I totally agree with what has been said about every body being different. I personally never lose weight on multiple meals a day. I try it for weeks and all I am is hungry all day long. I eat twice as many calories as I should and I am never ever satisfied. Eating 6x a day just makes me super likely to binge in order to get rid of that stupid 'never feeling full' feeling. On the flip side, I eat about three square meals a day. Sometimes I have snacks in between but rarely and I am more successful in losing weight simply because I don't get hunger pains in between meals. My body likes to feel full and I would rather have a larger meal 3x a day than smaller meals which don't satiate me. I've actually gained weight by trying the 6x a day habit. But of course other people are the inverse so it's impossible to say that any definitive rule about eating is correct except the tried and true, burn more than you eat.

I want to make my point clear: I don't believe meal frequency can make or break weight loss.

Caloric totals can.

Whether you spread your calories out over 3 or 6 meals isn't going to matter relative to weight loss.

Total calories will.

So if you're not losing weight, it's not b/c of your meal frequency. Rather, a vast majority of the time it's b/c you're not in a caloric deficit. (I'll certainly add there's other reasons that could cause a lack of weight loss, but that list doesn't include meal frequency)

Granted, meal frequency could screw with satiety, for instance, and thus lead to you eating more calories than you wanted. But that's not meal frequency per se causing the weight stagnation... it's the calories.

Just a random thought.

Something that no one has mentioned yet - or maybe it was just overlooked - is this:

Whether you eat one meal, or 3 meals, or 7 meals, you MUST get in some nutritional variety in your diet. You can stall out your weight loss by not getting the proper nutrients. At a very simplistic level, our bodies are programmed for survival. When a body stops getting needed nutrients, it does everything it can to hold on to whatever you're giving it. That can, for some people, result in a stall.

However, even if it doesn't result in a stall, you can damage your body by not giving it proper nutrients. You can lose weight eating nothing but meat, but eventually your body needs other vitamins and minerals or you'll begin to become ill. You can lose weight eating no fat whatsoever, but eventually your body will rebel because you need some healthy fats to function. If you're going to only eat one meal a day, you really do need to make sure that you get a variety of foods into that one meal.

Now the other thing that can happen is that if you only eat one meal a day, you can vastly underestimate the number of calories that you're eating. It's really easy to fool yourself into believing that you're not eating that much because you "only eat one meal". I've done it to myself before ... it sneaks up on you!

I know for me personally, I do best when I eat smaller meals throughout the day - it's both physical and psychological for me. If I'm eating frequently I don't have time to get really hungry and go overboard. Some people can better manage the hunger monster and do fine on one or two meals a day ... but again, nutritional variety. Much more important than how often you eat, IMO.

That's a good point, thanks.

I didn't bring it up simply b/c the topic of this thread was meal frequency and fat loss... but the point is good nonetheless.

I've been eating only two meals a day for a pretty long time. Occasionally on the weekends I will only eat 1 meal and that's dinner. I have found no adverse effects because of this regarding malnutrition. I don't really think I was eating enough good stuff before I started this meal plan anyway haha.

When it's a ll said an done I just find it much more simplier to track how much I eat with just two meals. So moral of this story eat all the meals you want but it's calories that matter. You must run a caloric deficit.