The Benefits of Breakfast like a Princess, Lunch like a Queen, Dine like a Maid

Cover - Change your Schedule,
Change Your Life by
Suhas Kshirsagar

Back in September, we turned our eating schedule upside down. We were reading a book called: Change Your Schedule, Change Your Life, a blend of Ayurvedic wisdom and cutting edge science.

One of the suggestions in the book was to eat the largest meal of the day at lunch time and a much smaller meal at dinner/supper time. The benefits were weight loss, better sleep, more energy, etc.

This was rather a radical concept to us. I mean, we knew that it was a common practice in Europe where lunch was often a hot meal and dinner was a bit of soup or an open-faced sandwich.

We'd never even heard of the idea of Breakfast like a King/Queen, Lunch like a Prince/Princess, Dine like a Pauper/Maid.

After much discussion, we decided to give it a try. We would eat a large, hot meal at lunch time and a much smaller meal at dinner time. Not just that, we would finish eating the evening meal four hours before bedtime. Apparently our bodies do not handle evening meals all that well and the later we eat, or the closer to bedtime we eat, the more likely that all those calories will get packed on as excess poundage. Given that we normally are in bed before 10 pm... this meant that our evening meal needed to happen before 6 pm!

We both work from home, so we had some flexibility in our schedules but, still, this switch required that we handle some big logistical hurdles. The first few weeks were a bit bumpy, but we've worked out most of the kinks. Some of the key steps were preparation and planning.

We started meal planning for the coming week so that we knew what we needed to buy at the grocery store. There's nothing worse than looking at recipe at 10:30 am, ready to get cooking, and realizing that we were missing some key ingredient.

We also knew exactly what we would be cooking the next day and what might need to come out of the freezer the day before. I can't tell you how many times we would miss that step in the old days and realize at 5 pm that we had nothing to eat and would then default to eat-out or take-out... not good for the health of our bodies or our budget! It's a bit harder to use that default when you're cooking in the mornings and most pizza places don't open that early!

The trickiest bit was getting used to the idea of cooking in the mornings. It felt really weird and threw a lot of monkey wrenches into well-entrenched habits and routines. We learned that cooking every single morning of the week was no fun... far better to make a big pot of something on the weekend and be able to eat that for several days before then having to cook something else mid-week.

We also learned that having frozen leftovers was non-negotiable. There are some days when we'd wake up and not feel like cooking but... we had something in the freezer that we could pull out and defrost quickly.

The importance of meal timing for our circadian rhythms

Now, has it made a difference for us? Absolutely. We are definitely eating less which means we have both lost weight. We also have more energy in the afternoons and sleep better at night. And, honestly, there are some evenings where I don't feel like eating anything and so I don't. It's actually a good thing to go to bed a bit hungry. This also means that when I wake up, I am quite hungry and so breakfast has gotten a bit bigger. It used to be that I would only eat a couple of peanut butter & jam sandwiches in the mornings. But now... it's a bowl of oatmeal with berries and walnuts, a bowl of meat-free baked beans and a peanut butter & mushed berries pumpernickel sandwich. I have tried various combinations of those three but, if I didn't have all three, I would often find myself hungry again at 9:30 am. This is the problem when you get up early and eat breakfast at 6 am! But... a solid breakfast now tides me over until lunch time.

But here's the thing... I would say the lunch meal is still the biggest meal of the day... not breakfast. So, for me, it's really Breakfast like a Princess, Lunch like a Queen and dine like a Maid. And for my partner, it's different. Breakfast fell off the radar a few months ago and she now starts her day with a big lunch, and then has some soup and a berry bowl in the evenings. The common theme is... biggest meal at lunch.

It's all tied in with our circadian rhythms... there are many, many studies that have shown the benefits of eating most of our calories earlier in the day. And, on the flip side... the harm that comes from eating a lot of calories in the evenings...

Flipping our meal timing so that our largest meal is at lunchtime was a small step in our road to physical wellness. It wasn't an easy step by any means but... having done it for over six months now... it was a very worthwhile step and one that we have now integrated into our lifestyle.