Is It Better To Eat 3 Square Meals Or Little And Often?

Conventional wisdom dictates that you cannot diet your way out of a bad lifestyle, and conversely cannot exercise your way out of a bad diet. However, whilst this is broadly true, it is less about “good and bad” diets and more about “right and wrong” nutritional routines.

Our cafe barn aims to help this by providing a huge range of balanced, nutritional, homemade meals perfect for a wide range of needs and goals.

What is interesting is that there is a clear transition away from routinely eating three square meals a day towards different types of eating habits, including grazing or the “little and often” approach favoured by bodybuilders.

Bodybuilders tend to eat many small meals (potentially as many as seven) based on the assumption that if they waited for meal times, their body would enter a type of starvation mode where the body stores energy rather than using it.

This argument has been disputed both within bodybuilding circles and in wider nutritional fields, with a study by the University of Warwick suggesting that frequency and size of meals do not have the effects on calorie burning that we might expect them to.

However, this study only focused on the effects of the number of meals on weight loss, and discounted a number of other reasons why people are opting for changes in their meal plans and lifestyle.

Some people have extremely busy lifestyles and thus do not have the time for a long meal; instead, they will tend to eat when they can and opt for healthy snack plans and light bite menus rather than full, filling meals.

As well as this, people who are training to bulk up, including bodybuilders, may opt for small, frequent meals not because they are metabolised any quicker, but because it becomes easier to eat more fibre, lean protein and vegetables compared to larger meals less frequently.