How many meals do you take in a day?

[webslicers.com]

two full meals... lunch & dinner...

[leucad]

Only have lunch and dinner and am always being told off for not eating breakfast - but then I cna never seem to face it at 7.30am.

[Dsite]

I have 3 solid meals and two snacks a day. This has helped me loose almost 35lbs since April,2008.

[Gobbo Mon]

How does that help you lose weight? that seems like a lot of food to take in.

[fg20878]

3 meals plus midnight snack.

[tedleonard]

I work a crazy schedule so my eating habits are just as screwed up. I work 12 hour shifts- 6pm till 6 am, and I sleep a lot (well, I don't think it's a lot but it's a lot proportionate to everyone else I work with).

Here's a typical day for me. Wake up at 4:30-4:45 pm, shower/get ready work work, at work at 6, eat dinner around 7, then home at 6 am and asleep around 6:30, then back up again at 4:30 the next day. So, I just eat one big meal a day. I know that's terrible but eh, what can ya do.

[ozone88]

I eat every five hours. So, the amount of hours I'm awake amounts to the sum of meals I take in.

Me too, around about every five hours. I have noticed I eat more and the type of food I crave in winter is different than in summer.

[codies]

Only breakfast (important), lunch, dinner. That's it. hardly snacking.

[ivy cuenca]

3-5 times a day but it depends on my appetite.

[Datura]

How does that help you lose weight? that seems like a lot of food to take in.

If you want to lose weight the worst thing you can do is starve yourself and skip meals. You will lose weight in the beginning but your metabolism will slow down to a level where only a little more food will make your body put on fat. That is a process built into us to make sure that we do not waste down to nothing in times of food shortage (thousands of years of evolution went into that one).

When you starve yourself you will lose fat and muscle. The lost muscle fiber will be replaced by fat when you eat again a little more and do not build them back with exercise. That in turn will slow down your metabolism (muscle fiber uses more energy to be fed properly) and you gain more weight.

So to even out the process of your body's metabolism it it best to eat at least 5 meals a day and preferably even more. But those meals must be rather small. The daily intake of calories must be appropriate to what your body type is. If you spread out the meals like this over the day, the furnace of burning that energy keeps going and this process alone allows you in turn to eat more.

The mistake of eating fewer meals is often made by people. Food is not your enemy in weight control, how you eat it will make it your friend

[kouji]

3 meals. i eat my stress.

[Shaun(OfTheDead)]

How does that help you lose weight? that seems like a lot of food to take in.

When you starve yourself you will lose fat and muscle.

It takes extreme situations for your body to start "losing" muscle. You'd have to be anorexic to pull that off.

A weight-lifter as a baby had the same number of muscle fibres as he does at his peak. What changes is his muscle size and tone, but he doesn't literally "gain" or "lose" muscle.


You can lose muscle tone through in-activity. It takes a large amount of energy to maintain muscle, therefore your body only sees fit to maintain it if it's being used.

On the flip side, if you want to lose weight, exercising to tone your muscles would be a good idea because the energy consumption to maintain the muscle would eventually go a long way toward burning off the un-wanted fat.


"Dieting" usually doesn't work for the reasons Datura described. Once the special diet is over, and you return to normal eating habits, you'd find the weight returns with a vengence.


The best bet would be... (drumroll, please)... to eat healthily and exercise.

Now, "eating healthily" doesn't mean starvation. Eating healthily means eating a balanced diet and drinking lots of water. (Not juice. Not soft-drinks. Water.)

It would also be a bad idea to eat just before going to sleep. Because without physical activity to utilise the energy you've just consumed, it would instead be stored.


But it should be noted... your genetics play a big roll in your body-shape. If you're genetically pre-disposed to be solid, you'd have a hard time trying to achieve the weight of a twig. The opposite is also true... when I was about 18, in trying to get strapid, I found myself eating an eight-meal-a-day diet to maintain the size (again... toned muscles utilise lots of energy). Eight truckin' meals!

What's my point ? Going against your genetics is an uphill battle. Not impossible. But it would be hard work. And no quick-result scheme would provide long-lasting results.

At the end of it all, you need to decide for you what it is you really want.

- Is it really important to me to weigh x pounds ?
- Am I really ready to commit myself (and my time) to achieving y body-shape?
- Would I have more fun doing z with my life instead ?

For me, I chose to do z with my life. But those questions have different answers for everybody. Decide for yourself and be willing to follow through with what you decide.

[jabo]

I eat brunch between 10 to 11, snack from 5 to 5:30 and then dinner at around 10:30 during weekdays, but on weekends, its breakfast, lunch, snack, dinner, midnight snack

[tedleonard]

That is a process built into us to make sure that we do not waste down to nothing in times of food shortage (thousands of years of evolution went into that one).

If Sarah Palin doesn't believe in evolution, then it must not be real. Get your facts straight!

[sweetkendi]

Before I used to eat 3 meals a day + a light snack. Now it depends on my mood, sometimes I eat 3 meals a day + a light snack but sometimes I eat 2 meals a day + 1 or 2 snacks.

[Datura]

If Sarah Palin doesn't believe in evolution, then it must not be real. Get your facts straight!

[php_daemon]

If Sarah Palin doesn't believe in evolution, then it must not be real. Get your facts straight!

We are descendants of accountants, hairdressers and phone sanitizers (no offence to accountants, hairdressers or phone sanitizers) that were expelled to Earth from a distant planet many light-years away 2 million years ago, and she knows it!

[Datura]

We are descendants of accountants, hairdressers and phone sanitizers (no offence to accountants, hairdressers or phone sanitizers) that were expelled to Earth from a distant planet many light-years away 2 million years ago, and she knows it!

But do you know how many meals per day they ate?

[php_daemon]

Given that they took many years to invent a wheel because they couldn't decide what color it should be, and that they burnt down the trees to fight inflation, and that most of them didn't survive the first winter, I'd say I don't know.

[Datura]

Pity… Information such as that could come in handy

[conradical]

I take about 45.
15 for the first floor, 20 for the second and the rest for the Coke factory in Atlanta.

Yes I'm a lunch boy.

[RyanReese]

Breakfast.
Lunch.
Afternoon snack
Dinner
Night snack.

Rinse and repeat.

Off Topic:

Those snacks are 2 sandwhiches

[SuperNovaArcade]

Lately I have only been having one bowl of cheerios in the morning when I wake up and that is it for the day.

[Xyle101]

I usually eat a lot and it depends as long as there is a food in our kitchen.

[TV paster]

Three Heavy mEals a Day! I am really voracious. i g=have gained some weight recently