Q: Is it better to eat several small meals throughout the day ("grazing"), or two or three larger ones, assuming I'm getting the same number of calories either way?

A: Let's say you run a business, and one of the things you need to do is check and respond to email. If you're like almost everyone I know, you get lots and lots of emails. More than you want. More than you know what to do with. And more than you can effectively respond to with 100% accuracy and attention.

You can't just stop doing email. If you didn't communicate effectively with folks, you'd be out of business. But you can't just do email either. You do the minimum to keep you functioning, and then spend the rest of your time doing more strategic work.

Here's my prediction: if you spend too much time eating and digesting email, then you're neglecting a whole bunch of crucial business functions. You're not planning for the future. You're not plugging profit leaks. You're not brainstorming product or service improvements. You're not testing your marketing campaigns. You're not calling on your customers enough. And so on.

Not only that, but studies show that people who always are checking their email are much less efficient than people who check their email only once or twice a day. The "email fasts" allow them to work on the high-value tasks in a concerted and focused way.

What Food and Email Have in Common

Well, guess what? Spending too much time on email is directly analogous to spending all day digesting food. When your body is digesting, because you always have something in the stomach, or coming down the hatch, it's not doing a bunch of other tricks crucial to good health. Such as:

• detoxifying
• repairing tissues and organs
• efficiently eliminating waste products
• healing

So if we eat three square meals a day, plus a morning snack (aka coffee break), plus a late afternoon snack (aka pick-me-up), plus a late-night snack (aka I'll kill for a cookie or a pint of Ben and Jerry's), then we're effectively denying our bodies the opportunity to do the long-term stuff that we need to live long and prosper.

A Word From Your Pancreas

Need more convincing? I have your pancreas on the line: "Give me a rest once in a while, will you? It takes me hours to replenish the enzymes you use to digest your food. If you have another meal or snack before I've topped up your tank, you're going to do a lousy job of digestion. So you'll process less, turn more to fat, get fewer health-promoting micro-nutrients, and gain more weight. Then I have work even harder to pump insulin into your cells, and there goes my yoga class!"

Fasting Prolongs Life

We all know (well, we all will by the end of this sentence) that eating fewer calories leads to better health and longevity. It's one of the few things that nobody serious disagrees with. Animal studies, human studies, physiology studies, all point to the same fact. It makes sense: in a famine, a species that could outlive the period of scarcity by favoring long life over reproduction would do well.

But other studies show that, as important as restricting calories is giving the body significant time each day with no calories. In other words, daily "fasts" promote health.

The MythBusting Section

So let's bust a couple of myths before we say goodbye for today:

Myth 1. Lots of small meals are good for us.

No. Eating larger meals, spaced apart, is good for us. Giving the body a chance to do other things besides email - I mean digest food - is critical to health.

Myth 2. Breakfast is the most important meal of the day, and you need a big and hearty one.

The word "breakfast," which comes from the English phrase "Help me, I'm going through toxic withdrawal and so I need to stuff myself with bacon and eggs," implies that a fast has begun which the meal is about to break.

If your last meal was at 1pm during the Pilates infomercial, and you're up at 6am to some sizzling and percolating, your body is just beginning the processes of detox and healing that we talked about earlier. Of course withdrawal feels lousy. And of course putting more poison in your body feels good. That's where the myth of the big breakfast comes from.

True Hunger vs. Toxic Withdrawal

Once you recognize the difference between true hunger, which happens when your pancreas has refilled the enzyme tank, and symptoms of toxic withdrawal (which is what most of us on the Standard American Diet feel most of the time), you can begin to face the addiction, and let your body naturally heal you and bring you back to a state of health.

Two Big Don'ts

1. Eating by Timex

The clock is not our friend when it comes to timing our meals and snacks. Learn to ignore time-cues for food, and instead cultivate true hunger. Hunger is a desire. It makes food taste more pleasurable. Recently I completed a 7-day water-only fast (don't try this at home - seriously - unless you've spent at least six months eating a whole-foods, plant-based diet almost exclusively), and I broke the fast with a piece of steamed zucchini. I kid you not, it was the most delicious thing I ever put into my mouth.

2. Situational Eating

There are so many situations where food acts as the social grease or the cure for what to do with our hands: watching the game, getting together with friends, sitting down to help the kids with homework, reading a trashy novel in bed, etc.

It's OK to say no, it's OK to take a small plate and then not eat off it. People are far more interested in their own eating than in yours, unless you make an issue of it.

If you're interested in the details of short- and long-term fasting, I recommend highly the work of Dr. Joel Fuhrman, author of the very important Fasting and Eating for Health. His Members' Site has an entire forum dedicated to fasting and caloric restriction, and I've found it a highly useful resource (especially on Day 3 of my fast, when I was ready to eat the couch).