When it comes to how often to eat doesn’t matter as much as overall caloric consumption for the day. While Building muscle for men over 30, tracking calories is key. If you are trying to lean down you will need to be at a calorie deficit of 500 calories. And if you are trying to put on muscle mass size you will need to be in a calorie surplus of 500 calories.
Everyone is different as far as how often you should eat. As long as you are eating within your daily caloric needs you will be fine. A lot of people like intermittent fasting and will eat their calories later in the day.
Here is a link to fasting if you are knew to the concept.
While others like prefer to eat 5-6 small meals a day. Your body will not start eating your muscle if you don’t eat every couple of hours.
How often should men over 30 eat to lose weight and build muscle?
- Customizing calories to fit your daily needs is more important than timing when trying to build muscle or lose weight
- Eating 5-6 small meals has only a 10% Thermic effect of food
- Intermittent fasting can be a way to help manage your caloric intake
- The anabolic window is not important as overall protein and carbohydrate intake
How often should I eat to gain muscle?
For us men over 30 tracking calories are even more important. It’s true when I was younger I could eat whatever fast food I wanted and could still train and be lean.
It wasn’t until I started tracking my calories that I started seeing results that were consistent. It’s very common to finally get motivated to workout and your working out like you should be but the scale in your bathroom is dropping.
It’s because you are not in a calorie deficit of 500 calories, or your macros are not balanced. Always make sure you are getting enough protein!
RELAX, it will also take time to accomplish your goals! There are plenty of magazines and movies full of guys on steroids claiming to be natural to sell you their products.
Unfortunately, I took the bait for many years trying to follow their diet and workout routines. Which would constantly end up with me being frustrated because I wasn’t getting the results they were.
As natural weight lifters, your body will need much more rest and a different weight lifting routine. As well as to how often to eat to reach your desired goals.
Does meal frequency matter?
As mentioned earlier, not really. Let’ take a look at why. If you are eating at a high meal frequency and your calories are still high it won’t matter. You will still be over-consuming energy that will need to be used up or will end up being stored as fat.
According to this study below. If you use IF “intermittent fasting” eating within 8 hours and fasting for 16 hours you can still burn fat and at the very least maintain current muscle. Plus improve health markers!
“In conclusion, our results suggest that the modified IF employed in this study: TRF with 16 h of fasting and 8 h of feeding, could be beneficial in resistance trained individuals to improve health-related biomarkers, decrease fat mass, and at least maintain muscle mass. This kind of regimen could be adopted by athletes during maintenance phases of training in which the goal is to maintain muscle mass while reducing fat mass. Additional studies are needed to confirm our results and to investigate the long-term effects of IF and periods after IF cessation.”
This study shows by doing IF will help you manage your body composition with added health benefits!
What about the Thermogenic Effect of eating many small meals?
I thought you have to eat 5-6 meals a day to keep your metabolic flames roaring? Nope! While true though that your body will use up energy while breaking down nutrients in meals. This is referred to as the thermic effect of food TEF. Who knew you could burn calories just from eating food. Research has shown that it is up to 10% of your total daily energy expenditure.
Ultimately, it still comes down to the number of calories you eat in a day. Not how many times you eat within a day. If you eat six meals of 250 calories and three meals of 500 calories you can still have the same reaction.
If the thermic effect is around the average 10%, it will come out to 150 calories in both instances. This has been studied and they came to the conclusion that decreasing or increasing how many times you ate had no effect on calories used.
The thermic effect of eating many small meals a day has little effect on calories consumed in a day.
Eating Frequently is Good for your Health and muscle gain?
This just isn’t true, you and I haven’t evolved to be constantly satiated from eating many small meals. Our ancestors had times of famine, a caveman simply did not go to the snack machine and hit F2 for some chips.
In fact, there is plenty of proof that shorter periods of fasting can be beneficial to your health. A process called Autophagy occurs and may help anti-aging and protect from certain diseases. Think of this as a reboot for the cells in your body. You will recycle old dying cells in this process.
It’s been shown in some cases where snacking or eating high calories diet can increase your chances for fatty liver disease.
This is just even more proof that not everyone needs to eat multiple small meals a day. One of possibly a few other exceptions would be regulating your blood sugar levels. Therefore, eating frequency does not affect overall body composition. Some studies even show that snacking can be harmful to your health.
