The question “how many meals should you eat per day?” has been a prevalent question in the fitness and nutrition industry longer than I’ve been alive.
There have been thousands of attempts at answering this question.
Some say you should eat more frequently, some say you should eat less.
Which is it?
In the days of misinformation and mass information, how can you know the right answer?
That’s what I hope to help you with in this article.
My hope is that you not only walk away with an answer to “how many meals should you eat per day?” but also, a better understanding of the roles meal frequency plays so you can sniff out myths and distinguish right from wrong.
Now, if you’re someone who just wants a fast answer without learning anything from it, here you go:
There is no best meal frequency for every person. The ideal amount of meals per day depends on a few factors, but generally, I will make the argument that 3-4 meals per day is best for most people.
Now, if you’re someone who wants to get an answer, learn something new, and figure out what’s best for you and your goals, keep on reading.
What’s the context?
Before we get into the nitty gritty of meal frequency, we need to make sure we’re on the same page.
Most people who are wanting an answer to this question are those who want to improve their body composition (build muscle and/or lose fat), improve their diet and nutrition habits, and as a result, improve their health and longevity.
By the way, if you want a free fat loss guide to help you lose fat easily in sustainably, you can get that here.
Given that those people are the people I help, the remainder of this article will be speaking through that lens.
In other words, I’ll be more directly answering this question: “how many meals should I eat per day if I want to improve my body composition and health?”
With that clarified, let’s dive in.
Meal Frequency and Its Contributions
Meal frequency is tied to many things regarding our health and body composition such as
Weight management
Hunger and Satiety
Circadian Rhythm
Muscle Growth and Recovery
as well as blood sugar control. However, I will be speaking to the first four, as your blood sugar and insulin sensitivity conversations should be between you and your doc.
Weight Management and Body Composition
In order to better understand meal frequency, we need to understand body composition change and how it works. Specifically, we need to understand fat loss.
Your body burns a certain amount of calories per day. That total calorie amount is called your total daily energy expenditure (TDEE).
TDEE consists of a few different things:
Basal Metabolic Rate (calories burned at rest): this is often referred to as your metabolism
Thermic Effect of Food (TEF): this is the amount of calories your body burns by breaking down and digesting the food you eat. Diet quality is the largest contributing factor.
Non Exercise Activity Thermogenesis (NEAT): this is the amount of calories your body burns from movement that isn’t formal exercise such as doing chores, typing on a computer, walking, etc.
Exercise Activity Thermoenesis (EAT): this is the amount of calories burned from exercise like lifting weights, swimming, cycling, etc.
A snapshot of your total daily energy expenditure
If you consume more calories than you burn, your body will store those excess calories in the form of fat and/or muscle. This is called energy or calorie surplus.
If you consume fewer calories than you burn, your body will lose stored energy from fat and/or muscle. This is called energy deficit, or calorie deficit. A calorie deficit is needed to lose stored energy.
Put plainly, a calorie deficit is needed to lose fat.
This is where we run into a very common meal frequency myth: the more meals you eat in the day, the more it “stokes your metabolism” making it faster. It’s often illustrated like a flame. The more meals (coal, paper, etc.) you put into the fire, the more the fire roars. This myth has led to the misleading idea that eating more meals makes fat loss easier due to a faster metabolism.
But that’s not really what’s going on.
As we just learned, the only part of your TDEE that increases from food consumption is your TEF, and TEF is largely dictated by food/diet quality.
A diet of 4 meals per day with quality food choices can have a bigger impact on TEF than a diet of 7 small meals per day with average food quality.
But you may be thinking “well what about a diet of 7 small meals per day with quality food?”
Sure, that may increase your TEF by a teeny bit.
But if you’re consuming more calories than you burn, you will still gain fat.
And one thing we need to remember is that the more frequently you eat, the higher the likelihood you eat in a caloric surplus, consuming more energy than your body needs to maintain its current weight.
