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Theory Behind the Meal-Plan: Eating Every 2-3 Hours
I have no way of verfying this, but this may be the oldest meal-plan to be widely used by bodybuilders, aside from the exploratory years of the hobby / profession where people would just steamroll food into their mouths and see what happened. Personally, this was the way I ate from day one of my bodybuilding journey up until about a year ago, since literally every bodybuilding / fitness source I looked at when contemplating whether or not to get into bodybuilding advocated this type of eating. Whether or not there was a cause and effect in doing so is debatable, but I know that the gains I've seen in my physique came while on this meal-plan. So I have a lot of experience and understanding with the benefits I think I received, as well as what was difficult about implementing this meal-plan.
The theory and protocol behind eating every 2-3 hours is as follows:
- So long as you're awake, you eat small-portioned meals every 2-3 hours
- Each meal has a small portion of each macronutrient (protein, carbs, fats) required for the day
- Eating small meals provides optimal absorption of just the right amount of nutrients your "body can absorb at one time"
- Eating small meals in theory keeps your metabolism in a constant state of work, burning calories
- Eating small meals every couple of hours in theory prevents your body from breaking down muscle for energy
So you calculate what you think your macros should be using whatever dietary calculator you find using a search engine. Once you've figured that out, you space out those calories over multiple meals every two to three hours. This usually comes out to about 5-8 small, miniature meals eaten throughout the whole day.
Source: rugbyea.com
Once you start to get used to this meal-plan / way of eating, and start to master it, you can start playing around with when the best times to eat a carb, a fat, a protein, etc are. For example, many people will front load their carbs (eat them first) over their first 2-3 meals so that they get the energy required to function throughout the day, whilst at the same time not getting a spiked insulin response before bed due to alleged increased suseptibility to fat storage while asleep with insulin hormone floating around to some heightened level (not exactly proven). They may even go heavy on the carbs before a workout to get a nice kick of easily ready energy for easier, more intense workouts.
People on this meal-plan will also go heavy on the fats before going to bed since fat slows down the absorption of other macronutrients (since your body has to take a lot of time to digest fats through more complex pathways than carbs and protein), and thus you get a steady slow stream of macronutrients absorbed by your body throughout the night and close the window to which you go without eating / starving (since your body essentially fasts while you are asleep).
All in all, the name of this meal-plan game is to constantly provide your body with nutrients and prevent "starvation mode" from occuring in your body while keeping your metabolism going and giving your body only the amount of food that it can digest while not storing it into fat due to excess. A lot of "bro-science" going on with this meal-plan. For those of you who have no idea what I just said, "bro-science" is a term used in the bodybuilding world to describe methods / ideals / techniques that are passed off as proven fact without really any hard science to back them up. This is not to say that the 2-3 hour eating method is without merit though and many professional bodybuilders use this method to attain amazing physiques.
Benefits of this meal-plan
The main benefit that comes from following this kind of meal-plan in my experience is that you won't want to pig out or go crazy on food from intense hunger pains (if you're doing it right, i.e. getting enough protein, fiber, etc from each meal) since you'll be eating often. Once you follow the protocol of this meal-plan for a while, your body starts to get into rhythm with how you are eating each day and you eventually become fuller easier from a smaller portion of food. This diet also teaches you how to prepare for things ahead of time and follow a strict schedule.
Source: fitgirlpersonaltraining.com
Cons of this meal-plan
Eating.....every 2-3 hours......sounds like it could be pretty inconvenient at times right? Exactly.
People who knew me during the time I was hardcore with this meal-plan will tell you how crazy I sounded with how I ate (they still do by the way), and how intense I was about doing whatever it took to feed the beast every 2-3 hours. I'd skip out of hanging out with people, refuse going places, or just not show up to places at certain times because I wanted to make sure I ate. I'd bring to class whole meals to eat during lectures that would go over the times I wanted to eat. If I went on a trip / vacation, I would stock up or tell people to stop by some place so that I could get a protein bar or a sandwhich so that I didn't miss a meal and hit the macros like I thought I should. It was pretty insane.
Source: doctorramey.com
I didn't stop because I wanted to appease those people though. Of course not. Whether or not they understood just how focused I was, how much all of this meant to me both personally and physically was of no concern to me. I don't and never will hold my social life above the greater message that my hobby of bodybuilding exudes and means to me. Rather, I started to realize that it wasn't so much the frequency of the meals as it was how you hit your macros compared to how your body uses those macros within a day over time.
And that's really the only negative aspect about this meal-plan I can think of. If you take out the whole meal frequency aspect of it, you essentially just have a normal meal-plan. It's the clashing with the other responsibilities and events in / out of your control that can make this meal-plan an issue.
My view on this meal-plan
Whether or not it really WAS the meal-plan that helped me attain the success I've found on my bodybuilding journey, the values that I gained while trying to follow the meal-plan has made me, in my opinion, a better person in many aspects of my life. It taught me how to keep a schedule, how to stay focused, and how to innovate my diet around my schedule and responsibilities. I definitely DID feel that I got hungrier more often while on this meal-plan, but also got fuller with less food. It might be a placebo thing, but I kind of DID feel like my stomach was constantly working. That could be all in my head though.
But if we think about this meal-plan from a biological / evolutionary standpoint, does your body really know what 2 hours is? 3 hours? Was it bioengineered in a time where eating that much food that frequently would EVER be a possibility? I don't think so. I don't think your body has some magical clock or mechanism that goes on and off that stimulates metabolic activity and muscle growth either by simply hitting time intervals that are arbitrary and relative to the body. Rather, I believe your body just reacts to how many macros you consume to what is necessary and required for that day / week / etc in storing or breaking down fat. Hormonal manipulation as it pertains to insulin and growth hormone release might come into play here with which macros you eat at what time / how frequently you eat, but I'm not sure it's that much of a gamechanger for natural bodybuilders.
Your body also won't automatically store fat if you exceed a certain limit of food per meal. Again, I doubt your body thinks like that. I don't think it spaces out calorie allotment in some biological interval system. Rather, your body will just take longer to digest it and, if you're under what your body's maintenance calories are for the day, will not store fat.
And that thing about your body dissolving muscle if you don't eat? I think that's absolutely ridiculous. So long as you are carrying bodyfat / glycogen, I find it VERY hard to believe that your body's initial response to not eating food is to attack and breakdown its means of locomotion for attaining that food / sustenance. Personally, I think your body breaks down muscle to an extreme extent ONLY when you are REALLY denying it of proper nutrients.....like in a state of starvation.....a PROLONGED state of starvation over the course of days or even weeks. What people confuse for "muscle breakdown" during times of dieting is not muscle being broken down in my opinion, but rather a decrease in carbs / glycogen and thus muscles that aren't as full as they would / could be. As an aside, a LOT of your muscle mass isn't exactly straight muscle but also the things that fill the muscle.
And that's my overview and opinion on the eating every 2-3 hours meal-plan. If you are someone who CAN fit this kind of meal-plan into your day along with your other responsibilities, then I think it's a great place to start. It was difficult to find any systematic reviews / studies on this, so excuse me if I cannot back up any of the claims I just made. Try it for yourself, let me know if you found any success!
-Jtrain
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Interestingg thoughts
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