Rethinking Three Meals A Day

What if the rule of breakfast, lunch, and dinner was built for the clock, not your body? We take a hard look at the cultural origins of three meals a day, why that script became so dominant, and how a smarter approach to meal timing can improve energy, mood, and long-term health. Along the way, we unpack research on meal frequency, fasting windows, and the surprising backstory behind the 2,000-calorie “standard” that shaped nutrition labels more than it shaped wellbeing.

We share personal results with intermittent fasting, from weight stability and better focus to improved blood sugar and fewer afternoon crashes. Then we zoom out to the science: conflicting studies on high-frequency eating, new perspectives linking more frequent meals to higher disease risk, and the pivotal role of fasting duration between meals. Rather than a one-size-fits-all rule, we walk through variables that actually matter—food quality, circadian timing, and the sequence of what you eat—plus why a protein-forward first meal after a fast often beats a carb-heavy start.

If you’ve ever felt trapped by food rules, this conversation gives you permission and tools to experiment. You’ll hear practical guidance on building a 14–16 hour fasting window, testing different first meals, and listening to data from your own body: energy, satiety, mood, and simple health markers. We also tackle myths around meat, processed foods, and the marketing that shapes our habits more than our hunger. Question the norms, keep what works, and rewrite the parts that don’t.

Enjoy the episode, then tell us how you structure your day: How many meals serve you best, and what’s your ideal first bite after a fast? If this resonated, follow the show, share it with a friend, and leave a quick review so more listeners can find it.

Chapters

• 0:00 Welcome And Setup
• 0:29 The Viral Video Spark
• 1:39 Questioning Three Meals A Day
• 2:35 Intermittent Fasting Benefits
• 5:02 Meal Frequency Research Findings
• 7:13 The 2,000 Calorie Backstory
• 9:35 Personal Fasting Routine
• 11:35 What To Eat After A Fast
• 12:51 Challenge The Food Rules
• 13:38 Closing And Gratitude

