[MrBlonde]

When to Eat.

One factor I've ignored about BMR and your metabolism is the "thermal effect of eating". It actually takes some energy to eat and digest food. I ignore this when calculating the goal calories because the value is relatively small and it just gives a nice loading to make life a tad tougher, which is gonna bring you better results.

Now the best way to eat your food is to evenly space your meals out over six times in the day. This gives your stomach the chance to digest and clear before the next meal is due. Meals should be eaten at least say 2 hours apart. And you want to avoid eating anything 3-4 hours before you go to sleep each night.

In practice this can be quite difficult at first because we're used to eating three big meals a day (or less) and usually with a large dinner. You want to eat the same AMOUNT of food, but spilt up into 6 meals. If you eat 6 meals the same size as before you're gonna eat about double what you were eating previously! This is not good!

You will get this six meals a day thing right over time, sometimes it's even good to get a normal sized meal and just divide it into two parts, to be eaten 2 hours apart.

This will mean people tell you "you just eat all day". You can add that to the comments about how you piss all day and how you're a namby pamby for avoiding bad foods. I find it really gets to me a lot coming from fat slobs ;-)

Sample daily eating plan

Meal 1: 0800 Breakfast at home
Meal 2: 1000 Morning tea at work
Meal 3: 1300 Lunch at work
Meal 4: 1600 Afternoon tea at wok
Meal 5: 1800 Dinner at home/work
Meal 6: 2000 Supper at home