I’ve always had a problem with the idea of eating six small meals per day to lose weight. It seems as if it would be an inconvenience to eat that often.

It’s difficult enough to eat three meals per day, especially if you’re preparing them with fresh ingredients and with as few processed foods as possible. Can you imagine doing that much work six times a day?

I also don’t agree with the hormonal effect this style of eating has on a body. While eating several small meals does slightly reduce insulin spikes, it instead provides an almost constant flow of insulin with lower peaks. You end up having your total insulin increased throughout the day rather than having a couple of high peaks. From a health and weight loss standpoint, total daily insulin is more important.

If you’ve read Eat Stop Eat or listened to the Eat Stop Eat Advanced Audio Files, you’ve learned that one of the most important parts of your metabolism is the opposing effects of growth hormone and insulin when it comes to burning fat.

When we are fasting, the growth hormone is secreted, and it directs nutrients toward our muscles. When we eat, we secrete insulin, and nutrients are directed toward fat.

Insulin plus excess calories equals fat storage. That is a simple rule of metabolism.

If you’re trying to lose weight, keeping your insulin level elevated over the course of the day doesn’t seem like a good idea. If you eat six meals a day, you have to constantly monitor the calories you eat, because even the smallest mistake at any of your six meals will cause you to store fat.

Look at it this way: Overeating by as few as 85 calories at each of your six meals would lead to an extra 500 calories each day. That’s enough reason not to bother with six meals per day, but the main reason why I don’t like the approach is because it’s not fair to women.

Six meals per day is sexist.

The six small meals per day diet began with bodybuilders. And most people who read about bodybuilding are men. So when magazine writers are writing new stories for their nutrition readers, they’re doing it for men who follow bodybuilding and whose muscle mass and bodies are larger than average.

That’s when we started hearing about eating six meals per day. When it was originally promoted as a way to lose weight, it was done in bodybuilding magazines – directed toward bodybuilders. The idea made sense to them.

When a 260-pound bodybuilder is trying to lose weight, he might start by lowering his calorie intake to around 2,400 – which is much more than an average person would ever need in a day. At six meals per day, this man would be eating about 400 calories at each meal. Based on this math, this man could actually lose weight by eating a six-inch steak and cheese sub for every meal! That sounds like a great diet!

But a 5’4” woman who weighs 130 pounds isn’t so lucky. If this woman wants to lose weight, her calorie intake is going to have to be much lower than the bodybuilder’s 2,400 calories per day. If her goal was to eat 1,300 calories, at six meals per day, she would only be able to consume 220 calories at each meal. That’s the equivalent of a medium sized banana and a half cup of yogurt.

But if her banana is a little larger than medium sized, she will go over her meal allowance, and she would need to eat even less at her next meal. The six small meals per day plan requires you to be impossibly strict with your eating.

Why do this to yourself if there is no proven weight loss advantage to eating multiple small meals per day?

The six small meals per day approach was designed for a very unique group of people – bodybuilders. But for some reason, it is promoted to the rest of us as a feasible weight loss plan.

Also, if the plan is to be done properly, you have to give in to obsessive-compulsive eating. You are forced to worry about how much you consumed at every meal and what the nutrient breakdown was for everything you ate. You also have to begin thinking about your next meal as soon as you finish the previous one. These are not good habits for living with food. It only makes life difficult for most people.

It’s very difficult to eat only 200-300 calories per meal. It’s also difficult to spend six hours per day preparing meals, so most people end up resorting to the use of supplements or protein bars to get all their meals in without going over on their calorie amounts. And that is probably why this style of eating was designed.

If bodybuilding magazines were the first to make this style of eating popular, and if those magazines serve as the main advertising source for sports supplements – wouldn’t it make sense for them to promote the six meals per day eating style in order to sell more supplements, protein powders and nutrition bars?

Again we see how obsessive-compulsive eating benefit’s the food industry – and how the food industry can have an influence on how we eat.

There is nothing wrong with supplements. But don’t let the way you eat be dictated by the supplement industry. If you want to lose weight, you need to reduce your calories with the method that best suits you.

There is a small group of individuals who may do well eating six small meals per day, but if it doesn’t work for you, don’t do it.

Find the easiest method of reducing your food intake while still allowing you to enjoy the foods you eat – and use that method.

Many women simply try to eat less and exercise more until they are “small,” but I prefer taking a tactical approach that defines a woman’s goals.