Transcript

SPEAKER_00: 0:00

Hello, everybody. This is Still Rose's Podcast. This podcast was created for women by women to elevate women's voices. I have a kind of an interesting topic here today. Um, I hope everyone's doing well. Let me start with that first and foremost. But I have a kind of an interesting topic. So over the weekend, my husband was I always come down and meditate in the morning, and now he sits in the room right next to me in the lounge chair in my office. And um he, you know, unwinds himself in the morning. Over the weekend, he was listening to he was clicking through social media and he settled on this video. And I actually stopped what I was doing to listen because it really piqued my interest. It's this woman, um, I can't remember her name. You've probably seen her. If you have social media, you have to have seen her at some point. But she's an older, very thin woman on social media, and she talks a lot about like natural, holistic ways to treat disease and and whatnot. Now, a lot of what she says, I fact-check because this is part of how I think and how I make my living. And so I fact-check just to make sure, like it makes sense. And there's always studies and research to back up what she's saying, which is why I'm going to reference this now. And so she started talking, she was talking about diet, and she said that the three meals a day structure was actually introduced in the early 1900s, probably a little bit sooner, because I've I just did some research and I was looking at colonialization and all this stuff. Three meals a day was introduced specifically, truly an American cultural thing. And it was structured really most recently around our workday, school day, because we live this very structured lifestyle. In her video clip, she talks about how it was recommended basically by the system, the powers that be here. And it's really not based on health for us, because if it was based on health for us, three meals a day wouldn't be recommended. If you go back and you think about, and she, this is where she could start talking about, you know, our ancestors were hunter-gatherers. And these people did not have three meals a day because the food was not available to them. They ate when food was available and they all they ate when they were hungry, but there was no structure. You must eat breakfast, you must eat lunch, you must eat dinner. That came purely out of us, society, deciding to do that. Now, before you say to me, Jenny, no, but the experts say, like, this is what we need. If you dig deeper into that, you are actually going to see some conflicting evidence, but you have to dig because the topical layer is going to reinforce three meals a day. It's very interesting the way that the search engines are set up. I'm not going to get all conspiracy theory on you all, but I will say I find it very interesting how difficult it was for me to find this information. Nevertheless, I'm going to take a step back for a moment before I go all the way down the path because I want to really ground you. So I've talked about intermittent fasting before. I've talked about how that was really the catalyst to help me lose weight in my 40s because I was really trying many different scenarios. I was trying different ways to lose weight. Nothing was working. And a friend of mine, a mother friend, a mom friend of mine, recommended intermittent fasting, totally changed my life. I owe her big for that. Benefits of intermittent fasting, obviously, weight loss is one I just mentioned, but it improves your metabolic health. And fasting can significantly lower blood sugar and insulin levels, reducing the risk of type 2 diabetes. This is beneficial for me. Diabetes runs in my family. It reduces inflammation. So there's chronic inflammation as a factor in many diseases. Studies suggest that fasting can lower overall levels of chronic inflammation in the body. This is accurate. Enhanced brain function. Fasting may support brain health by promoting the growth of new nerve cells, increasing cognitive function, and potentially offering protection against age-related neurodegenerative disorders like Alzheimer's and Parkinson's. This next one is most important here. Cellular repair, autophagy. During extended fasting periods beyond 24 hours, the body initiates a process called autophagy, essentially a cellular cleanup that removes damaged cells and can help regenerate new healthy cells. Now, this says beyond 24 hours. I've read articles where it says at the 16-hour mark, you've hit it. So that I'd have to fact-check a little bit further. Increased growth hormone, fasting can increase levels of human growth hormone, HDH, a crucial protein involved in growth, metabolism, weight management, and muscle strength. So you know how I feel about fasting. I will swear by it. I love it personally. It's done wonders for me. It's done wonders for my health, in my opinion. I do think that intermittent fasting, in combination with a lot of the other things that I do, um is why I am in such great health. I had a doctor recently, you know, we were doing a overall exam. And um, at the end of it, she just says, So you're basically healthy as a horse. And I was like, basically, that's it. You know, it's it's a beautiful thing because I've I know so many people that are unwell and have these chronic ailments. And to be able to be blessed with good health is actually a blessing. Intermittent fasting, this is where I am, right? Now, the influence of meal frequency. So I started to go down this rabbit hole and I wanted to share it with you guys. So I found this journal article, National Library of Medicine, that discusses the influence of meal frequency and timing on health and disease. Um, I'm gonna read you one caption, I'm gonna break it down for you. While epidemiological evidence indicates an association between higher meal frequencies and lower disease risk, experimental trials have shown conflicting results. Fair. Furthermore, recent perspective research has just demonstrated a significant increase in disease risk with a high meal frequency as compared to a low meal frequency. Apart from meal frequency and timing, we also have to consider breakfast consumption and the distribution of daily cat energy intake, caloric restriction, and nighttime eating. A central role in this complex scenario is played by the fasting period length between two meals. So this is the abstract in this study. So this study is on, I found it on National Library of Medicine. You can literally, I mean, you look Google, like, are we meant to be eating three meals a day? You're gonna find a lot of stuff. This one in particular does discuss the fact that high meal frequency is uh increased disease risk. So if there's research, now let's take a step back too and peel the onion back a little bit further. You are not going to find a resounding amount of medical research that discusses this. And the reason for this is is because if the entire United States gets the message, you should not eat three meals a day because it is increasing your disease risk. You need to scale back, it's gonna increase your health. That is not good business practice for us here, right? So we're not recommending that as a quote unquote society. But I'm telling you, this is what the research is saying. Now you're not gonna find loads of like you're not gonna find loads of research articles on this at this time because no one's gonna pay for this. Why would they pay for it? Because then it's gonna