Eating three meals a day ... is it absolutely necessary?

[Ohiogal]

Or has staying home during the pandemic thrown that notion out the window?

********

If you pore over the food-business news from the past year, there’s little question that lots of people have changed their habits in one way or another. For instance, many people are buying more snacks—in January, Frito-Lay said that some of its marquee brands, such as Tostitos and Lay’s, had finished the year with sales increases of roughly 30 to 40 percent. The entire “fruit snack” category has more than doubled its sales, according to one market analysis. Frozen-food sales are up more than 20 percent, and online orders of packaged foods as varied as chewing gum and wine have also seen a marked increase.

But sales numbers and trend reports tell only part of the story. Underneath them are people trying to mold their individual circumstances to survivability, or maybe even pleasure, however they can, and the biggest unifying factor is that “normal” hardly exists anymore. For millions of people who have lost income during the pandemic, just getting groceries is often a hard-fought victory. Among the wealthy, constant Caviar deliveries and access to private, pandemic-safe dining bubbles at fine restaurants have kept things novel. Households in the middle have scrambled to form new, idiosyncratic routines all their own....

https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2021/03/your-weird-pandemic-meals-are-probably-fine/618210/

[BusyBeingBest]

1. I have never in my life been hungry for three meals a day.

I'm not skinny either--carrying about 15-20 extra pounds But I don't even start getting hungry until noon. If I ate what is generally accepted as normal meals, I'd weigh a lot more.

[Kaleva]

2. For much of my adult life, I eat one meal a day.

Breakfast doesn't interest me and I'm usually not hungry at noon and don't get hungry until very late afternoon.

[frazzled]

3. It's necessary in our house

We’ve become more scheduled than normal in our little universe. The main impetus is fear falling into total indolence and/or chaos. Two people working from and living at home in seclusion means boundaries need to be established. It took the first seven months to convince my spouse that he should not be answering emails from his laptop at 10:30 pm.

But from the beginning we realized that we might go bonkers unless every morning we showered and dressed, and every day prepared and sat down to 3 meals at regular hours (well, we’re not breakfast people, so mainly coffee, newspaper, and maybe the occasional English muffin). He makes lunches, I make dinners. And we try to keep them interesting and relatively healthy. It keeps us grounded and breaks up the endless days. Plus, we like to cook.

I hope that we can introduce some variety and flexibility back into our lives once this is over and we’re out and about again, but for now, we are hanging on to routine as a way of preserving health and sanity.

[PoindexterOglethorpe]

4. If I eat more than one meal a day, and a small one at that,

I gain weight.

I am perhaps the only person who has lost about 35 pounds since last summer.

[Happy Hoosier]

14. I got ya beat... 60 pounds and counting!

Been working to get control of blood sugar.

[PoindexterOglethorpe]

15. Good for you!

What I'm most pleased by is moving my BMI from 31.6, and sometimes higher, to 25.1. If I lose the additional 10 pounds I'm working on, my BMI will be 23.2.

I know a lot of people trash the BMI. It may not be perfect, but it is extremely useful for the vast majority of us.

Many years ago, when weight charts gave desirable weights based on small, medium, or large frame. Every single overweight person I knew back then always, always, always, claimed to have a large frame. Really? No, most of you were not large framed. That was the exact equivalent of the current claim that BMI is meaningless.

[Mike 03]

5. Never been a breakfast eater, even as a teenager

But I grew up hearing health experts and doctors say it was the most important meal of the day, so I imagine my no-breakfast habit is not a very good one.

[Ohiogal]

7. I think all that crap about

breakfast being the most important meal of the day was invented by cereal companies to sell more cereal, and many people really bought into it. I never wanted to eat breakfast, either, and always had my mother standing over me demanding that I eat before leaving the house for school. Hey, we turned out all right, didn’t we?!

[PoindexterOglethorpe]

16. My younger son, especially by the time he was in high school,

simply had no appetite in the morning. While I understood that, still understand that, my concern was that by the time he finally made it to lunch, he'd be out of gas so to speak. I wish I'd thought of workable solutions, like making sure he had some sort of reasonable snack he could scarf down between classes and before lunch.

Because these days I normally only eat one meal a day, and I eat that meal late afternoon or early evening, I simply don't get hungry before late afternoon. Oh, I do have a cup of coffee when I first get up. But I'm retired, have a lot of control over what I do and when I do it, quite unlike a student or worker.

The real problem is the underlying inflexibility. Work and school hours are hideously rigid. As for sleep times, I've been an afternoon person and worked an afternoon shift most of my life. It was hell when my sons were young and (even though I was a stay at home mom so didn't have to scurry off to a workplace) I had to get them up in the morning and off to school. Oh, dear lord. What is best about my life now is that I can tell people, "I don't do mornings" when setting up any kind of appointments. My cleaning service doesn't get here before 11am. I'm doing cardiac rehab three days a week at 1pm.

To those of you who love mornings (and I actually have a very good friend who is one of those), good for you. Just do not even consider phoning me before 10am. And I promise, I won't phone you after 8pm.

[Arthur_Frain]

6. Whatever gets folks to click on the web pages these days I suppose.

I thought this was common knowledge by now, three squares a day is not what your body needs. 5-6 smaller portions eaten through the day do a much better job of fueling your body, without forcing it to deal with an overfill stomach.

And it should go without saying that what you put on your plate is as important as how often, and you folks advocating skipping breakfast, well you’re not as bad as anti vaxxers, but you’re doing the same damned thing in claiming your subjective opinion is superior to science. Breakfast jumpstarts your metabolism, it gets the engine running so that it burns calories throughout the day. There’s scads of data supporting this.

[JustABozoOnThisBus]

8. Three meals a day? I like to have three meals before lunch.

Frito-Lay is probably doing well because of all the states that legalized marijuana.



(kidding)

[Skittles]

9. I don't really eat meals, I just graze all day long

and I have never been overweight

[AwakeAtLast]

10. I have been doing well with 3 small meals

And three snacks daily. Low Carbohydrate (not 0), lean protein, vegetables, and healthy fats.

I've lost 18 pounds since January 7th, and I haven't been hungry, which is a big deal for me.

My work schedule allows me to get those extra snacks in, which was not as easy in my previous job.

[TomWilm]

11. I can easily go ten days without any food

I do this at least once a year, if I am hiking or such, since I miss the ability to feel hunger. Life get so much easier when you don't have to carry and prepare food all the time. Miss the coziness of eating though. But of course I drink a lot of good water.

[Treefrog]

12. I have rarely eaten more than two. I love breakfast, but need little after that unless really

working out or hiking long distances.

[Demsrule86]

13. If I eat breakfast, I am starving all day. I could eat my shoes...and binge on all sorts of bad

things. Thus, I eat lunch and dinner.