Why You Need to Eat Consistently
Let’s clarify that title: “consistently”, as in adequately, a normal amount of food every day, and not necessarily at regular or fixed intervals (like time-restricted eating or intermittent fasting—about which I have plenty of thoughts).
What’s a normal amount of food? That’s a bit more subjective, but that’s your baseline/maintenance energy requirements (which I’ll discuss in the next article).
However you arrive at achieving your normal or average energy intake, whether it’s two big meals or eight large snacks, just be sure that at the end of the day, you’re more or less hitting your baseline/maintenance energy. Generally, you should not feel overly hungry or overly full.
That is, of course, unless you’re running a cut, a calculated short-term phase of energy restriction to help you achieve a reduction in body fat, or unless you’re running a bulk, a calculated short-term period of energy surplus, either for athletic training, performance, competition, and/or to put on some muscle.
If you’ve been on a calorie carousel, overly high one day and overly low the next, over the week, you may more or less be in energy balance. However, having such drastic swings in energy content from day to day will negatively affect your body composition in ways that will only become visible after a long-enough period.
We can all admit to overeating at some point, putting us into an energy surplus for a single day. If you track your weight at all or just observe your physique the next day, you’ll likely find that your body weight has jumped up a couple of pounds and that your body has literally filled out. Although it’s easy to lose your mind in these situations, resist the temptation.
Almost all that extra body weight is water, the additional literal/physical food that’s in your digestive tract, and the glycogen that’s being stored in your liver and muscles (glycogen is stored carbohydrate). Each gram of carb stored is also bringing along 3-4 grams of water. If you had some extra sodium, which is likely if you’re eating extra food, that’ll also bring some extra water. The same goes with fiber, which also reabsorbs water as it’s sitting in your colon. The good news is that you can drop all this water weight almost as quickly as you put it on.
If on the subsequent day you eat normally, at maintenance energy, you’ll find that the following day (now two days after the overfeeding), your body weight has returned to the expected “normal” number on the scale. You did not gain and lose any body tissue and certainly not this quickly.
Imagine going in the opposite direction. You undereat for a single day. The next day your scale weight drops two pounds. You feel great and feel that you look slimmer and lighter. Unfortunately, again, you did not lose this amount of body tissue. You basically did a low-grade water cut, like any athlete in a weight-class sport. The following day, you return to eating maintenance energy, and your bodyweight evens out again. Over these few days, overall, you’re in energy balance, and, despite the fluctuations on the scale, you did not add or remove body tissue.
Irrespective of these small changes, on the scale, how you might perceive yourself and/or how you may feel, your body composition—the ratio of lean tissue to fat tissue—will basically remain the same.
Your body composition is determined by your average energy intake, the composition of your diet—food selections and macronutrient ratios—and your lifestyle and activity levels. As most adults tend to accumulate fat and lose muscle as they age, if you’re inactive and not cognizant of your energy and macronutrients (like protein), you’re likely trending in that direction ever so slightly, but it will not be visible or noticeable until you’re well into it, like an infection that has been incubating for several days before you start showing symptoms.
What I want to examine here are the big swings in energy consumption and how they affect this scenario.
Let’s start with a radical and extreme reduction in energy consumption. Let’s say you eat half of your maintenance energy, which is too large of a reduction. If you maintain bodyweight, for example, on 2,000 cals a day, you’d be eating 1,000.
The second day, you’ll see a large drop on the scale, but again, this is basically just dropping water from less food in the gut, having burned up some glycogen and not having replenished it, as well as less sodium. When energy is restricted that much and that quickly, the body burns through the glycogen first and then taps into alternative energy pools.
We’d all love to think that this pool is 100% adipose tissue, but that’s not the case. When you undereat to this extent and once glycogen reserves are dwindling, you can expect about half of the required energy to come from adipose and the other half to come from body protein. What you’re doing is downsizing. Skeletal muscle is energetically expensive to maintain. The body would rather give up the expensive energy mortgage than live off of energy savings. (I know. It doesn’t make sense to us, but the body has its own logic.)
So, let’s say that that single day of energy restriction resulted in a 1,000-calorie deficit. To make up those 1K calories, half comes from adipose, and the other half comes from skeletal muscle. 500 calories is about 125 grams of body protein, and 500 calories is about 55 grams of adipose. Energetically, it’s half and half, but due to the different energy density of the tissue, by physical weight, more muscle is coming off proportionally.
With these extreme energy reductions, you’re going to start looking worse; your body is just chewing up muscle. When you lose body fat correctly, you should start seeing your muscles becoming visible at some point. You shed the fat and reveal the musculature.
Imagine that you do this repeatedly—this overly aggressive energy restriction—over weeks or months or years, and it doesn’t necessarily have to be consecutive days. One day here; another day there. They’re drops in a bucket.
The bucket starts filling up.
