishing meal, but not so hungry that you lunge for whatever food you can get your hands on. Ask yourself these questions:
Do I feel satisfied at the end of a meal?
How soon do I get hungry again after a meal?
How strong is my hunger between meals?
Is the sensation I call hunger actually physical hunger or is my urge to eat due to cravings, boredom or habit?
If you feel ravenous between meals, that could be a sign that you need to eat more at your meals (possibly just more protein) or you could need to eat more often.
If you feel the need to eat oddly soon after a meal, but don’t really feel hungry, it may be that you aren’t eating the combination of foods that best suits your body, so try experimenting.
If you tend to be distracted while you eat, practice eating mindfully so you get the mental satisfaction of fully tasting your food.
If you realize that you rarely experience true hunger or feel overly full after you eat, you may need to eat less at meals if you’re eating three meals a day or eat less often if you’re eating several meals.
Small frequent meals — especially if they morph into grazing — can make you miss out on the hunger and fullness cues of how much and when to eat. Plus, when you’re eating all the time, it’s easy to eat mindlessly without any idea of what or how much you’re eating in a day.
Finally, if you never allow yourself to get hungry, you may forget what hunger feels like. Hunger is a normal physiological signal that tells us it’s time to refuel and moderate hunger is nothing to fear. In fact, it enhances our enjoyment of the meal to come.