An old and sage adage has it that you should eat a huge
breakfast, a good-sized lunch and a tiny dinner.
Why?
The reason for a big breakfast is easy.
Breakfast sets the “metabolic table” for the day and
because the more energy you start the day with, the more likely it is that you
will produce more during the day, as well as the more likely that you will have
the energy and discipline to do the exercise you need to do every day.
A good-sized lunch just adds to those benefits since you
will still be active for at least 8 or 10 hours after lunch.
A small dinner is also easy to rationalize: your body
“slows” at night so you really don’t need much in the way of calorie intake as
evening sets in.
Unfortunately, nearly everyone follows exactly the
opposite of that adage and for most of us breakfast is the smallest meal,
dinner the largest.
To prove why that’s probably the least healthy way to
live, a study on rats has shown that rats who ate a high-fat diet yet had their
unlimited food intake restricted to only 7 hours of the day gained no weight
from their high-fat, high-calorie diet and also had much better hormonal and
metabolic measures than did the rats who were fed a high-fat diet but were
allowed to eat whenever they wanted to.
Ergo: it’s not just what you eat but also when you eat
that matters.
