If You Just Eat Three Meals a Day, Will You Lose Weight?

Three square meals a day is the established norm, but not everyone chooses to follow it. Some people trying to lose weight eat five small meals a day or skip breakfast. The truth is, it doesn't matter how often you eat, as long as you eat healthy foods and the right amount of calories.

Your diet is one of the most important factors in how successful you are at losing weight. Genetics, age, gender, ethnicity, and medical conditions and medications also affect weight loss success, but the basic idea is that if you eat more calories than your body burns for energy each day, you'll gain weight. If you eat fewer calories than your body needs each day, you'll lose weight.

Therefore, whether you eat three times a day or 12 times a day, what matters most is keeping your calorie intake below your calorie expenditure. Figuring out this number can be challenging, but you can get a general idea using recommendations from the Dietary Guidelines for Americans based on age, gender and activity level.

Since exercise is another important component of weight loss, you should aim for a moderately active to active lifestyle. If you're a moderately active man between the ages of 26 and 45, you need around 2,600 calories a day. A moderately active woman in the same age range needs approximately 2,000 calories each day.

These are the calories you need to maintain your weight. To lose weight, you need to eat fewer calories.

Read More: Will You Gain Weight Eating 2,000 Calories a Day?

Track your meals for the next few days to see how many calories you're actually eating. If you're exceeding your daily calorie goal, plan your three meals a day to stay within your calorie budget.

You can divide your calories among your three meals any way you'd like. If your goal is 2,100 calories per day, for example, and you divide it equally, each meal would contain around 700 calories. If you like to eat a small breakfast and a larger dinner, you might allot 400 calories for breakfast, 800 calories for lunch and 900 calories for dinner.

It's helpful to know what those amounts of calories look like. For example, a 400-calorie breakfast could include:

• Two large hard-boiled eggs
• One serving of oatmeal prepared with water
• 1 cup of raspberries
• Coffee with soy creamer

A 900-calorie dinner could include:

• Filet of salmon with 2 tablespoons of tzatziki sauce
• 1 cup cooked brown rice
• 1 cup cooked spinach with 1/2 tablespoon of olive oil and 1 ounce slivered almonds
• One small orange

Read More: 5 Tips for Eating Protein the Right Way

As you can see, you can eat quite a lot of food in three meals while staying within your calorie budget. It's easy to do when you cut out junk foods, processed foods, fried and fatty foods, sugar and desserts that are high in calories and low in nutrients. When you choose healthy, whole foods such as fruits and vegetables, lean protein and whole grains, it is less challenging to lower your calorie intake and still feel full.

Including enough protein and fiber-rich foods at each meal may help you stay full for longer so you can stick to your three-meal a day plan without snacking. Both fiber and protein digest slowly and slow stomach emptying.

Because fiber expands when it comes into contact with fluids in the stomach, it promotes stomach distension, according to a review article in the Journal of Nutrition and Metabolism in January 2019. Stomach distension delays the release of a hormone called ghrelin that stimulates appetite, thus preventing hunger soon after eating. Protein can also reduce ghrelin production.

If you do find that eating only three meals a day doesn't keep hunger pangs a bay, add in a couple healthy snacks. Some carrot sticks and hummus or apple slices and nut butter can tide you over until your next meal, so you don't give in to cravings for less healthy foods. Just be sure to include your snacks in your total calorie intake for the day.