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> The most important factor for keeping calories intake low is making many small meals a day

Is there any research that actually shows that?

My own personal experience with leangains (intermittent fasting; taking all my calories in an 8 hour window with lunch being my first and biggest meal) is that I find it far harder to overeat that way than with smaller meals. It's "easy" to fit in a snack between small meals, but after lunch I'm totally sick of food, and it's hard for me to even meet my macro nutrient goals (I lift weights; my protein intake is high). Often I have to force myself to take in a second meal to meet my calorie needs (edit: because I simply often don't want to eat again before the end of my eating window, around 8pm, after my massive lunch at noon).

On the opposite end, I see very few people around me that eat "only" two meals. My co-workers for example, might very well only sit down for a meal twice, but they snack constantly. And their "snacks" are often substantially higher calorie than their main meals. When I did try to diet with many small healthy meals, it was a nightmare - I was constantly hungry and constantly craving food.

When I do intermittent fasting, I have hunger pangs in the mornings 2-3 days, and then I stop being hungry in the mornings.

The whole point with many meals a day is not waiting to have a giant munchie to eat, because when you do so you'll look for high-fat, high-sugar food and devour an insane ammount of calories in minutes before your body triggers a sensation of satiety. Then depending on your genetics and level of activity, you will get malnourished, obese or both.

You stopping having hunger pangs in the mornings after some days is your body adapting to your schedule. As long as you don't go lunch with a blackhole in the stomach and are mindful about what you're eating, it's fine. Still, eating something in between is important to avoid wild sugar peaks and helps improving cognition performance if your job is intellectual.

> The whole point with many meals a day is not waiting to have a giant munchie to eat, because when you do so you'll look for high-fat, high-sugar food

When I eat more meals a day and then suddenly have a longer gap than I'm used to, I find it easy to do that.

When I systematically east 1-2 meals a day, I adapt to that pattern in 2-3 days, and then have no problems eating a diet where getting sufficient fat is actually hard, and where I often find I have to add some "easy" carbs to meet my calorie requirements because the sheer volume of food I am due to eat for my lunch makes it an annoying chore.

Part of the reason I don't like the "many small meals" approach is because I then quickly adapt to getting hungry many times a day, and the chance of getting hungry at a time I can't eat makes it very easy to snack on unhealthy foods.

> You stopping having hunger pangs in the mornings after some days is your body adapting to your schedule.

Exactly. With no need for many meals a day.

> Still, eating something in between is important to avoid wild sugar peaks and helps improving cognition performance if your job is intellectual.

Not my experience at all. I get the "wild sugar peaks" when I eat irregularly and/or when I consume lots of easily digested sugars. But since I don't get hungry very often while do intermittent fasting, I have no problems eating a lot of my fat and protein first, at which point I don't generally want much sugar, and my diet ends up being foods that are digested fairly slowly. I do get a bit tired shortly after lunch, but I quickly get more energy again and conversely my mornings are generally far more alert than they used to be with lots of small meals.

Still, eating something in between is important to avoid wild sugar peaks and helps improving cognition performance if your job is intellectual.

I am not sure if this is true. I think in people without diabetes, insulin does it's job and regulates your blood sugar pretty well during a fast and I think cognition is better when a large amount of your body's resources are not being used to digest food.

Maybe, but it seems to me the trick is not to end up developing type 2 diabetes by repeatedly spiking blood sugar to the point the pancreas gives up.

Let me add some more anecdotal evidence in favour of so called intermittent fasting.

Without snacking during the day, it is far easier to quantify exactly what I am putting into my body and it is easier to make sure whatever it is, is of a higher quality and is actually what I need (or feel that my body needs). In addition to this, big meals in the late afternoon or evening are a lot more satisfying to me than multiple small meals that just leave me wanting more.

I would highly recommend this way of life to anyone struggling with what they are eating.

> Without snacking during the day, it is far easier to quantify exactly what I am putting into my body and it is easier to make sure whatever it is, is of a higher quality and is actually what I need (or feel that my body needs).

The "snacks" between meals is for eating something like a fruit, yogurt, nuts... not french fries. Without eating fruits throughout the day you probably don't even meet the minimum fruit intake recommendation. Depending on the country, the average intake is half than the recommended.

I have a similar experience. I follow a diet (in the general sense, not in terms of weight loss) that contradicts most of dieticians recommendations (hearty breakfast,good lunch, light dinner, lots of healthy snacks during the day), that is to say that I try to have a single luscious meal, usually at dinner, and have just some fruit or yogurt during the day when I'm hungry.

This way I know that I'll be completely satisfied at least once per day, and of course there are limits of what I can eat in a single meal (and not much time left in the day for eating more).

