How many meals should you eat in a day?

The most important aspect is that you are CONSISTENTLY hitting the right amount of calories AND hitting your macro ratios (protein, carbs, and fats.) If you are a beginner and you’re finding it hard to meet these requirements, creating a schedule with evenly spaced out meals may help you hit your goal numbers. Evenly spacing out your meals, depending on meal size, every 3-5 hours makes it easier to create change to your diet.

Most of us are currently under-eating, believe it or not. You may be over-eating the wrong things and under-eating whole foods. When one begins tracking their food intake, they start to notice what they’re having too much or not enough of. The average day for most will consist of eating two or three times a day with some sort of snacking in between. Eating the proper amount of nutritious calories a day (alcohol and processed foods don’t count ) can be demoralizing if only broken up over 2-3 meals. The downside to this is that mentally, this can break us down to the point where we stop adhering to the diet.

For example, if you are in a reverse diet so that we can get you to a place where cutting weight is doable, you may be asked to eat 1,800 calories a day. Only having 2 meals a day, eating 900 calorie meals, may sound fun at first but will soon feel impossible to sustain when you’re not use to eating that many calories.

Your body can only use so much protein per hour. Although science hasn’t been able to give us a specific range, research has narrowed down that this simple equation is close to estimating where your protein consumption should be per meal. To figure out how much protein your body can process to fuel skeletal muscle, we would take your total days protein value and divide it by 4 meals to find your maximum and 8 meals to find your minimal protein intake per sitting.

For example, if you are supposed to eat 125 grams of protein per day- your highest
protein in one sitting is 31 (125/4=31.25) and your lowest serving per meal is 16 (125/8=15.625).

Eating anything less than this number will cause your body to not have enough resources for helping muscle tissue grow and repair (protein synthesis). If you eat above your limit, your body will only absorb that maximum amount and the extra protein will be used for other functions. I don’t want to say you will waste protein if this happens, but instead, you’re wasting the opportunity for optimized muscle development by burning through resources not properly spaced out. Protein is used for literally everything in your body. The more protein we can provide to skeletal muscle, the better our odds at getting leaner by maintaining muscle mass. Depending on your bodies individual needs, protein level (amino saturation) in the blood will deplete within 3-5 hours. The better you can consistently maintain protein levels, the better your body can preserve lean body mass.

The second issue is regarding carbohydrates. Carbs break down into sugar and transport into our blood cells where it is readily available to be used as energy. The more carbs we eat in one sitting, the more energy our body has available for the next 2-3 hours. This also goes for insulin, the more carbs we eat, the more insulin our body needs to transport it. Whatever energy we don’t use keeps our blood sugar level too high making the body remove it from our blood stream and store as fat. Our body can’t use stored fat – a process called lipolysis – until insulin drops to low levels. Controlling blood sugar levels (and insulin response) will help your body burn more fat throughout the day. Fats are the main source of energy for low level activity. If we evenly distribute our total days worth of carbohydrate over 4-6 meals, we are providing the body with a constant low level feed of energy. Dividing the macros evenly over several meals will lower the concentration of carbohydrate that goes in at once. Keep in mind that complex carbs v. Simple carbs can also play a role in blood sugar levels.

If you are someone who eats 2-3 meals a day, going too long without eating will induce fatigue and promote cravings. You may get tired in the middle of the day as you’re running low on fuel and crave food in the form of cookies, candy, or chips. This is a signal the body creates as an attempt to get more calories in, usually getting you to turn to less nutritious foods, and make up for lacking calories for the day. When we turn to junk food and sweets that are not on track with your diet, we create an association between that food and receiving instant gratification or pleasure through hormones in the brain. On the other hand, if you are someone who would rather eat 10 small meals in a day, you may be spreading your meals so thin (mostly in a weight cut) that you never feel satisfied or full.

The sweet spot for how many meals is 4-6 evenly broken up meals. Keep in mind that “evenly broken up” meals refers to macros and not calories. Two meals that are both 500 calories can have a totally different effect on the body.

Notice the difference in macro ratios:
Meal 1: Protein-25 Carbs-50 Fats-22 = 500 cal
Meal 2: Protein-50 Carbs-25 Fats-22 = 500 cal

The same thing goes for meal distribution. Eating 6 evenly broken up meals will be different than eating 3 large meals and 3 small meals. Someone who is experienced at counting macros can have a more advanced break up of their macros. This would be according to their training schedule and the length of time they will go between meals. Shifting carbs and fats around can be beneficial in certain situations, but getting better meal frequency will hold more importance over those minimal changes.