Rule Basics

You need to eat three meals a day, every day. No skipping meals and nothing to eat between meals. After dinner the kitchen needs to be closed until breakfast the next day. This means no snacking and no late night eating. You should have your first meal of the day ("breakfast") between 30 and 90 minutes after waking up. The second meal of the day ("lunch") should be between 4 and 5 1/2 hours later. The third meal of the day ("dinner") should be between 4 and 5 1/2 hours after that. You should then have between 3 and 4 hours after dinner before bed without food.

Reasoning Behind the Rule

The number one risk factor for obesity is skipping breakfast. This is because when you don't eat breakfast, your ghrelin levels that have been rising since you woke up, are not suppressed. As a result your hunger cells continue to suppress your metabolic rate all morning long until you eat something substantial. Only by taking in calories can you suppress ghrelin levels long enough to tide you over until the next meal and allow your metabolic rate to rise.

The suppression of ghrelin with a balanced meal lasts 4 to 5 hours. At that point it is time for the next meal. There are two problems with snacking in between meals. First, if you are snacking then you are likely doing so because you are hungry. If you are hungry, it is a sign that your ghrelin levels where not satisfactorily suppressed from the previous meal. As a result your metabolic rate has not been maximized for the day. Secondly, snacks are simply a source of more calories. This leads to a progressive cycle of borrowing calories from the next meal to make up for the snack after the last meal. The smaller next meal means again you are more likely to snack after that meal, all the while again having ghrelin levels higher than they need to be.

When you eat late at night, you suppress ghrelin levels. As a result you will have more difficulties progressing into slow wave NREM sleep. Until you can do this you can't get into REM sleep and thus release more leptin. So by eating at night you are essentially taking away the first 1 to 3 hours of sleep and making that sleep non restorative and hormonally inactive.