For an example, let’s use a woman who is 31 years old, is 5’6” tall, and weighs 160 pounds. She has about 35% body fat. She isn’t sedentary, but she also isn’t a fitness freak.

Let’s use the Venus Factor principles to map out a weight loss guide for this woman.

The average Lean Body Mass for a woman who is 5’6” is 104 pounds. A little less than 50% of that is skeletal muscle, so that means about 50 pounds is true muscle.

We also know that Lean Body Mass can be as high as 112 pounds for a woman who is 5’6”, but realistically, adding 4-5 pounds of muscle would be impressive since this would mean a 10% increase in skeletal muscle.

With an 8-10% increase in muscle mass, we have a Lean Body Mass of about 108 pounds.

When body fat is reduced to around 20%, we see a very large decrease in body fat – from 56 pounds to 27 pounds. Not all the weight loss would be body fat, but, over the long run, a lot of the weight loss would end up being from fat.

What we would end up with is a woman who is 5’6” and weighs about 135 pounds with about 20% body fat.

Keeping in mind that this woman would be roughly one standard deviation more muscular than the average 5’6” woman, we should expect to see a 25 inch waist and shoulders that are between 40 and 41 inches in circumference.

The above description is this woman’s “body road map” – something to strive for while visiting the gym to gain or maintain strength.

Strength brings muscle mass. Unless you’re a beginner athlete, you can’t get stronger at a lift without your muscle getting a little larger. If you want to build a more attractive body, you need to have some muscle that allows you to have a “shape” underneath your skin and fat.

The woman in our example should take her measurements, test some basic lifts in the gym, and then track her weight loss progression.

This is what it means to be tactical with weight loss.

This gives you a map, and you have some measurements to use as guidelines. With these guidelines, you should be able to eat less, lose weight, and track your progression to make sure the inches lost from your waist and hips is greater than the inches lost from your shoulders.

This isn’t a perfect road map. You could genetically have very wide shoulders, or you may not be capable of having a 25 inch waist. You should be able to get very close to your goals, though, and having a rough map is better than having no direction at all.

Tactical body shaping is what the Venus Factor is all about. The Venus Factor is a road map that makes your weight loss process easier.

Your body is malleable. You can shape it into whatever form you want to as long as you’re tactical and realistic.

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Sometimes, what holds you back in your weight loss efforts and your quest for perfect abs are not typical words, such as protein, fat, carbs, calories or extreme body workout.

Two of your biggest obstacles have nothing to do with what you eat. They are self confidence and perfection.

There is a misconception that it takes a “special” person to be successful at weight loss. We tend to think that the individuals who hand out dieting advice are perfect people – living perfect lives, with perfect bodies and perfect jobs.

When we compare ourselves to these perfect people, we feel like we’ll never measure up – and that causes us to lose confidence.

Nobody is perfect, though.

The truth is that the diet guru who seems to eat perfectly is actually addicted to chocolate. The guy who gives out advice on how to bench press 600 pounds has actually had three shoulder surgeries and bone spurs removed from his elbows because of the strain he’s put on his body.

The celebrity who says he’s been dedicated to a workout program to get in shape for his next movie forgot to mention he’s also taking anabolic steroids. The Paleo diet princess who says high fructose corn syrup is of the devil secretly enjoys the occasional Coke at the movies. The magazine covers you see are a result of Photoshop mastery.

So, when you realize that you’re not perfect either, you shouldn’t be disappointed.

If you think it’s impossible to have shredded abs without even flexing – professional fitness models feel the same way.

Perfect abs just don’t exist, in spite of what movies or magazine covers try to tell us.

Our abilities to reach our own goals are being hurt by our illusion of perfection.

Here are a few things of which you can be sure:

Some days, you’ll go off your diet.

Sometimes, your efforts at weight loss will plateau – and sometimes, your weight will go up.

Some days, you’ll love the way you look, and on other days, you won’t. But the truth is that you probably look the same on either day.

This doesn’t mean you’re a failure. This means you’re human.

You will break a fast early. You’ll eat more than you want to. You’ll miss a workout. You’ll eat a food that’s “bad.” Even the most dedicated fitness professional will not be able to eat perfectly and diet hardcore for four months straight.

If you slip up, don’t get discouraged. Just keep moving toward your goals – and remember: No one is perfect. That should help your self confidence.

When you realize that no one is perfect, you lose your reason not to be self confident.

As a note…this article was highly influenced by this blog post –>  http://www.danoah.com/2010/09/disease-called-perfection.html