You have to follow these certain rules to lose weight

From ‘You have to eat six small meals a day to lose weight’ and ‘You must eat breakfast to kick-start your metabolism’, to ‘You have to eat at least 1200 kcal a day’ or ‘Don’t eat carbs in the evening’ — there are thousands of (nonsensical) rules about losing weight and/or eating healthily.

Ultimately, the only thing that counts is daily caloric intake. It doesn’t matter whether the calories are distributed over six meals, 20, or just one. The ‘six meals a day’ rule has been disproved umpteen times but still stubbornly persists as a widespread myth. Bellisle et al. (1997) were able to show that the way food intake is distributed throughout the day (one large meal or several small ones) doesn’t influence the body’s energy requirements. And Cameron et al. (2010) showed that there was no significant difference in weight loss between dieters who ate six meals spread through the day and those who only ate one.

Aside from the weight-loss aspect, which is unaffected by the distribution of calories across the day, there are indications that eating (too) often throughout the day can have an adverse effect on the regulation of your blood sugar levels. The body gets used to a constant supply of energy, so to speak, and forgets how to regulate blood sugar by itself. By contrast, so-called intermittent fasting can have an extremely positive influence on blood sugar regulation. The phrase ‘intermittent fasting’ is used to refer to either whole-day fasting, or time-restricted feeding, when eating is limited to one part of the day (for example, the first four hours of the morning), and the rest of the time (20 hours in this case) is spent fasting.

Funnily enough, the reaction to this kind of fasting from the outside world is often ‘It can’t be healthy!’, which just goes to show once again how many of these eating rules continue to circulate unquestioned. They’re sometimes even spread by so-called experts, although they aren’t supported by any scientific research.

Whether you have breakfast in the morning or take your first meal of the day at 8.00 pm is irrelevant for losing weight successfully. It doesn’t matter whether you eat carbohydrates or protein in the evening, and I’ve already commented extensively on the idea that you should never eat less than a certain amount per day. Of course, some of these interventions do have a short-term effect on the number that appears on the scales. If I eat a large plate of pasta in the evening, then I will naturally weigh more the next morning, because that food is still in my system. If I start eating carbohydrates again after having cut them out of my diet for a time, my body will retain more water — and the same is true of salty food. But I’ve already commented enough on the topic of short-term weight changes. When and how you eat is completely irrelevant for long-term weight loss.

Some rules are based on scientific research. But it should be pointed out that what counts as a difference in a scientific study can sometimes ultimately be no more than a few calories. Whether you ‘kick-start’ your metabolism in the morning or not might make a difference of ten calories, depending on whether you have your breakfast right after getting up or four hours later, and provided you don’t change your daily habits in any other way. But these ‘never skip breakfast’ rules make some people feel forced to eat even if they don’t have the appetite. In the worst-case scenario, they will end up eating more overall, because they feel breakfast somehow doesn’t count, as it was more of a duty than a pleasure for them.

The Washington Post (2015) devoted an extremely interesting article to the science behind this breakfasting tip, explaining its origin. The recommendation entered the US Dietary Guidelines in 2010 on the basis of purely observational studies after it was noticed that people who regularly eat breakfast have a lower risk of obesity on average. But such observational studies are not proof of cause and effect. It could easily be the case that other factors are the cause of both effects — the habit of eating breakfast and lower body weight. Also, taking the fact that people who eat breakfast are more likely to be slim as the command ‘Eat breakfast, then you’ll be thin!’ makes about as much sense as concluding that people who call the emergency services get injured more often, so to reduce your risk of injury, you should never dial the emergency number. The Washington Post article also cites several studies that proved by experimentation — not simply by observation — that eating breakfast definitely does not lead to weight loss, and that skipping breakfast doesn’t make you fat. The article highlights how unfounded some ‘official recommendations’ are. A non-expert public unaware of how the recommendations come about, naturally assume there must be something to them. After all, they’re official guidelines, so there must be something behind them — probably some kind of ‘metabolism stuff’, some ‘hormone thing’, or other mysterious influences.

The best strategy is to ignore all the tips and keep it simple: take in less energy than you burn. In the end, it’s more important to find the way of eating that works best for you and that makes it easy (easier) for you to maintain your personal caloric balance. Your nutrition plan should not try to follow any general rules, but should rather reflect your individual needs. Some medical conditions can even be exacerbated by following certain rules. What works for some may be precisely the wrong thing for others with different (e.g., medical) backgrounds. For some people, it might be helpful to distribute their caloric intake across many small meals throughout the day. But if that’s effective for their weight loss, it won’t be for physical reasons, but mental ones. In a case like that, it makes sense for that person to eat many small meals, rather than forcing herself to follow the current trend of intermittent fasting.

I think a lot of people find it unsettling to throw all their ‘golden rules’ overboard. Some almost see it as an attack, because there will always be people who have had a kind of personal breakthrough by following certain rules. It might be avoiding carbohydrates (in the evening), following a particular diet, changing the frequency of their meals, or losing weight with some kind of shake or supplement. It is important to remember here that ‘there’s more than one way to skin a cat’ and different people work in different ways. An easy route for some people might be tortuous for others, and vice versa.

For example, I, personally, like the structured and clear-cut nature of counting calories. I have a very strong tendency to lie to myself. (‘I haven’t really eaten that much today, so a piece of chocolate should be okay … Oh, I’ve already eaten too much chocolate today, so I may as well write the day off as a failure and eat some crisps!’) Seeing the numbers written down in black and white and knowing for sure whether I can afford to eat that bar of chocolate helps me to avoid fooling myself. At the same time, I know there are people who can think of nothing worse than having to weigh out all their food and type the figures into an app, and who do a lot better when they tell themselves, ‘I’ll eat only lean meat, fruit, and vegetables six days a week, and one day a week I’ll eat whatever I want,’ or still others who would rather fast for two days a week, or do without dinner every evening, so that they automatically eat less, without the bother of counting calories.

Those who have achieved a breakthrough with a certain diet often tend to mystify their success as being down to some kind of magical, metabolism-accelerating effect or equivalent. That’s usually because it really does seem like a miracle when you suddenly find a way that feels easy to solve a problem that you’ve been struggling with for years. In reality, there’s nothing magical about those miracle diets. Each one is just one more way of reducing calorie intake, among myriad others. Even if it feels like you’ve found a trick that lets you eat as much as you like, the real trick is that you want to eat less, and so cutting back no longer feels like a sacrifice.

I don’t think it can do any harm to look into and try out some of the diet fads, like a low-carb diet, the 5:2 diet, the paleo diet, or protein shakes as meal replacements, to see if any of them suit you personally. Ideally, there will be one among them that makes it relatively easy for you to lose weight and keep it off. For me, for example, a protein-based diet is good, both because I do a lot of weight training and therefore have a high requirement for protein, and because protein is more filling and therefore reduces my appetite. But I love sweets too much to follow a very strict protein-based plan.

So, while it might be disappointing for some people to see their golden rules debunked, I think it’s actually extremely liberating. I know a lot of people who have a permanently guilty conscience about their eating habits — be it because they just can’t manage to force down breakfast in the morning, often only have one big meal a day, eat too late in the evening, or like to eat the wrong carbohydrates at the wrong time. In these cases, it can be very freeing to cast off that guilt and sit down at 8.00 pm with a plate of pasta in the knowledge that it absolutely fits in with your daily calorie requirements, and it won’t automatically go straight to your hips just because you’re eating it five hours ‘late’.