I suppose this is a short question with a long answer. When you think about it, in the beginning when humans were just nomadic hunter-gatherers, there probably wasn’t breakfast, lunch and dinner time spent around the table. Food was found, preserved and distributed according with what was needed to survive.  A typical day could have been spent foraging for food, running from predators, hiking to find shelter, resting and eating.

My point here is that our bodies were designed to operate at their full potential by eating through the day in 2-3 hour increments. This has a number of benefits, the main one being that your insulin levels stay at a constant. They never spike, therefore keeping your metabolism rate steady and achieving homeostasis in the body.

When the insulin levels in the human body spike, stress hormones are released in order to achieve balance once again with in the system. The brain senses this stress and will switch to what’s called the sympathetic nervous system. This is the part of the brain that’s in charge of fight or flight responses (survival mode). The body is prepared to do whatever it takes to survive, such as taking nutrients and storing them as fat.

After three hours of not ingesting food, the body can also go into what’s called a catabolic state where it turns to the muscle tissue for protein and begins to break it down. This is bad because muscle needs much repairing and aids in keeping the metabolic rate up. With less muscle and more fat, the body slows down and prepares for emergency…or hibernation.

Simply put, it seems to be much easier for the body to digest and process food into energy with smaller doses. Eating every 6 hours or longer probably seems a little like starvation to your system and therefore it perceives this as a problem. Ladies and gentlemen, we are simple creatures and we should not forget our origins. Our bodies were designed to do one simple thing: Adapt and survive.  It’s easy to fall away from where we began. The world is a much different place than when we humans first came upon it, but if we can listen to our bodies and treat them with the respect they deserve, perhaps we will find that a few changes in habit are worth the effort.