I found out that this is what works best for me, my personality and my relationship with food. I can do this indefinitely, while in the past, I would eat healthily for maybe weeks or months, but then I would go back to the same old habits.

For other people it would not make sense, or be a bad fit. My point is that, in the end, nutrition is something very personal and has heavy psychological implications, and should be treated case by case, there is not a "silver bullet" working for everyone.

Well, I snack constantly, but my diet consists mostly of vegetables, fruit, nuts, meat and water. I haven't had weight issues yet. If my snack consist of one carrot, one apple, handful of nuts or one orange, it's not that bad. Doesn't hurt that apples and oranges are delicious. But then again, I'm not trying to lose weight, just eat healthier than coffee and donuts every day. My dietary requirements might be different if I actually also did strength training in addition to cardio (running & walking).

> There's a large factor on satiety which is how hungry, or even happy, you feel at the moment.

Satiety is a measure of how hungry you will feel. It doesn't make sense to call hunger a factor. I agree that we need to measure the quality of the food correctly, and I suggested a way to do it.

The correlation between office work and obesity too small to call it a direct result.

I believe the obesity epidemic is caused by three things:

1) R&D in the food industry that optimizes for profit, where profit is maximized by creating foods that are irresistible.

2) Technology driving the price of food to near zero.

3) More women in the workforce leads to fewer domestically prepared meals. These meals are replaced commercially created meals (lunchables, mcdonalds) thus #1 applies more often.

#2, #3 are good things. The best fix is to design a system where profits are maximized by making tasty foods that with the constraint that the foods don't incorrectly inform our biochemical hunger feedback mechanism.

My plan attempts to address this problem.

> 1) R&D in the food industry that optimizes for profit, where profit is maximized by creating foods that are irresistible.

The problem is, what is irresistible for someone who makes two meals a day is different than what is irresistible for someone in a different diet, lifestyle or even mood.

While I was busting my ass inside an stressful office until 10:00 PM without eating, I wanted to get home and sink my teeth in a pepperoni pizza as fast as possible while watching TV. Nowadays I'm on a different lifestyle and, mind you, I woke up craving for squid, for some reason (the body talks). I went downtown, bought fresh squid, cooked a risotto myself with the things I like. A low fat, low sodium, high protein, Zinc and Selenium rich meal - the exact opposite of pizza, but satisfied me just as much today.

You're saying the food industry optimizes for irresistible (crunchy, fiberless, fat and sugar rich) food and there's no way around this formula. I'm saying they are only selling what hungry, depressed and stressed people are craving to eat.

Good pizza and good squid risotto aren't polar opposites: they are both full of carbs and contain almost the same amount of sodium. Pizza probably has more vitamins due to the tomato sauce.

My contention is that pizza doesn't have to be junk food, it just is most of the time in the US. Choose a better restaurant or make your own.

What I'm comparing is the satisfaction hit you get from having a greasy pepperoni pizza delivered and devoured in 20 minutes and eating something completely different depends totally on lifestyle and mood.

What the OP was implying is that fast/junk food is inherently irresistible and that's why more people are obese. What I'm saying in turn is that it's today's lifestyle which makes people find it irresistible and that nothing else satisfies.

I know what you were saying, I was going off topic, because as an Italian and a food enthusiast, I'm tired of hearing pizza being described as junk food. That's all. :)

Even mass-produced pizza doesn't have to be junk food ... but when you sit down and eat a whole pie, you're going to be over-doing it regardless of how healthy the ingredients were.

Why do you think pizza is bad for you? I incorporate pizza in my diet frequently. The main limiting factor with it for me is keeping carbs down, but as someone else pointed out: a risotto is also carb heavy; that rice is pretty much all carbs.

Pizza can be massively unhealthy if you buy from somewhere that's full of sodium and soaked in grease, but there are plenty of ways of making pizzas that are fine to eat every day even.

Heck, squid works just fine on a thin pizza base too, as do mussels and prawn if you want a nice seafood mix.

You're saying the food industry optimizes for irresistible (crunchy, fiberless, fat and sugar rich) food and there's no way around this formula. I'm saying they are only selling what hungry, depressed and stressed people are craving to eat.

Well yes, but solving problems like depression, stress, and overly-long working hours is much tougher than just blaming food executives.

Have you ever thought what the people at the food industry eat? Do the C levels at General Mills and Mars eat all that cereal and candy? Do the McDonalds people eat at McDonalds? What are the diets of leaders in the food industry vs the diets of leaders in technology?

