How many times a day should you eat for weight loss? (story of an experiment)

Author: Timko Ilya - master of the whole project and fitness trainer.
2012-10-25

I want to share a case from my coaching practice. A couple of months ago, a woman came to my gym weighing 76 kg. She had about 16 kg of excess weight and dreamed of getting rid of it. I calculated that with a systematic weight loss of 1 kg per week, she could achieve this in about 3.5 to 4 months.

I advised her to eat four times a day. It’s worth noting that she trained six times a week. On Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, she did strength training with supersets (approximately following this program). On Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday, she ran on the treadmill for 50-60 minutes. So, her weekly workload was very high.

In addition, I advised her to limit sweets and fats but not to restrict carbohydrates or, at least, not to restrict them too harshly. With such frequent and intense training, the body requires a significant amount of carbohydrates for recovery. A lack of them would quickly lead to overtraining and an inability to train effectively.

The first three weeks went according to plan. She was losing 1 kg per week. Moreover, the measurements were decreasing faster than the weight since muscle weighs more than fat. The percentage of muscle in her body was increasing while fat was decreasing. Her body was becoming denser. Therefore, even losing 1 kg a week is good.

However, then the weight loss stopped. For the next three weeks, her weight didn’t decrease by a gram. I didn’t see the need to increase the workload even further, as the volume of training was already more than sufficient. Thus, I had to look for the reason in her diet.

According to her, she was consuming about 1200-1300 kcal per day, which was also more than enough since she burned approximately 1900 kcal per day. In my view, we were doing everything correctly. Lowering her caloric intake or increasing the workload was not an option. Otherwise, it would inevitably lead to overtraining.

But the fact remained: for three weeks, her weight wasn’t changing.

Then one trainer advised her to eat not four but six times a day. Moreover, it was to be on a schedule, with intervals between meals ranging from 2.5 to 3 hours. And immediately her weight started to drop at a rate of 2 kg per week! She was eating roughly the same and training just as she had before. The only thing that changed was the number of meals from four to six.

After thinking about it, I realized this fully aligned with my knowledge of physiology. Here are the conclusions I came to:

Conclusions

1. The more often a person eats, the faster their metabolism (fat breakdown) becomes. This is related to the adaptive responses of the body. Infrequent eating encourages our body to store more fat. With frequent eating, the body “doesn’t see” the need to do so.

2. A sign that you’re not eating as often as your body would like is hunger. My client often felt hungry with her four meals a day. Once she switched to six meals, the hunger pangs ceased to torment her.

3. There’s no need to drastically cut your diet. It’s enough to consume only 15% - 20% fewer calories than you burn in a day (5 principles of nutrition for weight loss). The rest will be managed by eating six times a day. Good luck!