Two Meals a Day for Weight Loss and Other Great New Diet Advice We Are Never Going to Take

OK, so the latest verdict on how to lose weight is in, and the result is a bit…uninspiring. Instead of eating six mini-meals, apparently (Huh? Are we doing that?), we should be eating just breakfast and lunch.

Thanks for letting us know, but that is SO NOT GOING TO HAPPEN. We just really, really like to eat dinner. You know?

The recommendation, for what it’s worth, comes from a small study, presented at the American Diabetes Association meeting in Chicago on Sunday, which monitored the body mass index of 54 people with Type 2 diabetes. Over thr course of 12 weeks, the ones who just ate breakfast and lunch lost an average of 1.23 points in BMI—while the slouches who ate six small daily meals with the same nutritional content lost only .82.

“Our results support the ancient proverb, "Eat breakfast like a king, lunch like a prince, and dinner like a pauper,”’ Hana Kahleova, a researcher at the Institute for Clinical and Experimental Medicine in Prague, said at the presentation, which was sponsored by the Czech Republic’s Ministry of Health. “Eating breakfast and lunch is more beneficial than skipping breakfast and eating lunch and dinner, because the fat deposition is bigger in the afternoon and after the evening meal.”

It does make intuitive sense, of course. But perhaps the only bigger culinary joy than a drawn-out, lavish dinner is the divine nibble of chocolate or dish of ice cream you enjoy several hours after it, late at night, by the flickering blue light of your TV.

We’re pretty sure we’ll be relegating this latest suggestion to the same high shelf we’ve reserved for various other recent diet suggestions: the Fast Metabolism Diet, for one, which relies upon a strict pattern of what you can and can’t eat over a four-week period: lots of carbs and fruit on Monday and Tuesday, lots of protein and veggies on Wednesday and Thursday, all of those plus healthy fats and oils on Friday through Sunday. It’s not that it’s so restrictive that we can’t bear it, it’s just that it’s too specific, and involves matching foods with days of the week, and frankly, there’s just too much planning and too many rules involved.

For being too restrictive, we’re also shunning the Fast Diet, the UK craze developed by British physician Michael Mosley that’s made its way stateside. It calls for two weekly days of fasting, during which you are only allowed 500 calories daily if you’re a woman and 600 if you’re a man. The rest of the days you can do what you want. A recent Brazilian study even found that intermittent fasting caused positive changes in blood sugar and fat loss. But sorry, we’re just not going there either.

Same with the popular Paleo Diet, which has kind of the opposite problem: too much—meat, that is.

Are we too resistant to change? Perhaps. Are we susceptible to fads? Naturally. Which is why we’re trying our damnedest to wholly embrace this one: the movement toward being body positive, as cheered on by folks from Kate Upton and Vogue Australia editors to the lingerie department leaders at Debenhams department store. Because really: Why not celebrate, instead of torture, ourselves?