Donald Thompson looks like he might have a BMI above Larry Page.

http://www.aboutmcdonalds.com/mcd/our_company/leadership/don...

http://www.google.com/about/company/facts/management/

Also not sure how the price of food is near zero? Are you implying that the cost now is near zero because I don't have to go out and kill a cow, nor do I have to farm and scavenge? So cost as in physical cost? Because breakfast and lunch today were not near zero and I have noticed the cost of milk and eggs going up, not down.

> 3) More women in the workforce leads to fewer domestically prepared meals.

This is unfortunately true, as in it will take probably another 20 to 30 years for the majority of Western men to realize that they can cook, too, and that cooking is not only a "woman's job". Coming from a family where both my parents worked full-time jobs and where my dad was actually cooking tastier meals than my mum it surprised me when I grew up and saw that in other families the husband wouldn't approach the kitchen even if he would be starving to death.

Otherwise I cannot really understand why a majority of people have starting seeing cooking a healthy meal as a "waste of time". This is something so ingrained in our well-being, I'd say is almost quintessential to who we are as a species, that it baffles me when I see so many people relying only on pre-processed food that comes packaged in cardboard boxes.

You're right, because it's generational. My dad only knows how to make "Kraft Dinner" and hot dogs. I love cooking and most other males my age (30s to 40s) do as well. The advent of cooking competition tv shows and celebrity chefs has really catapulted this sentiment into mainstream society.

I'm a pretty good cook, and when I was a single guy, I assure you my excess of body fat came from some of my awesome home cooking rather than TV dinners. The biggest problem is everything being oriented around "family size" being 4+ but actual real world sitting at the table tonight and eating probably averages about 2 on long term average due to other committments etc. There are four members of my immediate family but tonight I eat dinner alone, and I need a individual portion size not "family size".

> 2) Technology driving the price of food to near zero.

Got any source for that?

I worked for 3 years in a European Union Scientific project (FP7) of Rural Development and Agriculture in 6 countries (Germany, Czech Republic, UK, France and Bulgaria). The findings we got (including direct interviews with farmers, Eurostat data and other panel data) contradict your claim.

Specially if we consider that one of the main requirements of food is land (either for crops, trees or pasture for animals), and if anything, fertile land is getting more expensive.

As a quick data point, corn was $1.32/bu. in 1970. Adjusted for inflation, that would be close to $8 today. Current price is $5.16. That does indicate a downward trend in prices, and I expect you will see similar trends for other food commodities.

> Got any source for that?

Sure: http://www.ers.usda.gov/data-products/food-expenditures.aspx...

Download Table 7 (Food expenditures by families and individuals as a share of disposable personal income), and you will see a steady march from 24% of disposable income to 9%.

>The most important factor for keeping calories intake low is making many small meals a day, and we won't solve that changing food, but lifestyle.

Is that the case? Many countries that have much stricter cultural traditions about when and how much to eat (the French, the Italians) eat 2-3 meals a day. They don't eat when they feel hungry, the eat when it is eating time.

Notice one important thing about Italian culture: they eat slow. Lunch time takes more than one hour and includes several dishes (antipasto, pasta, meat, then fresh fruit). Same for dinner. So they do eat spaced and having time to chew does increase satiety.

Now compare that to having to lunch in 15 minutes when you are starving. You want to swallow a Whooper and grab a Coke that you can drink while walking back to the office.

> The most important factor for keeping calories intake low is making many small meals a day

That's an assertion without provenance and a contentious assumption to make.

> I don't think that works too well. There's a large factor on satiety which is how hungry, or even happy, you feel at the moment.

But surely there is such a thing as food that is more filling and food that is less so, and how hungry you are (or how happy) will lead to deviations from that baseline, but it won't cause that baseline to magically disappear, I would think?

a) data

but more importantly

b) price

-> I once saw a very fat boy (12-14) and his very fat mother (cant guess age) in a very poor neighborhood as I was taking a bus to college.

"Mom, can I eat vegetables today?"

"No, you're eating pasta tonight! We don't have no vegetables"

"AWWWWWWWW!!! No fair!"

"Shut up"

McDonalds is cheap. Pasta is cheap. Most shit food is cheap and easy. Non-shit food is not cheap nor is it easy. We must make a tax to make shit food as pricy as non-shit food. Then people will start making better decisions.

Now going back to hcarvalhoalves' point -- 9-5 schedule gives us that 1 hr lunch. We cannot spend our time preparing food so we can eat during that one hr. We go for fast-food lunch. Usually that means high sugar, or high something not great for you. If its good for you and can fit that 1 hr schedule, its usually very pricy and most people can't afford to spend say $20 per meal 5+ times a week.