go against like so a pharmaceutical company is not going to back research that's gonna prove this because they're in the business of disease. It's gonna conflict. So I just I'm putting all of that there because I want you to have the full picture of really what this is. We should never be taking anything at face value, ladies. We should always be questioning everything and we really need to fact-check and do our own research. Do not just take anything at face value. So here's the article, right? So it says that increased meal frequency does increase your disease risk. Period. It is real. It actually does happen. Now, I went further and I was trying to find more information. And let's see here, over the years, there have been studies that show benefits to eating more frequent meals, right? Questionable, as well as studies that show the downsides of it. Again, you're gonna have that 50-50, but it's the same thing with eating meat, right? I'm a vegetarian, I don't eat meat. Processed foods, all processed foods, meat falls into the category of processed foods. Why? Because the animals are given, they're given injections, they're given chemicals, they're given medicine to boost up how much they grow. And then you're eating all of these hormones and you're eating everything that's in there, that's going to affect your health. Like everyone's questioning why is there so much cancer today? Why is why is cancer so rampant? Like, why is disease so rampant? You know, what are we, what do we do? Let's give each other more medicine. No, actually, the answer is right here in front of our faces, but we're not looking at it because again, we're taking everything at face value. Let me see here. So let's see. The three meals a day recommendation didn't come out of out of nowhere. In one sense, it all comes down to math. This I found very interesting. It says here, quote unquote, the average adult human requires 2,000 calories per day and you're only awake for so many hours, et cetera, et cetera. The article's about something a little bit different, right? So this is focused on a 2,000 calorie a day diet. Now, I will say this. I don't eat 2,000 calories a day, like at all, ever. I do not eat 2,000 calories a day. It's quite a bit. Well, why is 2,000 calories a day recommended? Hold on, let me break this down for you. So you're thinking to yourself, well, the guidelines say 2,000 calories a day, so I must at least get close to this if I'm going to be healthy, right? Wrong. Why is 2,000 calories used as a standard? The FDA needed a reference number to standardize nutrition labels and include the percent daily value. The 2,000 calorie amount was a simple mathematical figure to use for these calculations. Okay, so we have ding ding ding, answer one. Well, it's a simple figure, but where did they get this simple figure, right? The number was based on public surveys where people reported their daily calorie intake. Men reported eating an average of 2,000 to 3,000, and women reported 1,600 to 2,200. So we settled on 2,000 as middle ground. Well, hold on a second, people. Let's take this back another layer. A simple survey of what everybody's eating is what is informing a 2,000 calorie-a-day diet. So it's not based on we've done research that has informed us that you need to eat 2,000 calories a day to survive and be a well-being human being and have wellness and be all that you can be. That's not what that is. It was a simple survey sent out to many people and it came back with this result. And so they settled on a number and everybody ate it up with a spoon in their 2,000 calorie a day diets and said, Well, I need to have three meals a day because I need to hit that number in order to be healthy and achieve X, Y, and Z. Or alternatively, well, it's 2,000 calories a day. So if I'm eating 1700, it's fine. Or if I'm eating 1500, it's fine. Yeah, sure, it's fine. But are you meant to be eating that much? The answer is no, you're not. There is quite a bit in the background of this that is rooted in marketing and it's rooted in selling us something. It's rooted in marketing food on food on food on us. Why is it rooted in that? Because that's business. Don't want, again, I don't want to go conspiracy theory on you, but really, really think about this. Think through everything we're being fed, these big grand rules that we've been told. Now, this has been like a topic of a debate at my house because I don't eat until 12 o'clock every single day. I always wait until 12. Sometimes I wait until two or three. I will go as long as I can. Some days I do really well with it. I can hold out until two or three o'clock. Some days at 12 o'clock, I'm already chewing my arm off. But in any case, I'm always fasting for about um 16 hours, roughly. 14 to 16 hours. I'm always fasting for 14 to 16 hours, plus some. I will always try to go more than that because the health benefits are so real and they're so not promoted. Intermittent fasting is promoted as a, oh, you're gonna lose weight. But when you dig deeper into that, there are a lot of health benefits that are behind the scenes that you have no idea about. And the most interesting thing when you do start fasting is you start to realize it's the first thing you put in your mouth, food-wise, is critical because it actually tells you a lot about how what it's doing inside your body. Now, I've said to other folks, like, if I am like hangry, I'm going crazy, right? And I hit my fasting mark and I'm like, I'm gonna, I'm gonna eat now. If I eat carbs, if I eat something starchy, one, it hurts my stomach. And two, I am immediately lethargic. Immediately. I immediately am tired and I start to get really droopy and I have to drink my ca my little tea, my caffeine tea, and try to get myself back up and shake it off. If I eat something that is high in protein, um, I have like loads of protein yogurt in my fridge. If I eat something light, if I eat eggs, if I eat something that is good protein and, you know, lighter and not carb heavy, my body responds well. I do want to point something out. I did just note that I eat eggs. Yes, I am a vegetarian who eats eggs. I was struggling with my iron intake. Um, and so every once in a while I will incorporate eggs to help boost me a little bit, but I also go really heavy on kale, beets, you know, I try to really, I really try very hard. Every once in a while I do eat eggs because of the iron um situation. I'm very interested in hearing from some of you on this. And I would really encourage all of you to look into this whole marketing thing we're being fed that we have to eat three meals a day. You can only eat certain foods at certain times. It is actually very ridiculous. You can eat whatever. You want to eat beans for breakfast because you are a vegetarian, you're trying to get your protein and you need legooms, eat beans for breakfast. Like it's really, it can be anything you need it to be to suit your lifestyle, but to also suit your health. But I encourage you to really look into this. I encourage you to dig deeper. And I'm I'm gonna really push for all of you to really start peeling the layers back and the things that we're being told and the things we're being fed, quite literally being fed. There is more to the story than what we have been accepting at this point. And we actually need to start becoming more aware. Um, I hope you found this informative. I'm very appreciative of you. I'm grateful that you're listening with me, and I will catch you on the next one. Take care.