Is six meals a day a good way to lose weight or just another fad to promote protein powders and meal replacement bars?

I think it is a big inconvenience to eat that often. It's hard enough to eat three meals a day if you are preparing them well with fresh ingredients and as little processed foods as possible, I couldn’t even imagine doing that much work 6 times every day!

I also don’t like the hormonal effect of this style of eating. Eating several small meals per day does reduce insulin spikes (slightly), however it does this by substituting in an almost constant flow of insulin (with lower peaks). So instead of a couple high peaks, you end up having your total insulin increased over the course of the day. Total daily insulin is more important from a health and weight loss standpoint. When it comes to fat burning, one of the most important parts of your metabolism is the opposing effect of Growth Hormone and Insulin.

Growth hormone is secreted when we are fasting (i.e. during sleep) and directs nutrients toward our muscles. Insulin is secreted when we are fed and sends them the other way toward fat.One rule to remember on metabolism is that insulin plus excess calories equals fat storage.There is no way to avoid this reality.

Consequently, keeping your insulin elevated over the course of a day seems like a bad idea to me, if fat loss is your goal. Eating this often also tends to make one almost obsessive with calorie monitoring. Even the smallest mistake at each of your 6 meals will almost certainly cause you to store fat.Think of it this way, even over-eating by as little as 85 Calories at each of your 6 meals would be an extra 500 Calories per day. This is reason enough for me not to bother with the 6 meals a day mantra, however it’s also not fair to women. That’s right, six meals a day is sexist.

The diet style of eating six small meals a day started with bodybuilders and it is traditionally men who read about and follow bodybuilding.So when magazine writers are trying to think up new nutrition stories for their readers, they are doing it for guys who are into bodybuilding and who typical have much larger muscle mass and bodies than average.This is where 6 meals per day come in. When it was originally pitched as a way to lose weight, it was in bodybuilding magazines, directed specifically to bodybuilders. This idea made sense to them and didn’t seem too hard.

After all, when a 260-pound heavily muscled bodybuilder is trying to lose weight he might start by lowering his calorie intake down to around 2400 (which is much more than an average person would ever need in a day).Divide this by 6 and he is eating around 400 Calories at every meal.Based on this math, this bodybuilder could lose weight by eating a 6-inch “steak and cheese” sub from Subway for every meal!Now that sounds like a diet I could handle no problem.However, a 5 foot 4 woman who weighs a 130 pounds isn’t so lucky. For this woman to lose weight her caloric intake is going to have to be much lower than the bodybuilder in the example above. If her dieting caloric intake was 1300, and she was eating 6 meals per day then she would get to eat a whopping 220 Calories at each meal! – That is approximately the same calories as a cup of yogurt!! Eating such small meals six times a day is torture. This style of eating requires you to be impossibly strict.There really is no scientifically proven weight loss advantage to eating multiple small meals per day (this includes any supposed metabolic advantage), why do this to yourself? I can’t imagine eating multiple small meals the size of a banana and some yogurt for weeks on end…like I said earlier -it would be torture!

There is also no weight loss or health benefits to eating this way. So this is why I don’t agree with the weight loss strategy of eating 6 small meals per day - It was designed for a very specific, heavily muscled, unique group of people (bodybuilders) but for some reason it gets pushed on the rest of us.Not only were 6 meals per day designed for a very unique group of people, but also in order to be done properly, you need to give in to Obsessive Compulsive Eating.

It forces you to start worrying about how much you ate at every meal, and what the exact nutrient breakdown was for every single thing you ate, and the minute you are finished one meal, you immediately have to begin planning the next one. This is a very toxic way of living with food.There is no benefit, and for most people who don’t weight 250+ pounds, it just makes life very difficult. Eating only 200 to 300 calories per meal is very hard to do, and because nobody can spend 6 hours a day preparing these meals, you end up having no choice but to rely on supplements and protein bars to get all your meals in without going over your calorie amount…and most likely this is the whole purpose of this style of eating.It was bodybuilding magazines that first made this style of eating popular, and it is these same magazines that serve as the main advertising source for sports supplements. So if following 6 meals a day is only really possible when you use protein shakes and protein bars it makes perfect sense that this style of eating is promoted so heavily by the bodybuilding/supplement/magazine industry in order to sell more supplements, protein powders and protein/nutrition bars. Once again, we see how Obsessive Compulsive Eating benefits the food industry and how the food industry can affect the way we eat.Here’s my advice. There is nothing wrong with supplements, but don’t let the way you eat be dictated to you by the profit needs of the supplement industry. If you want to lose weight then you need to reduce your calories by the method that suits you the best.

I’m sure there is a small group of people who might even does very well eating 6 meals per day, and actually have the time to do it…but please, if it doesn’t work for you then let the 6 meals a day idea fade away just like every other industry driven fad.Find the simplest easiest method of reducing the amount of food you eat, while still allowing you to actually enjoy the foods you eat, and then use that method.