The typical mantra in traditional bodybuilder culture is that you should eat every 2.5-3 hours in order to “stoke your metabolism”. However, this is neither scientifically nor anecdotally valid.

This theory that you need to eat frequent meals throughout the day seems to have sustained itself thanks to mainstream media and high-level bodybuilders purporting the benefits of constantly shoveling nutrients down one’s gullet instead of having a few further spaced apart feedings each day. Eating frequently does not “rev” the metabolism more so than eating only 2-3 times per day and here’s why:

Assuming energy/nutrient intake is equivalent between two diets, the thermic effect of food (TEF) will be identical regardless of how the nutrients are partitioned out throughout the day. As an example, let’s say you eat three meals (each containing 60g protein, 60g carbohydrate, and 20g fat) one day and six meals (each containing 30g protein, 30g carbohydrate, and 10g fat) another day. The TEF per meal will be larger on the 3-meal per day diet, but the total 24-hour TEF will still balance out since you’re eating less total meals. Another example of this--say you have an entire pizza sitting in front of you, the TEF of eating that whole pizza remains the same no matter how you choose to divvy out the slices. You could eat half the pizza at two meals or 1/8th the pizza at 8 meals, the total TEF will still balance out in the end.

The bottom line

Don’t buy into the idea that eating smaller, more frequent meals will somehow magically increase your metabolic rate more so than eating a few larger meals because that’s just not how the body reacts thermodynamically. At the end of the day, total energy intake is what will ultimately determine the TEF, not the frequency of that energy intake.

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