Tip: The Fat Guy's Eating Pattern Search Skip to content Menu Menu follow us Store Articles Community Loyal-T Club Loyal-T Points Rewards Subscribe to Save Search Search The World s Trusted Source & Community for Elite Fitness EatingSupplements Tip The Fat Guy s Eating Pattern One pattern of eating disrupts metabolism and dietary behaviors more than any other Here' s how to avoid it by Chris Shugart June 5, 2018January 13, 2022 Tags Diet Strategy, Losing Fat, Nutrition & Supplements, Plazma, Tips I was fat back in college. Besides the usual culprits – eating crap and not moving around much – I got porky by skipping breakfast and overcompensating at night. Breakfast was coffee, lunch was whatever I could get for three dollars at Taco Bell, and dinner was everything I could shovel in that wouldn't fight back. Nothing disrupts your metabolism and dietary behaviors more efficiently than that eating pattern. I lost the fat, but I've had to develop several strategies over the years to keep it off. One of the most important strategies has been to kick that fat-guy eating pattern to the curb. My personal rules today are: eat breakfast and avoid eating about three hours before bed. And these two things go together. Study after study backs up eating breakfast for fat loss and maintaining leanness. Breakfast has an autoregulatory effect. It helps you regulate your appetite hormones throughout the day. Eat a healthy breakfast, or try to just frontload your daily calories, and you're also much less likely to overeat at night. I train in the morning, so a typical day might start like this: 5:30 AM: Finibar 7:30 AM: Workout nutrition (Plazma) 8:45 AM: Oatmeal, protein powder, fruit or berries That's over 1300 calories by 9 o'clock in the morning. That's frontloading. I'll have lunch (meat and veggies) and a couple of snacks (raw almonds and seeds) then eat a healthy dinner. Because I start the day with a good number of calories, I've normalized my appetite, so skipping the nighttime snacks and not eating three hours before falling asleep is easier. "Easier" but not always easy, because our bad habits can override what our physiology is telling us. So you have to learn the difference between cravings and real hunger. When I first adopted the "no food before bed" rule, I had to sit there and think about how satiated I was from dinner. I'd get the urge to snack before bed even though my stomach was still digesting dinner. That was habit, not hunger. But the more successful nights I had, the easier it became. Autoregulation again. I get it, but remember this is a sign that your hormones – primarily ghrelin and leptin and their effects on the brain chemicals NPY, AGRP, and POMC – are dysfunctional. But they can be repaired. Start with the "no food three hours before bed" guideline and the rest will come naturally. You'll wake up ready to eat, like you're supposed to. Sure, you can experiment with things like intermittent fasting, keto, or whatever. There's a time and place for stricter/wackier diets, but frontloading calories and not eating before bed should be your default pattern for keeping the chub off for the long term. That's simply how your body and its elegant array of hormones and chemicals was designed to work. Get The T Nation Newsletters Don' t Miss Out Expert Insights To Get Stronger, Gain Muscle Faster, And Take Your Lifting To The Next Level related posts Eating Perform Beyond Your Limits Endure any workout. Push harder, recover faster, and come back bigger, stronger, and ready for more. Here's how. Nutrition & Supplements, Workout Nutrition TC Luoma February 10 Diet & Fat Loss Question of Nutrition 3 Is pomegranate really nature’s Viagra? Is HFCS really the same as sugar? Do you need extra vitamin D? All these answers and much more here. Diet Strategy, Nutrition & Supplements, Omega-3 Fatty Acids, Pomegranate, Question of Nutrition, Resveratrol Jonny Bowden, PhD November 11 Eating May the Forskolin be with you Forskolin burns fat through two different pathways: causing the body to burn fat for energy and enhancing thyroid function. Forskolin, Losing Fat, Nutrition & Supplements Douglas Kalman September 14 Eating Tip The Mifflin-St Jeor Calorie Equation How many calories should you be eating? How many should you drop to lose fat? Here's how to know. TJ Kuster May 4