FITNESS MYTH #2: KEEP THAT FIRE BLAZING!

The fitness industry is absolutely rife with trends.

Whether that means exercises, a new training technique, dry scooping preworkout…

But none are as prevalent (or as polarising) as those to do with nutrition.

Case in point - look at what the current largest camps are:

Carnivore vs Plants

Fasting vs Not Fasting

Keto vs High Carb

And on either side you’ll have people who actively dislike the other camp of people.

It’s SO fucking weird.

And no nutrition myth was as pervasive or enduring as the one that was doing the rounds when I started coaching.

And that is the 6 meals a day metabolic myth.

There’s a lot to unpack!

This myth basically stipulated that the more frequently you could eat, typically arranged as six smaller meals versus three larger ones, then the benefits for fat loss would be greater.

The analogy used at this time was this one:

“If you want to keep a fire burning all night, you wouldn’t put all the logs on the flames at once. You’d put the flames on gradually”

That is absolutely true about the fire.

But unfortunately, that doesn’t apply to your metabolism in one very important way.

Because no matter how you tempo the log situation with the fire, it doesn’t change the most important thing about the logs: how much energy there is to be burned.

Whether you ate all the cakes at once or in increments over a day; if there’s 4000kcal worth of birthday cake to eat and you eat all of it, that’s still 4000kcal that has to get metabolised.

When put under the microscope this analogy is not only false it’s also falsely equivocating a fire to your metabolism.

Is there any utility to eating more than three times a day (which I’m going to assume is the standard for most people)

Maybe, in some very unique cases.

Protein synthesis (the process where muscle building potential gets elevated after eating protein) can be stimulated in a pulse style manner where each “pulse” peaks at around the 4 hour mark.

So, in theory, eating in line with that could potentially help gain an extra 1-2% muscle gain when everything – and I mean everything – is dialled in as tightly as possible.

But this is a classic “majoring in the minors” type issue and isn’t even proven to have a tangible benefit.

The biggest benefit, to my mind, again relies on a case-by-case basis.

If someone simply prefers to eat smaller than often or finds it hard to eat bolus amounts of food at once due to GI issues or bloat.

There’s no hard and fast rule about frequency – intermittent fasting has demonstrated that – and as long as calories, protein and baseline nutrition is met you have almost infinite flexibility with how to approach this.

The issue is when it’s presented as dogmatically as it has been and represented as having a specific benefit.

When the reality, like most things in fitness, is that it’s a lot simpler and a lot less neurodivergent.

Jordan