Q: If I need to lose weight for a jiu-jitsu tournament, should I lower my meals from five meals a day to two or three meals a day?

A: No. You should continue to eat every few hours (I like three hours). This maintains stable blood sugar which will keep you from losing muscle and help avoid binging on foods you shouldn’t be eating. Because you want to lose fat, not muscle right?

What you need to be focusing on is what your food is derived from, and pay attention to your macro nutrient ratios. Carbohydrates, fats, and proteins (and sometimes water is thrown into the group) are your macro-nutrients. 

The majority of the population isn’t carb tolerant, so their bodies don’t do well eating many carbs. These people would get lean, perform better, and just feel better in general if they stayed with a paleolithic diet.

So basically, you’d be eating less processed and refined foods, less starchy carbs, and more animal proteins, vegetables, fruits, and nuts. Anything a caveman could’ve ate is fair game. So bread, pasta, and pastries are out. You get the point.

Around 1890 or 1910 (I’m going off of memory here so forgive me on the exact date) Arthur Atwater developed the calorimeter. You’d put food in this device and heat it up. However long it took to turn to ash determined how many calories was in it. He hypothesized that our bodies would work the same way. But in fact, they work like chemistry sets not calorimeters. So what the food is coming from matters more than the calories.

I’m not allocating that calories don’t make a difference…they do. If you ate 10,000 calories a day and sat on your ass all day, you’ll gain fat. But think of it like this. If you put 500 calories of ice cream in a bowl and 500 calories of broccoli in another bowl, doesn’t it make sense logically that the ice cream will be worse for you by doing something different inside your body?

Besides making sure you’re eating clean food for you (this is dependent on your genes, hence “for you”), you should also start to reduce the size of your meals slowly, as you get closer to your competition. I’m not big on asking people to measure food because most people won’t and it can make a person neurotic and raise cortisol if they do. Just eye ball it.

One more thing. Make your breakfast your biggest meal, lunch the next biggest, and dinner the smallest. There’s a saying that goes eat breakfast like a king, lunch like a prince, and dinner like a pulper. Make sure your last meal of the night is about two hours before you go to bed. This will ensure high growth hormone levels while you sleep (growth hormone gets you lean). And only drink water or green tea. Nothing that has calories in it.