I'm a huge proponent of OMAD (One Meal A Day) eating, which is a type of intermittent fasting. Basically, for people who need to reduce caloric intake, I find that restricting the time you eat is a much easier way to manage that reduction than just trying to have smaller meals. Going from 3 meals a day to 1 or 2 large meals is easier than just eating 3 smaller meals for many people.
Suppose you are interested in this style of eating, and you want to know when you should eat. Have a big breakfast and then stop? Splurge on lunch? Big dinner?
I've been seeing a few posts recently relaying scientific evidence that frontloading (having calories earlier in the day) is healthier.
I'm not going to argue one way or another, and I'm not going to analyze the evidence. Maybe it is! Maybe if you are going to eat one big meal every day, you should try to have it earlier in the day rather than later.
The problem, as I see it, is that in Western society dinner is the social meal (lunch to a lesser extent, but mostly dinner). Dinner is when we go out for dates, when we celebrate special occasions, it's the meal for weddings, and so on and so forth.
From a purely physiological perspective it might be healthier to have your one big daily meal earlier, but you also have to ask yourself, what is easier to maintain? What plan will give you the best quality of life?
In my experience, if I'm available to eat dinner, I miss out on very few social occasions and I inconvenience other people very little. I might be healthier if I ate a big breakfast or lunch and skipped dinner, but I'd miss family time and socializing time, and that's not worth it to me.
Just pointing out that there are things the medical research doesn't well account for.
