
Originally Posted by
Windex
What research specifically have you read? To your point of sustainability, there's a good < Better < best for nutrition and a "Good" diet that you can do 100% of the time will be superior to the "best" diet that you can only do 80% of the time. Just be careful of what you read, and where the material is coming from. You don't want to fall into the trap of finding shortcuts that will diminish results.
There are 3 extremely important meals:
- First meal of day
- Preworkout Meal
- Postworkout Meal
Now if you ate 4, 5, or 6+ times per day, you are somewhat correct in the timing of those meals are going to be a lot less important relative to the other 3 meals above.
Pre and Post are pretty self explanatory, you want to start a workout with gas in the tank and when the workout is over you want to refill the gas tank.
The body is like a factory and if I ran a factory, I would want it to be operational as close to 24/7 as possible to maximize efficiency. When you eat a meal, you go through the 6 steps of digestion, but that's only one component. Digestion facilitates nutrient partitioning. Nutrient partitioning facilitates blood flow. Blood flow promotes cell growth.
If you want high level reading when it comes to Nutrition and Fitness I would recommend following Dr. Rhonda Patrick's research.