how often should i eat to lose weight?
How many times have you asked this question and been told “3 meals and 2 snacks a day.”
Well friends, I am sorry to be the one to break this to you, but that is a lie.
3 meals and 2 snacks everyday is actually making it HARDER for you to lose weight. Here’s why.
You may have heard the “eat every few hours to stoke your metabolism” rule and believed if you didn’t, your metabolism would slow down in between meals, making it even harder for you to lose weight.
But the truth is there is NO scientific evidence to back this up. In fact our digestive systems are actually designed to eat and then have a rest for several hours before eating again.
We live in a snacking culture though and it’s become the standard to eat 3 meals and 2 snacks a day. There are absolutely some situations where this is required (clinical eating disorder recovery, managing diabetes and other clinical indications).
But for the vast majority of people who have struggled to lose weight and keep it off and have been stuck on the yo yo diet cycle for years (and likely even decades), 3 meals and 2 snacks is actually making it HARDER for you to lose fat.
Which means you’re probably now wondering “how often should I eat for weight loss?”
Here’s the punchline: Every 4-6 hours.
If you notice yourself consistently getting hungry less than 3 hours after eating, it means you are not eating enough at meals.
Feeling hungry that often sucks. It’s distracting and frustrating and stressful. It also sucks to finish a meal and not feel truly full—this can create anxiety around fullness and make it harder to connect to those physical sensations.
(Note that I am talking about true biological hunger here—not cravings, boredom or any other type of emotional eating--separate post for that!).
So you want to work towards eating enough at meals so you don’t get hungry for 4-6 hours.
There are so many amazing benefits to this:
You feel completely full after meals which is calming for the nervous system
You don’t get hungry an hour or two later so you’re not constantly distracted by thinking about eating
You eat less overall which will help you lose fat (if that is a goal)
When you eat smaller meals and snacks you’re basically walking around hungry all the time because you’re never eating enough to actually feel full. So there’s this constant low lying hunger brewing and we know that hunger always wins.
By eating every few hours you are absolutely eating more food than your body actually needs. If you take some of those smaller meals/snacks and combine them into one larger meal you will end up eating less overall.
I know it seems counterintuitive or like you’re eating the same amount of food, but you’re not.
Because if you’re eating a smaller meal and get hungry again 2-3 hours later, it means you need a little more food at that first meal to keep you full for an extra hour or two—likely a little more protein, maybe some more volume in the form of veggies.
Whereas at that 2-3 hour hour mark, you’re really hungry and will need a bigger snack to take the edge off—and what you eat at that time is more than you would have needed if you just made the earlier meal a little bigger.
That adds up A LOT if you are consistently eating every 2-3 hours during the day.
Here’s an example:
You have a single serve container of greek yogurt, a small bowl of berries and a spoonful of chopped almonds mixed into the yogurt for breakfast at 730am.
By 10 you’re getting hungry again so you have a snack…an apple with peanut butter.
Then at 1230 it’s lunchtime so you have your turkey sandwich, chips, cut up veggies and cookie for dessert.
At 3/330 you break out your hummus, pretzels and carrot sticks. Then dinner at 630 with your family.
So let’s start with that breakfast.
A single serve cup of yogurt is 14-15 grams of protein. That’s about HALF of what you need at each meal to feel full AND stay full. So if you added a second container of yogurt (which is about 150 calories) to your breakfast and then didn’t get hungry for your snack, you could skip that apple and peanut butter which is probably closer to 250+ calories total.
That’s a net reduction of 100 calories. Multiply that times 2 each day, across the week and you can see how the snacks could be having a massive impact on your overall intake.
That is how eating bigger meals helps you lose fat—when you add the right things (protein and fiber) to your meals to stay fuller longer, you end up eating less overall.
And this isn’t about restriction…this about adding MORE food to your meals and getting comfortable with feeling full. You feel more at ease in your body when you feel full after meals and aren’t preoccupied thinking about food an hour later because you’re already getting hungry again.
This template below is a good guideline for meals that will keep you full for 4-6 hours which is the answer to that life long question “how often should I eat to lose weight”.
This is the win win of a skills based approach to eating. I have an entire blog diving into 4 other core skills that can help you lose fat without a diet here. And episode 118 of The Diet Diaries talks about how fat loss happens without dieting.
So start adding MORE protein to your meals, include veggies in some form at lunch and dinner (remember bagged salads and raw veggies count!) and start noticing what happens (bonus is this will also help with cravings!!)