Make Meal Frequency Part Of Your Transformational Arsenal

Meal Frequency - Alter Meal Timing to Elicit Differing Results

Ori Hofmekler’s political art has been featured in the New York Times, the London Times, Time, Newsweek, U.S. News & World Report, and many other major publications. As his artistic career peaked, he began having serious trouble with one eye and eventually shifted his focus toward survival fitness and nutrition. His Warrior Diet helped popularize intermittent fasting in the strength world.

Jean-Paul Sartre once observed, “Man is the only creature that refuses to be what he is.” This is an oblique reference to a universal human trait: we are profoundly and intensely dissatisfied with our current physical self. We are dissatisfied with the shape, configuration, and proportion of our body, our physique.

We turn to exercise and diet as methods to attain what we seek. We seek to trigger a dramatic physical metamorphosis, to transform from an ugly earthbound caterpillar into a gorgeous, airborne butterfly. We want to change our physique so badly that we are spurred into action. Why do people diet? Why do they join gyms, why jog, why practice keto diets? Why train with free weights? The commonality, the rationale, for all our dietary and fitness efforts is that we seek to undergo a radical physical transformation in exchange for our tenacious training efforts and dietary deprivations.

Physical Transformation Requires More Than Sameness

The goal is profound: dramatically alter the body, from its current inadequate state into what we seek to become. We refuse to be what we are. How do we define physical “change?” The tangible changes are physical and measurable: more muscle, less body fat, and an across-the-board improvement in performance, regardless of the drill, skill or sport. The fuzzy intangibles are improved health, increased energy, renewed vitality, and better mental clarity.

These are profound goals. Profound goals are only attained with profound effort and profound dietary discipline. Physiologically, to trigger muscle growth and reduce body fat, the body must be presented with a repeating series of self-inflicted stresses. In our training, these stresses need to be some expression of serious effort. Only by exerting to a Herculean degree does the body trigger hypertrophy, muscle growth, and a concurrent increase in strength and power.

Weight training and cardiovascular training efforts need to be taken up to current capacities and limits on a recurring basis. Only by working up to, and sometimes past, current capacities will the body reconfigure itself. To reduce body fat, the body must be subjected to the right combination of coordinated cardiovascular training and nutritional stress. The body is encouraged to oxidize stored body fat to fuel activity.

There are four transformational levers of physical progress: resistance training, cardiovascular training, brain-train — the psychological aspects associated with radical physical transformation — and nutrition. Within each of these four interrelated transformational disciplines exists a universe of sub-worlds, subdivisions, subtleties, strategies, techniques, and tactics.

Meal Frequency Is the Forgotten Nutrition Lever

Within the universe that is nutrition, one overlooked area of progress potentiality is meal frequency. This is an unmined vein of gain. Not nearly as much attention is paid to meal frequency, the timing of when we consume calories, as is paid to caloric content and caloric volume. I will not say frequency is as important as content or volume — it is not. However, meal frequency, if handled correctly, can become a useful progress stimulator.

Progress is stimulated when the body is somehow blasted out of some aspect of its current complacent stagnation. To unblock a progress logjam requires the implementation of approaches dramatically contrasting current practices. Progress is not stimulated by doing more of the same. Progress is not triggered in response to ease and sameness.

Within the nutritional universe, the meal-frequency status quo is three meals a day. In the modern world, breakfast, lunch, and dinner form the conventional pattern. Wake up and have a hearty breakfast, the so-called most important meal of the day. Midday, eat again. At night, after work, have dinner, the final meal of the day.

How can an athlete induce progress by manipulating meal frequency? Consider implementing one of the two meal-frequency outliers:

• Multiple meals: the bodybuilding-based strategy of 5 to 6 daily mini-meals, grazing all day long.
• Intermittent fasting: eating within a defined window, eating less often, and tightening food quality.

Outlier #1: Bodybuilder-Style Multiple Meals

Starting in the 1960s, bodybuilding nutrition became increasingly sophisticated and increasingly effective. Those ancient bodybuilders rightly postulated that if an athlete was eating 3,000 calories a day, consumed in three square meals of 1,000 calories apiece, why not eat those same 3,000 calories in six 500-calorie meals? Would not the digestive burden be lessened? Would not the body be “taught” how to better assimilate and distribute food nutrients? Smaller meals, more meals: the logic was compelling, and bodybuilders reported immediate results.

The regular person eats 21 meals a week. The competitive bodybuilder may consume 42 mini-meals each week. Since the 1980s, the multiple-meal eating schedule has been a cornerstone of bodybuilding nutrition. Every 2 to 3 waking hours, the competitive bodybuilder consumes a food meal or a “supplement meal.” Calories are eaten in roughly equal amounts, with meals or feedings spaced at equidistant intervals throughout the day.

This strategy can work, but not because the mere act of eating six times is magical. It works when the food content is clean, the protein is sufficient, calories are matched to the goal, training is intense, and compliance is high.

When the competitive bodybuilder wants to add lean mass in the off-season, over a period of weeks the caloric content of each feeding is incrementally increased. The food content is kept clean and the cardio kept up. This way the bodybuilder seeks to add lean mass without adding an unacceptable amount of body fat.

When the competitive bodybuilder seeks to lean out, the process is reversed. Calories are gradually and almost imperceptibly reduced. Bodybuilders clean up food content and tinker with macronutrients. They may gradually pull starch calories out of the diet, sometimes replacing lost starch calories with strategically selected fats or MCTs. The goal is always the same: maximum leanness without cannibalizing hard-earned muscle mass.