There are two reasons for this:
For starters, the more often you eat, the smaller your meals will need to be (assuming you’re trying to keep your calorie intake at bay on some level). The smaller your meals are, the harder it’s going to be to feel satiated.
The lower satiety you have, the hungrier you are.
The hungrier you are, the more you want to eat.
The more you want to eat, the more the inner cookie monster in you is screaming to be released.
Secondly, and though it’s obvious, it’s still worth stating, the more often you eat, the more you expose yourself to opportunities to consume additional calories.
Think of it this way: Imagine you had two versions of your day. Version A required you to look into the pantry every hour, and version B required you to look into the pantry every 3 hours. Odds are, version A would lead you to increased snacking and excess calorie consumption.
Flipping those two things on their heads, let’s look at fewer, larger meals.
Hunger and Satiety
Do you want to guess what the largest contributing factor to satiety or “fullness” is?
It’s not calories.
It’s food volume.
The volume of food you consume is the largest contributing factor to feeling full and satisfied throughout the day.
This is the key to fat loss. I communicate this with my clients regularly and it’s what allows them to consistently lose fat, build muscle, and do so without feeling like they’re on a diet eating like the little bird that sits on their back porch every morning.
Losing weight, keeping it off, and doing so without being a starving, miserable grouch comes down to an abundance of high volume foods that are lower in calories.
Aside from selecting foods that are high in volume, having larger meals per day is a key to feeling fuller for longer.
Imagine spreading 6 pounds of food per day across 3 meals compared to 6.
I don’t know about you, but eating 2 pounds of food in one sitting sounds like a lot.
When you eat large, square meals, you are going to feel fuller for longer. Especially when each meal contains at least 30g of protein and a few hundred grams of fruits and/or vegetables.
Aside from having more high volume, low calorie food in your diet and enjoying 3-4 square meals per day, there’s another thing you can do to reduce hunger.
Circadian Rhythm
Want to take a wild guess as to why you’re craving things a lot and feeling hungry more often than usual?
You’re not sleeping enough.
Research suggests that less than 7 hours of sleep can begin affecting ghrelin and leptin hormone levels.
If you read those two words and imagined a couple of gremlins, I got you.
Ghrelin is the hunger hormone, and leptin is the fullness hormone.
Getting 6-7 hours (what some consider great sleep) of sleep, can begin causing mild increases in ghrelin and decreases in leptin; more hunger and less time feeling full.
After 1-2 nights of 6 hours of sleep or less, significant changes in ghrelin and leptin can be seen.
Long story short, less sleep turns you into a tired and hungry grump.
Want to take a guess at what contributes to the quality of your sleep?
Meal frequency.
Meal frequency plays a large role in your circadian rhythm, the cycle that helps your body know when it’s time to be awake and when it’s time to be asleep.
Your body has an internal clock on some level, and some “cogs” that help keep that internal clock regulated are the meals you eat, so sticking to regular meal times can be helpful.
It doesn’t have to be strict, such as eating breakfast at 8am on the dot every morning. Think of your eating times as windows.
For example, breakfast between 8am-9am, lunch between 12pm-1pm, and dinner between 5pm-6pm.
In addition to having regular meal windows, it can be beneficial to avoid eating two hours before bed. It's been shown that eating closer to bed can affect the quality of your sleep.
And we all know that there is a difference between getting seven hours of poor sleep and seven hours of great sleep.
When you prioritize meal frequency and eating windows, your sleep will be better. And when your sleep is better, your mood, energy, hunger, and satiety is better.
Muscle Growth and Recovery
Meal timing may arguably have a more important role on muscle growth and recovery than meal frequency, but the way I see it, meal frequency and meal timing go hand-in-hand..
But I will be honest with you, meal timing is definitely one of those “don’t miss the forest for the trees” scenarios.
Overall, your total daily protein intake is what matters most.
If you’re consistently consuming 7 small meals a day but you’re consistently underconsuming protein, smaller meals won’t matter.
