If you’ve been trying to lose weight and you’re confused about how many meals or snacks to be eating per day, then this episode of the Smart Nutrition Made Simple Show is for you…   For those of you that don’t know me, my name is Ben Brown and I’m the owner of BSL Nutrition. We are an online nutrition and fitness coaching company that helps you change your belief system around what it means to be healthy…   And in this particular case, it’s time to put to rest some of the conventional beliefs surrounding meal frequency and fat loss.   In this episode we’re going to discuss:   some of the popular conventional wisdom around meal frequency My observations from coaching hundreds of clients over the past 15 years And what the science and our experience suggests is the best way to determine how many meals per day you should be consuming, why, and how to start to build the skills necessary to create your own personal meal scheduling system   Before we move further, I think it’s important to acknowledge why this even matters…?   I mean we’ve talked ad nauseum about the importance of just needing to create a calorie deficit for weight loss and so, it shouldn’t matter how many times per day we eat, whether it’s 2 or it’s 10, as long as we’re in a deficit, we’ll lose weight…right?!   And while theoretically this makes sense, in practice, it becomes a different story, because behaviorally, there are limitations to what we can realistically commit to WHICH IS WHAT MATTERS MOST.   Put differently, even if the science said that eating 6x a day was best, it wouldn’t matter because it's just not practical for the vast majority of us… and so, it’s important for us to titrate down the science to reasonable actions that help us develop skills to make consistent progress … which is what we’re all about here at BSL Nutrition.   So, back to the conventional wisdom…   We’ve heard that you need to eat 6x per day to “stoke the metabolism”   We’ve heard that you need to graze on small portions so you don’t over eat   We’ve heard that you shouldn’t eat breakfast   We’ve heard that breakfast is the most important meal of the day   We’ve heard that you should intermittent fast daily   We’ve heard that we should just have bars for breakfast and lunch and then have a “sensible dinner”    And the list goes on and on…   So it’s no surprise that we’re confused about which direction to go so we can finally figure out how to lose the weight once and for all.   And this is where we need to move from understanding the data to real-world decision-making.   For most of us listening to this podcast, there are a few fundamental things that are relevant when it comes to long-term weight loss and behavior change: We need to find realistic ways to manage our calorie intake daily without necessarily having to track every morsel of food consumed. Don’t get me wrong, we believe strongly that food tracking, for many, can be the highest ROI driver of creating more awareness around portion sizes and weight loss limiting behaviors but…We also fully acknowledge that for many, this can create undue stress and exacerbate unhealthy eating patterns, which is why we often both substitute these skills and/or help leverage the tracking to create the very skills I’m sharing with you today We need to learn how to build satisfying meals without worrying about overly restrictive food rules that are unrealistic to follow long-term or having to think incessantly about food all day long We need a manageable way to eat daily that gives us good energy, helps us control hunger from meal to meal, AND fits within our hectic daily lifestyle   All too often, especially based on the plethora of popular meal strategies I listed previously, we have the tendency to set ourselves up for disaster, usually by undereating from meal to meal, trying to consume too