Intermittent fasting has gained a lot of hype over recent years, with many personal accounts touting it as a weight loss savior. What’s less popular nowadays though, is the fact that eating frequency also influences your weight. The research indicates that eating less often is beneficial for a range of health outcomes. Having two meals a day is healthy, and may be a good strategy to help you maintain your weight over time.
The Logic of Why Having Two Meals a Day helps with Weight Maintenance
Of course, intermittent fasting has its benefits. A review of the research on intermittent fasting reports that it has benefits that are similar to caloric restriction (in terms of body weight control, improvements in glucose homeostasis and lipid profiles, and anti-inflammatory effects), but it is easier to maintain overtime. One of the main reasons why intermittent fasting seems to help with weight loss is its effects on the hormone insulin. Intermittent fasting is effective at reducing fasting insulin levels. Insulin is a hormone that, among other jobs, tells our fat cells to store more fat. In other words, the more insulin that your body releases, the higher the likelihood that your body will store fat.
With this in mind, it’s no wonder why people who eat just 1-2 meals a day lose weight over several years compared with people who have 3 or more eating occasions per day (Kahleova et al. 2017). This likely has something to do with a reduction in the number of times a burst of insulin is released during the day. When you eat two times a day, you are telling your body to burst out insulin just two times. So, in essence, you’re telling your body to store fat only two times. (As opposed to, when you eat three or more times a day, your body is releasing a burst of insulin many more times in the day, and thus storing fat many more times in the day).
Not only regarding weight, eating less frequently is healthy overall, as just two or three meals a day combined with intermittent fasting is also associated with reduced inflammation and gut microbiota health (Paoli et al., 2019). Both of these have good implications for cancer and diabetes risk.
Should you have breakfast+lunch or lunch+dinner as the two daily meals?
In their observations of 50,000 adults over 7 years, Kahleova and colleagues (2017) saw the following:
- People who ate 1 or 2 meals a day lost weight. People who ate more than 3 meals a day gained weight. People who ate exactly 3 meals a day maintained weight.
- People who had a longer overnight fast (≥18 h) lost weight. People who had a short overnight fast (<12 h) gained weight.
- Breakfast eaters lost weight compared with breakfast skippers.
- People who had the largest meal of the day at breakfast lost weight. People who ate the largest meal of the day at lunch lost weight, but not as much as those who ate breakfast as the biggest meal.
All in all, it seems that a practical strategy for long-term weight maintenance may be to have a big breakfast, then 5-6 hours later, a medium-sized lunch, (then if necessary, 5-6 hours later, a small dinner), then fast overnight for at least 12 hours.