If you’re consistently consuming 3 larger meals a day but you’re consistently underconsuming protein, larger meals won’t matter.
Generally, aiming for a minimum of .7g per pound of bodyweight is best when prioritizing muscle growth, recovery, and preventing muscle loss.
And yes, even if your main goal is fat loss and you’re afraid of getting “bulky” you should still be aiming for a minimum of .7g per pound of bodyweight each day.
If your goal is fat loss, an easy number to get is 1g protein per pound of goal body weight.
So if you weigh 200lbs, but you want to weigh 150lbs, aim for 150g protein per day.
The meal frequency you set for yourself will help you make sure you get enough protein each day.
When you have a daily protein target of 150g per day, and you eat three meals per day, you know you need at least 50g protein in each meal to hit your daily target.
This is called chunking, where you take something big and break it down into small chunks in order to better understand it.
It's far easier to get 150g of protein each day when you are only focused on getting 50g in the next meal, compared to eating throughout the day and hoping you hit 150g when the day is finally over.
And generally speaking, whole foods that are high in protein tend to be satiating. The more protein you have in each meal, the higher the chances are you feel satisfied and you’re not feeling ravenous going into the next meal.
Now what if you’re consistently getting enough protein in? Does meal timing matter then?
Yes, it does.
Your pre and post workout meals are arguably the most important meals to prioritize proper nutrient timing, especially if you train first thing in the morning.
Ideally, your pre and post workout meals should have at least 15g carbohydrate and at least .3g protein per kilogram of bodyweight (lbs / 2.2 = kg).
But if you’re like me, you don’t like the feeling of food in your stomach while you train.
If you have to train first thing in the morning before eating, do your absolute best to have something light so you can get your pre workout nutrients such as a rice cake, graham cracker, or piece of fruit and protein shake in water (I know, the water won’t taste as good as with milk, but may be better to sip on throughout your workout).
Now, if you insist that you won’t eat anything before your workout first thing in the morning, though I strongly advise against it to prevent muscle breakdown, I won’t fight you to the death on it. But, I will stress the importance of getting plenty of protein within two hours after your workout.
And for those of you wondering.. No, your workout won’t be wasted if you don’t have a protein shake immediately after your workout.
Just eat a high protein meal as soon as you can within two hours if you’re training fasted.
With all of that said, meal frequency may have an impact on your body composition through meal and nutrient timing.
In my opinion, this one isn’t worth spending a lot of time on, as getting your total daily protein intake is most important. But if you want to optimize your results a bit more, spend some time tweaking your meal frequency to prioritize protein intake pre and post workout. My client Eric and I focused on this and his results speak for themselves.
Piecing it All Together
We’ve spent some time going over meal frequency in order to answer the “how many meals should I eat per day?” question.
Generally speaking, meal frequency plays an important role in weight management, hunger, satiety, circadian rhythm, as well as muscle growth and recovery.
Here’s the bottom line:
There is no one size fits all for meal frequency. Do whatever you need to do to get enough protein in, keep hunger at bay, feel satisfied after each meal, have regular meal windows, and most importantly, enjoy your diet.
If that means you have 6 meals per day, great. If that means you have 3 meals per day, that’s great too.
It is my opinion that 3-4 larger, more protein dense meals will be best for most people who want to feel full, hit their protein target, and have a rhythm to their eating without feeling like they’re eating all day long.
I have been training and coaching people for over 10 years now, and I have only seen a handful of scenarios where smaller meals were better for the individual compared to 3 to 4 larger meals.
The only way you can figure out what works best for you is to be consistent with something, see how you feel, and tweak it if it doesn't work.
There's no teacher like experience
Thanks for reading. I hope this helped.
If you have any questions or comments, feel free to let me know below or send an email to adam@poehlmannfitness.com
Cheers,
Adam
PS. If you want more information on coaching and what it’s like to work with me, you can learn more here.
