“Eat breakfast like a king, lunch like a prince, and dinner like a pauper.“
Feeding rhythm might be one of the most important yet simplest things one can do to improve one’s metabolism. If nothing else, take this one thing with you from these notes and use it, it WILL change your health and body for the better.
So what do I mean by feeding rhythm? It is basically how often, at what times and how regularly you eat. You might have heard things like:
breakfast is the most important meal of the day
you have to eat 3, 4, 6 times a day
don’t eat after 6 o’clock etc
How much of this is fluff, what works and how to use feeding rhythm to improve your metabolism and natural fat-burning ability. Let’s forget the myths and take a look at what science has to say about this.
The most important thing, the 80% of feeding rhythm importance is …. regularity. This is the thing that might be the most important part of fixing your eating habits and metabolism. Of course, you can eat regularly and unhealthily. A typical example is people who eat very little and randomly throughout the working day and then regularly overeat in the evenings. But I’m not talking about random regularity but planned regularity. If you are eating 4 times a day at 7 o’clock, 12 o’clock, 16 o’clock and 20 o’clock, you do it every single day throughout the year and you don’t diverge from this. This is the foundation of strong nutrition and eating habits. This has so many benefits.
First of all - your metabolism functions by our inner 24-hour clock. So it needs, more like graves, regularity. When we offer it regular meal times, it can prepare and function 100% when we eat.
Secondly - relating to the first one - studies have shown that people who eat regularly, even unhealthy food, have a much smaller tendency to overeat. When you don’t offer your metabolism energy regularly, it overcompensates by overeating when it has a chance. It is a normal evolutionary self-preservation mechanism.
Thirdly - when you eat regularly, there is a much bigger chance that you know what you will be eating, preventing you from overeating or eating whatever comes into view. People who eat randomly throughout the day go around fast food places or groceries much more often than people who know where and what they will be eating tomorrow at lunch. Those people have their meals prepared or some specific eating place planned.
So make this one of your priorities to start eating regularly. Even if you eat too much or the wrong kind of food. It WILL start to bear fruit by some point, I promise.
As for boosting your metabolism, there is a very important principle that you should know. It is eating more of your calories at the beginning of the day. This is where all the breakfast sayings and mantras come from, although without understanding the science behind it. It has been shown in the studies that the same amount of calories in the morning will boost your metabolism much more than the same calories in the evening. In one study scientists compared two groups of overweight women. Both were given the exact same diet and calories. But the twist was that one ate most of its calories in the first half of the day and the second one by the second half of the day. The first group lost weight while the second one didn’t. They estimated that the difference between the two groups was 200-300 kcal per day! This is an amazing number if you take into consideration that nothing else was different in those two diets. So whatever you eat, if you eat most of it by the first half of the day, the better metabolic boost you will get from it. 200 kcal per day will amount to 10,4 kg of extra fat burnt in a year!
There is also the second big benefit to eating more of your calories in the first half of a day. This comes down to hormonal mechanisms. Hundreds of studies have shown that people who eat breakfast are much less likely to overeat in the evenings. This mechanism is so strong that it works from day one. Eating little at the beginning of the day causes your hunger and metabolic hormones to overcompensate in the evening and load all the calories into your mouth that you can get your hands on. If you’ve ever visited your fridge constantly in the evening just to snack some more and still not feeling full, it is the same exact process I’m talking about. Of course, you can still overeat as emotional eating, but not by hormonal mechanisms.
One of the most often used things I hear about this is that “I have no hunger in the mornings”. Nobody has hunger in the morning that has overeaten in the evening before. It is a very common hormonal response and one that leads to overeating in the evenings and undereating in the mornings. To test it out and break the cycle, you have to do nothing more than to fast for 1-3 evenings in a row and I promise - you will be craving for a good breakfast!
This leads us to the third main point of feeding rhythm. This one is not mandatory, but something to think about if you want to maximize the metabolic effects of your nutrition. It is intermittent fasting. No, intermittent fasting is not the magical way to turn your metabolism into an automatic fat burner as some claim. It has shown to burn no more calories than any other diet. The intermittent fasting benefit comes from autophagy. This is the process when your body’s cells break down and use the dysfunctional components inside it. It’s like an automated self-cleaning mechanism and is strongly triggered by fasting. The longer the fast, the more powerful autophagy comes. It has lots of health benefits - it lowers inflammation and improves cell function and may even help to prevent dementia and cancer. So how can you use this effect? You don’t have to fast for long periods at a time. It is much simpler than this and here’s where intermittent fasting comes into play. You can get the same benefits from fasting for short periods every day. At least 12 hours is recommended, but 14-16 hours is even better.
But what about eating often? You’ve probably heard or even practiced eating every 2-3 hours to “keep your metabolism active”. This unfortunately has no scientific backing. It has no metabolic effect on how often you eat. It comes down to practicality. For most of us eating 2-5 times a day has been shown to be the best way. However, you have to test and find your own rhythm.
So there are three very strong ways to improve your metabolism and overall health. If we take all of this together then there are a couple of suggestions to boost your metabolism:
It regularly - at the same time every day
The more calories the earlier in the day you eat, the better metabolic boost you get.
Use intermittent fasting, eat 8-12 hours every day and fast for 12-16 hours.
I try to eat from 9 o’clock till 17 o’clock and fast between, with the biggest meals of the day coming from breakfast and lunch. I used to binge in the evenings but very rarely feel hunger at all in the evenings anymore. This is a lot to take in but start with one step at a time, test things out (long enough) and build upon this. The benefits outweigh the work of changing your feeding rhythm by 100 fold.
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