What about Eating within the Anabolic Window?
Meal timing is important when considering the Anabolic window. Many health experts believe nutrition timing is important but is lacking research. I’ve found everything from having protein and carbs after your workout within 15 minutes to 3-4 hours.
This theory is based on two ideas of protein and carbohydrate intake after workouts. While working out stimulates your muscles it also causes the protein in your muscles to breakdown.
Muscle Protein Synthesis is where growth and repair occur. That’s why it is important to have protein after your workout. Carbohydrates could have the same said for them.
It’s thought that after your workouts Carbohydrates will help raise your glycogen levels and will help recovery. While both of these practices are true to some extent. Not everyone’s metabolism and nutrition are not as clear cut and dry.
Protein Consumption
As I explained earlier Muscle Protein Synthesis MPS is the process in which your muscles are stimulated and helps with recovery and growth. Even though this is an important key to recovery. Research shows it doesn’t need to be done right away.
Your muscle will not disappear if you don’t immediately chug a protein shake after exercise. In fact, you should make protein intake a priority instead of timing.
Dr. Schonefeld has proved that daily protein intake is of more importance than when you to take your protein. The exceptions to this rule would be athletes who train multiple times a day. In this case, they would need to increase fuel in between workouts.
Carb Intake
There is the importance of the anabolic window since carbohydrates are stored in your liver and muscles. Glycogen is basically a readily available source of energy.
Once again, there is merit to taking carbs after your workout which supports part of the anabolic window theory. If you have several athletic events per day is when meal timing is important.
For you and I who are not professional athletes and are only working out once a day we’ll be fine. There is plenty of time for us to restore our glycogen levels.
On the contrary, it’s been thought that working out in fasted state or low glycogen could help with weight loss. I don’t always have my best workouts when fasted but I could see where it could burn more fat.
Even though it makes sense for glycogen replenishment. It will not pertain to most of us in most scenarios. You will be fine if you’re not able to replenish protein or carb intake immediately.
Is Breakfast the most Important meal?
If you still believe in eating your cereal every morning because breakfast is important, then you have been living under a rock. Many experts believe in eating high protein and high-fat meals for breakfast.
Which is thought to help with mental function and energy levels. This sounds great and all but is unsupported by research. And some instances show that you can burn more body fat by increased Fat intake. This is happening from the dietary fat itself, not because your body is burning more body fat.
There is evidence that eating a high protein breakfast has health benefits. This could be more than likely from the protein itself and not from the timing of the meal.
As with the mythical Anabolic window, timing does not seem to be of importance according to research. There is nothing wrong with eating breakfast as long as it fits into your calories.
I prefer eating bigger meals over small meals through out the day. I like to use Intermittent Fasting myself and will eat around lunch time. If I eat breakfast or multiple meals a day I tend to over eat through out the day.
I know people who have to have breakfast or prefer it. That is fine once again as long as it fits your calories. As long as you can have good adherence to any eating pattern then do that.
Because adherence is what matters the most long term. Most people can lose weight but have trouble keeping it off long term. Do what works for you.
What about Eating Carbs at Night?
While I prefer to have carbs before my workouts, there is a decent amount of evidence that carbs at night could be a good thing. Once again timing is not as important as reducing the overall calories. You will also need to figure out your Macronutrient balance.
example of balancing your macronutrients would be 40% Protein, 40% Carbohydrate and 20% Fat. You can massage these numbers and do what works best for you. You can figure out your daily caloric needs here.
By using myfitnesspal it makes tracking your calories easy to do. There is some evidence that eating carbs at night can help with relaxation and with your sleep. This seems to be true as carbs release serotonin which helps with your sleep.
Cutting carbs at night may not be optimal since sleep is so important and carbs can help you relax and improve sleep.
Summary
In conclusion, there is evidence that meal timing can be an optimal strategy. But should be used mainly if you are doing multiple workouts per day, it’s safe to say you and I are not doing this.
What’s more important is counting calories and finding out how many calories you will need. this is done usually by adding 500 calories or subtracting 500 calories from your overall maintenance.
Also finding an eating routine that works best for you and one that you can adhere to long term. While tracking calories is not fun it will teach you how much you could be grossly overeating.
When I started tracking calories I couldn’t believe how much I was overeating. You won’t have to do this forever just until you figure out your body’s needs.