A dumb comment I have to talk about

“You shouldn’t eat more than 500 calories per meal.”

That is not an exact quote, more of a paraphrasing for the paranoid want to protect the privacy of even people who say profoundly stupid things. However, this is a comment I read on a short form video where an actual nutrition professional was commenting, positively, on a heavier woman’s fat loss journey. Maybe I shouldn’t let it get to me, but this comment has left me so irritated for so long that I have to talk about it.

I’m certainly not going to argue with someone in the comments, because we all know how that goes, i.e. poorly. But maybe you, dear reader, can see that comment, see my issues with it, and learn something the person who left that comment didn’t. I imagine, it won’t be hard for you.

That said, there are people who believe nonsense like this, and I’m going to have to try very hard not to curse. This is a level of either ignorance or stupidity that I simply cannot fathom.

This is the kind of thing that makes people think nutrition is harder than it actually is. So, I’m going to go through everything I can think of that’s wrong with this claim. Buckle in.

Proving this wrong with math

I am a six foot tall man, I’m 47, I weigh around 185, and I’m moderately active. That puts my daily maintenance calories at around 2500 per day. According to that commenter, I should be eating 500 calories per meal. Three meals a day means I should be eating 1500 calories per day. So, a 1000 calorie per day deficit. That’s not good advice.

Just for fun, I went into a calorie calculator to figure out how light I’d have to be to have a 1500 calorie per day maintenance. Can you guess how much I’d have to weigh for that to be accurate? 25 pounds. Yes, I’d literally be long dead before this would be good advice.

So, let’s cut out my activity and just go for my Basal Metabolic Rate (BMR), or the calories it would take to just keep me alive with zero activity. 130 pounds. If I follow the advice of the original comment, removed all movement and exercise from my life, and lost 50 pounds, it would be good advice.

Even if I were to be lenient and think that comment was thinking four meals a day, it would still be bad advice. There isn’t a world where 500 calories per meal would be good for me. So who would this advice be good for?

Well, if I were five feet tall and moderately active, I’d need to weigh 65 pounds. That’s bad. What if I was older too? At 57, I could get all the way up to 80 pounds. It’s kinda sounding like this is still terrible advice.

Is it different if I were a woman? Yes, finally. A five foot tall woman who is 47, moderately active, and weighs 100 pounds could legitimately need 1500 calories per day. Finally, we’ve found an instance where the original comment is actually reasonable advice. And that advice, if the woman was only lightly active, would put her in a nearly 200 calorie surplus.

It’s almost like a blanket statement of calories per meal can’t possibly be accurate unless it’s in a very specific set of circumstances.

Proving it wrong with different eating styles

There are people who do what’s call OMAD, One Meal A Day. While you couldn’t pay me enough to want to do that, for some people having one giant meal is how they maintain a healthy lifestyle. Now, imagine literally anyone doing OMAD and eating 500 calories per meal. They’d die pretty quickly.

What about intermittent fasting? Whatever your eating window is, you are essentially keeping to two meals a day. That’s 1000 calories a day. You’d die slowly, but you would surely die. Even if you were eating every other day, if you’re limited to 1500 calories per two days, you’re gonna have a bad time.

But there’s more problems. What about people who eat four meals a day? If we go back to the woman for whom 500 calories per meal was actually good advice, that stops being true if she eats four meals. It’s even bad if she just has three meals and a modest snack. If you went all the way to five meals a day, you could actually get back to a healthy amount of food for me. The healthy amount of food for me would be a 1000 calorie surplus for my short female self.

It’s almost like blanket statements of calories per meal can’t handle how many people eat.

Proving this nonsense wrong with basic critical thinking

500 calories is not the ideal number for a meal. It is, in fact, a bad number of calories for a meal in many, many circumstances. But aside from that, it’s also wildly specific. What if I have 550 calories? Is that too many? According to that commenter, yes. What about 450? Is that too few? I don’t actually know what the commenter would say, but given how little they thought about the whole 500 thing, I doubt I’d be impressed.

What happens if you have to skip a meal? Do you then have to not eat more food later? How about if you are trying to lose weight? Are you not allowed to eat less? Or trying to gain weight? Can’t do more? What about if you’re sick? There are so many variables that a blanket statement can’t even engage with that it really raises the question: did that commenter think at all before saying something so stupid?

And one other critical thinking thing I’ve ignored to this point: did you know that all calories listed on labels are, at best, estimations? There’s literally no way to be exact. Two apples that weight exactly the same can have slightly different calorie values. How are you even supposed to hit 500 when you don’t have perfect information?

It’s almost like blanket statements of calories per meal cant handle even mild critical thinking.

Don’t listen to one size fits all advice

I don’t know if you ever worn something that is one size fits all, but typically that one size fits everyone by being a good fit for no one. Bland generalizations don’t come from people who engage critically with what they are saying. Nuance, even if the Internet is allergic to it, is important. Eating 500 calories in a meal isn’t a bad thing. There are plenty of satisfying meals for that number of calories. If you eat more, or less, in a meal? That’s fine too. Worry less about the exact number and more about if your food is nutritious and delicious.