Should I Eat 3 Meals a Day?
Is 3 meals a day the best for a healthy lifestyle? In my experience as a nutritionist and wellness coach, I’ve noticed that clients who eat three meals per day do much better at controlling their weight. For many, 3 meals a day meal prep can make this easier by providing ready-to-eat, balanced meals throughout the day.
Here’s another nutritionist’s take on the topic:
Eating three balanced meals per day is often touted as the healthiest way to maintain a healthy diet and get adequate nutrition. But if you’re like me and have an unpredictable eating pattern, getting three meals in each day can be tough. I love to snack throughout the day, I don’t like putting effort into cooking, and I even skip meals until I’m so hangry I can barely think straight. I know that I’m not alone in struggling to make the 3 meals a day lifestyle work for me.
According to the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey, the proportion of people consuming 3 meals a day declined significantly from the 1970s to 2010 (73% to 59% in men and 75% to 63% in women).
3 meals a day: An origin story
Though we now take it for granted, the division of your daily diet into three meals — breakfast, lunch and dinner — hasn’t always been the standard, and it still isn’t in some places in the world. Before industrialization, as New York University food historian Amy Bentley told The Atlantic, people in the US tended to eat just two large meals, fueling their bodies for rural, outdoor labor. In ancient Rome, the custom was to eat one large meal, plus two small, light meals.
Kitchen table with ingredients for cooking summer salad. In the background a man is preparing food
In the US, our eating habits are now typically organized around our workdays or school days. But cultural norms aside, there’s no scientific reason for you to eat exactly three meals every day.
Over the years, there have been studies that show benefits to eating more frequent meals, as well as studies that show the downsides of it. Some research has also found benefits to eating less frequent, bigger meals and — you guessed it — the downsides of it.
With that said, the 3-meals-a-day recommendation didn’t come out of nowhere. In one sense, it all comes down to math: The average adult human requires 2,000 calories per day, and you’re only awake for so many hours. “Across all peer-reviewed research and health practices, 3 meals a day is a general recommendation to encourage consistent, adequate energy intake,” Miluk said. “Unless someone is seriously lacking in time or safe access to food, I would not recommend eating less than 3 meals a day, as that would require a large intake in one sitting in order to meet basic needs,” she added.
More important than the number of meals, Miluk said, is consistency. Skipping meals, waiting all day to eat and other inconsistent eating patterns can have a range of unintended outcomes, from increased blood pressure to high or low blood sugar.
So how do you know if your eating patterns are healthy?
“Experiencing frequent mood swings, hanger, erratic cravings, insatiable hunger, eating with a sense of urgency and binges are common signs that you may need to reevaluate your eating patterns and relationship with food,” Miluk explained.
But eating regular meals is, somehow, so much harder than it seems, at least for people like me.
Why eating 3 meals a day is so hard
Sometimes the choice to veer away from the 3-meals-a-day schedule is just that — a choice. But even if you’d love to eat a proper breakfast, lunch and dinner every day, it can be challenging. You can’t always control when you get a moment to sit down and eat, or what food options are available. Mental health and stress can also affect appetite.
There’s a lot of pressure to eat the “right” number and type of meals and cook them all ourselves, using fresh, whole ingredients. On a budget. While working and taking care of loved ones. Easier said than done.
Sometimes it’s more convenient to… not do all that and just reach for a snack instead. While the number of people eating 3 meals a day has gone down over the past several decades, people are eating more calories overall: we’re just getting more of those calories from snacks now.
In some countries, it’s relatively easy to access nutritious food — and this is key — that you don’t have to cook yourself. Local foodways in Mexico and Ghana, for example, make it easy to walk down the road and get a cheap, fully prepared (and delicious) meal made with local protein and produce, or a bundle of fresh local fruit. Not so in many places in the US.
Still, the idea that you should cook all your meals yourself at home is a relatively recent phenomenon. In the past, only families that had space for a home kitchen and the means to hire help ate home-cooked meals every day. In cities, working-class people ate cooked food from small eateries and street vendors. Communal eating is also a treasured tradition in many cultures, both in the US and across the globe.
3 meals a day isn’t some magic number; it’s just a benchmark to help ensure you’re eating enough consistently — and modern life in this country makes it extremely difficult. So what can you do about it?
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