If you happen to accumulate ten days like this, even non-consecutive days—it could be ten days over a couple of months—you would reduce your skeletal muscle by 750 grams, which is more than a pound a half—of muscle.
With less muscle, you’re downregulating your metabolism, which means that your new maintenance energy requirements are now lower, yet, your appetite and hunger cues will remain constant, so now it’s even easier to overconsume energy.
After a single day of eating a thousand calories, your appetite is jacked up the next day. You’re primed and ready to eat, so you do, but you happen to overconsume (which is exactly what your body wanted).
That extra energy doesn’t magically rebuild skeletal muscle, which, without resistance training, will only happen if you’re essentially emaciated and starved, and it will only rebound a little, and only after you’ve put on some body fat.
First, with that extra energy, glycogen stores are replenished, but there’s a rate limit; the body can only manufacture molecules, materials, and tissues so quickly, so any energy that’s present that exceeds that rate limit in that time frame is being sequestered to body fat. And if you have two days of overconsuming, your glycogen stores are full and topped off, so everything that’s extra beyond that goes to straight to body fat. Basically, we’ve sacrificed the muscle but have no way of getting it back without outside interventions (hitting the weights).
Additionally, if your glycogen reserves are filled, and you’re overconsuming energy regularly enough, the body needs to get those nutrients and energy out of the blood, so it will start shoving it into fat, some to subcutaneous fat and other to visceral fat, around organs. This is essentially insulin resistance, pre-diabetic, and is headed towards diabetes and the milieu of diseases that come with metabolic dysfunction.
So now imagine a scenario where you have large swings in energy consumption. One day is severely restricted and reduced, and then the next day is unnecessarily abundant. Even one cycle of this has an adverse effect on your body composition, though you may not see it in the mirror just yet. You’ve effectively and quickly made yourself have less muscle and more fat. Imagine if you continue this cycle over longer periods. This is a yo-yo eating pattern.
This scenario is also true at energy balance if you are undereating protein. Our bodies have protein requirements. Body protein is not stagnant, fixed, or static. It turns over. Proteins and amino acids degrade, and the body needs to pull out the ones that are falling apart and replace them, but if we’re not providing them in the diet, the body will pull perfectly good amino acids from protein in a muscle. And if you’re undereating protein long enough, it will start pulling proteins from organs. This is referred to as body protein redistribution.
These effects are also why eating one meal a day (OMAD) is not ideal or optimal. You may be able to maintain body weight and be in energy balance, but it’s not likely that your body will be able to utilize all of the protein from a single feeding, even if you hit your targets. OMAD is an easy way to undereat in theory, but it’s also a great way to adversely manipulate your body composition. Intermittent fasting protocols can easily start skirting these lines also.
A bit of good news, though, is that in any energy deficit, the paring down of skeletal muscle will be mitigated by resistance exercise. It’s not underselling it to say: use it or lose it.
Any exercise, especially resistance training, speeds up skeletal muscle protein turnover (due to damage from the mechanical stresses, which is normal and what we want), and if you’re simultaneously undereating protein, you’re creating a large protein deficit that the body can’t make up. With an energy deficit, the body can pull from adipose, but the only amino acid reserves we have are body tissues.
The worst scenario for the worst body composition is severely restricting energy, undereating protein, and overexercising. That is the terrifically terrible trifecta to burn up muscle, drastically downregulating metabolic rate, and resulting in a physique that is unaffectionately referred to as “skinny fat”—kind of the worst of both worlds.
Eating adequate and sufficient energy—that is, calories—will keep your body from burning up muscle, which is what happens if we reduce energy intake too much. You’ll still need to hit minimum protein targets so that the same thing doesn’t happen.
You want to lose body fat, not just body weight, and body weight can be water, food in your gut, glycogen, and it can also be body protein, from skeletal muscle as well as other soft connective tissues. In an energy deficit, and without resistance training, you can also downregulate bone remodeling, effectively be in a bone-building deficit.
Eat at or close to your maintenance energy levels and refrain from deviating too far away from it, either above or below.
Still, should you even care about your body composition? Uh, yah.
Not just for aesthetic reasons. You want to maintain and add to your bones, muscles, connective tissues so that you can remain strong, mobile, independent, and a healthy body composition is a powerful vehicle to help us maintain metabolic health.
Since I launched this Substack in May, I’ve largely focused on strategies and protocols to help you build a dietary/eating pattern and master eating at maintenance and baseline energy levels, to maximize satiety without worrying about overconsuming energy, to focus on foods that are health additive, as well as how to work in (but not rely on) sweets and treats, and not to mention, the role and importance of exercise activity.
Now, we’re starting to get into the nitty gritty.
So, what’s your maintenance energy intake? How much above or below that number is too much? What else do you need to do to cut body fat?
A ten-point list is coming in the next article.
