Does eating frequent meals increase metabolism?

A lot of diet and nutrition experts recommend eating several smaller meals per day rather than eating the typical 3 square meals per day. The thinking behind this is that frequent feedings will help speed up the metabolism and burn more calories from the energy used to digest the food.

But does this really work in the real world?

There was a study done by Drs. M A Taylor and J S Garrow from King's College London UK (Int. J. Obesity 25: 519-528, 2001) that measured the energy expenditure from eating 6 meals per day vs. 2 meals per day. The test subjects ate the same number of total calories, but the first group ate that food in 6 small meals and the second group ate the same amount of food in 2 big meals.

The results of the study showed that there was No Difference in the energy expenditure from eating 6 meals per day or 2 meals per day. This goes to show that the key to losing weight (or gaining it) is the total caloric intake and not the meal frequency.

Now with that being said there is still some benefits to dividing up your food intake up over the course of the day because it is easier to digest and generally more comfortable on the stomach to eat lighter more frequent meals.

However, when it comes to sticking with a serious fat loss diet, one trick that I've used personally and have shared with several of my personal coaching students with great results, is once you are following a structured fat loss eating plan and you want to further reduce your caloric intake to create an even greater caloric deficit. Rather then cutting back on your portion sizes and eating smaller meals to the point where you have to eat a few bites of food and then leave the table hungry. Keep the meal size the same and just eat fewer meals.

When I start a pre-contest fat loss diet I'll begin with 6 meals per day, then cut back to 5 meals, then 4 meals, and for the last few weeks before a show I'll even drop down to just 3 meals per day. The meal size stays consistent and this allows me to leave the table comfortably full, but I'm creating a caloric deficit simply by eating fewer meals and less food over the course of the day.

This is one of the tricks I used to shed over 40 pounds of ugly bodyfat and get contest ripped in just the matter of months as you can see in the pics below:




















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