In bodybuilding, the eternal quest is maximum off-season increase in lean muscle mass without unacceptable body-fat gain. In the pre-competition phase, the quest is maximum leanness without sacrificing muscle.

Multiple meals are the antithesis of the three-square-meal thesis.

Outlier #2: Ori Hofmekler and Intermittent Fasting

Thesis, antithesis, synthesis. Some men are born revolutionaries. Ori Hofmekler is one. Ori was born in 1952 and raised in Israel. An artistic child prodigy, Ori attended the Bezalel Academy of Art in Jerusalem and the Hebrew University, where he received a degree in Human Sciences. His political satire became world renowned and was featured in major books, magazines and newspapers.

Hofmekler had a lifelong interest in the fitness levels, capacities and training protocols of ancient Greek and Roman soldiers and sailors. Ori studied deeply the capacities and capabilities of the ancient warrior, men who carried weaponry and armor, rowed, marched, fought, and endured. He was fascinated by humans who were not modern specialists but all-around physical animals.

Ori felt that the physiques and capacities of the ancients were superior to those of modern, one-dimensional athletic specialists. When his art career ended, he turned his full attention to survival science. In 1995, Bob Guccione started a fitness magazine and named Ori the editor-in-chief of Mind and Muscle Power.

Ori Hofmekler introduced his diet approach, based on his interpretation of the eating habits of ancient warriors and sailors. The Warrior Diet was published in the early 2000s. Ori’s contention was that we should eat less, eat less often, and eat natural food. Ori felt breakfast was the “worst meal of the day” and that the body needed long periods where no food was ingested in order to cleanse and self-regulate.

I cohosted a radio show with Ori for two years and learned his diet and exercise approach inside and out. His strategy was genius in its simplicity: let the body cleanse and rectify itself by not eating for 18 to 20 hours a day, with exceptions, and when we do eat, eat less, eat natural and avoid chemicals. Ori felt that precision nutrition needed to be melded with intense exercise.

Ori’s Warrior Diet is antithetical to the bodybuilder multiple-meal strategy.

Both outlier approaches can work. How do you square this circle?

Thesis, Antithesis, Synthesis

One proven-effective dietary frequency strategy, the bodybuilding approach, champions eating all the time. Another effective dietary strategy, Ori’s intermittent-fasting approach, champions eating the day’s calories within a narrow window. One would think the synthesis would be a blending of the frequencies: find the common ground between the bodybuilder approach and the Warrior Diet approach.

When one searches for the frequency common ground between the two outliers, the hybrid frequency arrived at is three square meals a day. Right back where we started. Back to what we sought to get away from initially.

Rather than look for hybrids, look for a different definition of synthesis: legislate pendulum-like contrast.

Establish a Frequency Pendulum

Why not use the intermittent-fasting approach until you exhaust progress, grow stale, or simply want a change of pace? What greater frequency contrast could you create than to switch from intermittent fasting, a small food-window strategy, to the bodybuilder approach, a strategy of eating small mini-meals throughout the day?

Conversely, if you have been using a multiple-meal eating strategy and have grown weary of preparing and consuming 40-plus meals a week, what could offer better contrast than switching to an equally effective, totally opposite, intermittent-fasting approach?

This type of frequency shift can blast dietary stagnation into smithereens. If you are eating three square meals a day and stagnant, try one of the outlier approaches. A radical shift in meal frequency can jolt the complacent body out of whatever mire it is currently bogged down in.

Feel free to further amplify results by augmenting a dramatic shift in meal frequency with manipulations in food volume and macronutrient content. There is a science and an art to meal frequency, and it needs to become part of your transformational arsenal.

When you eat is not more important than what you eat or how much you eat. But for some athletes, at the right time, meal timing can become nearly as important because it changes adherence, appetite, discipline, logistics, and the entire psychological feel of the diet.

Do not neglect or ignore this unmined vein of progress. Switch things up using a pendulum swing between these two frequency extremes. Get out of the bland middle.

Training Still Supplies the Transformational Stress

Meal frequency does not exist in a vacuum. It must be synchronized with training. Resistance training, cardio, food quality, sleep, and brain-train all interact. The frequency pendulum is not a magic wand; it is one lever in a larger transformational machine.

A lifter can use free weights, kettlebells, exercise bikes, or treadmills to create the physical stress. Meal frequency then becomes a way to organize the food-fuel around the stress. The training creates the demand. The diet answers it.

Safety Note for Meal Frequency, Fasting, and Aggressive Diet Changes

Intermittent fasting, aggressive calorie reduction, bodybuilding-style mini-meals, low-carbohydrate phases, MCT use, and rapid changes in meal timing are not appropriate for everyone. People with diabetes, kidney disease, heart-related issues, eating-disorder history, pregnancy, breastfeeding, underweight status, medication concerns, or significant medical conditions should seek qualified medical or nutrition guidance before making major changes.

Do not use meal frequency as an excuse to under-eat protein, ignore total calories, train through dizziness, binge after fasting, or turn eating into a neurotic full-time job. The goal is not dietary extremism. The goal is controlled contrast in service of measurable transformation.

This article preserves Marty Gallagher’s RAW nutrition philosophy and firsthand experience with Ori Hofmekler’s approach. It is not individualized medical, dietetic, rehabilitation, or programming advice.

Related Meal Frequency and Nutrition Reading

For related Marty Gallagher nutrition commentary, read What We Can Learn From Elite Chefs and The Food Taliban.

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