We eat too much, that’s all. if you only do “breakfast + lunch, no snacks, no extra butter”, it should be enough to have your BMI <25.
I am an asian european with quite healthy habit, but even with all of that , I find it impossible to get the BMI below 25. It’s always somewhere between 26 and 29. That is until COVID happens and I started experimenting a new type of diet: only eating lunch, no dinner.
I skipped dinner for a year and got my BMI from 29 to 23.
I finally realize how utterly stupid the whole concept of dinner is. I mean, who in its right mind would think about eating the biggest portion of food right before sleeping ? Who even invented the whole concept of dinner ? How stupid of a habit can this be ? When you go on a road trip you charge your oil tank at the start of the trip, not at the end.
Now it’s been 2 years since I totally stopped dinner, except for networking occasions with humans. BMI around 24. That is because I still live in a world dominated by humans, who are not smart enough to choose lunch as a favorite networking time...
The problem with routinely skipping dinner is getting enough protein. No matter how much protein you eat in one sitting, your body can use at most 40 or 45 grams. (The rest is converted to fuel—glucose, fructose or fatty acids, I don’t know which.) On a low protein diet, it is difficult to maintain anything near an optimal amount of muscle mass (even if you train regularly with weights) -- and the older you get, the harder it gets. One thing muscle mass is good for is smoothing out spikes in blood glucose: the muscles remove glucose from the blood and store it. Muscle also protects you from injury. Also men report that people (men and women) seem to like them better when they have more muscles (within reason).
But yeah, if you don’t have to worry about maintaining muscle mass, routinely skipping meals (“time-restricted eating”) is a very easy way to maintain a healthy BMI.
The upshot is that the studies saying your body can only use 45g of protein per meal for muscle synthesis are mostly based on fast-acting whey protein shakes. Stretching out the duration of protein metabolism (by switching protein sources and/or combining it with other foods in a gradually-digested meal) can mitigate the problem quite a bit.
The problem with too-hungry people is that yes, they eat too much, and no, they cannot just stop. The way it works is so: they eat a meal, start feeling very hungry an hour later, make an effort and resist eating for another hour, then some more until they can’t anymore and they give in and gobble up everything in the fridge. In cases like this skipping dinner is not actually possible, at least long-term.
Eating a meal does not immediately increase the available amount of energy. After eating a meal the body has to first spent hours on processing the meal before the energy is available.
If a hunter goes for a hunting trip they are usually eating the food after they did their hunting and not before starting their hunting trip. Our body is not optimized to at the same time sending a lot of blood to the intestines to gather resources and send the blood to the muscles for performance.
FWIW I normally eat dinner around 6, go to bed 5 hours later at 11pm, and eat my next meal 8.5 hours later at 7:30am; at which point “break-fast” is certainly the right word, since I haven’t eaten for 13 hours. Contrast to breakfast, which only has to last me 5 hours (until lunch at 12:30pm), and lunch which again only has to last me 5.5 hours (until 6pm).
We eat too much, that’s all. if you only do “breakfast + lunch, no snacks, no extra butter”, it should be enough to have your BMI <25.
I am an asian european with quite healthy habit, but even with all of that , I find it impossible to get the BMI below 25. It’s always somewhere between 26 and 29. That is until COVID happens and I started experimenting a new type of diet: only eating lunch, no dinner.
I skipped dinner for a year and got my BMI from 29 to 23.
I finally realize how utterly stupid the whole concept of dinner is. I mean, who in its right mind would think about eating the biggest portion of food right before sleeping ? Who even invented the whole concept of dinner ? How stupid of a habit can this be ? When you go on a road trip you charge your oil tank at the start of the trip, not at the end.
Now it’s been 2 years since I totally stopped dinner, except for networking occasions with humans. BMI around 24. That is because I still live in a world dominated by humans, who are not smart enough to choose lunch as a favorite networking time...
The problem with routinely skipping dinner is getting enough protein. No matter how much protein you eat in one sitting, your body can use at most 40 or 45 grams. (The rest is converted to fuel—glucose, fructose or fatty acids, I don’t know which.) On a low protein diet, it is difficult to maintain anything near an optimal amount of muscle mass (even if you train regularly with weights) -- and the older you get, the harder it gets. One thing muscle mass is good for is smoothing out spikes in blood glucose: the muscles remove glucose from the blood and store it. Muscle also protects you from injury. Also men report that people (men and women) seem to like them better when they have more muscles (within reason).
But yeah, if you don’t have to worry about maintaining muscle mass, routinely skipping meals (“time-restricted eating”) is a very easy way to maintain a healthy BMI.
As a counterpoint, take a look at this article: https://peterattiamd.com/protein-anabolic-responses/
The upshot is that the studies saying your body can only use 45g of protein per meal for muscle synthesis are mostly based on fast-acting whey protein shakes. Stretching out the duration of protein metabolism (by switching protein sources and/or combining it with other foods in a gradually-digested meal) can mitigate the problem quite a bit.
The problem with too-hungry people is that yes, they eat too much, and no, they cannot just stop. The way it works is so: they eat a meal, start feeling very hungry an hour later, make an effort and resist eating for another hour, then some more until they can’t anymore and they give in and gobble up everything in the fridge. In cases like this skipping dinner is not actually possible, at least long-term.
Eating a meal does not immediately increase the available amount of energy. After eating a meal the body has to first spent hours on processing the meal before the energy is available.
If a hunter goes for a hunting trip they are usually eating the food after they did their hunting and not before starting their hunting trip. Our body is not optimized to at the same time sending a lot of blood to the intestines to gather resources and send the blood to the muscles for performance.
FWIW I normally eat dinner around 6, go to bed 5 hours later at 11pm, and eat my next meal 8.5 hours later at 7:30am; at which point “break-fast” is certainly the right word, since I haven’t eaten for 13 hours. Contrast to breakfast, which only has to last me 5 hours (until lunch at 12:30pm), and lunch which again only has to last me 5.5 hours (until 6pm).