Posted on January 9th, 2008 by Shannon Clark  •  Filed under: Weight Loss

You’ve likely heard it before. ‘Eat every three hours to keep your metabolism as high as possible.’ Because of this statement, people everywhere are anxiously watching the clock, making sure they hit their meal times on schedule, every day, every time.

They figure by doing so, they’ll boost their metabolism, thus allowing them to eat more food and still lose weight.

Does this sound like you? If so, you may be in for a bit of a surprise.

The three hour rule, when it comes to meal times, does have some benefits – namely, keeping your blood sugar levels under control, but in terms of your metabolic rate, isn’t going to make a difference.

Here’s why.

Every time you have something to eat, your body is going to burn calories simply digesting this food. Great hey? If that isn’t the easiest way you’ve ever burned off some calories, I don’t know what is! But, the key thing to remember here is that the calories you burn will be proportional to how much food you are consuming. Therefore, consume more food, burn more calories. Consume less food, burn fewer calories.

So, how does this stack up for your three hour rule?

Let’s say you have a 2000 calorie allotment for the day. You don’t want to go over or under this as this is what you’ve predetermined is going to get you to your weight goals, be it weight loss, weight gain, or weight maintenance.

Now, this means you want to eat every three hours so, equating to about 5-6 meals for most people.
2000 calories divided by 5 meals (for simplicity sake) is 400 calories per meal.

On the flip side, let’s say you are busy and don’t really have the time to sit down for that many meals each day. Instead, you prefer to have 3 meals a day (apart from your pre and post workout nutrition, of course).

You will be getting about 650 calories in each of these meals, still sticking to your 2000 calorie guideline.

So, person 1 eats five-400 calorie meals and person 2 eats three-650 calorie meals. Who burns more calories through digestion?

Neither of them – they burn pretty much the same! Since person two is consuming more food at each given time, they will burn proportionately more calorie digesting that meal than person one. So, at the end of the day, total calories burned due to digestion are relatively the same. So sorry, if you think eating eight mini-meals a day is going to skyrocket your metabolism like nothing you’ve seen before, you’re sadly mistaken.

Do keep in mind though that we are assuming the exact same macronutrient composition of both diets. If one was on a high protein diet and another was on a high fat diet, then it would be an entirely different story because the different macronutrients do require the body to expend more energy to digest them; protein coming in at around 20-25%, carbohydrates around 5%, and dietary fat around 2-3%. So, as you can see, protein is the most metabolically expensive nutrient to be consuming. A higher protein diet will have you ‘netting’ fewer calories overall. When you get these calories – that doesn’t really make all that much difference (again, apart from pre/post workout).

So, if you are feeling slightly stressed out over having to always make sure you eat every three hours, relax. At the end of the day, as long as you’ve hit your target calorie goal and consumed the foods you should be consuming, it’s not really going to make that big of a difference.

In fact, I’d wager that the stress you are experiencing from being tied to this menu schedule will be doing more harm than if you would have just eaten your meals when it was convenient for you!

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