How many times a day should I eat.

[msmith]

I work out 3 days a week and ride my bike to the gym. How many calories should I eat and what should I eat and how many teals and snacks to buld muscle and loss weight?

[carl669]

you should eat exactly 1632 calories per day when you work out and 1487 on the days you don't.  you should eat quinoa and goat milk yogurt only.

just kidding.  no one can really tell you how much you should eat or how often to eat since everyone's body is different.  there's the generic answers like eat 500 less calories than you burn and you should be a 1lb per week weight loss.  but, other than that, it's kind of an experiment.

as for what you should eat, well, there's a lot of different schools of thought.  some people eat low fat, high carb and lose weight.  i eat high fat, low carb and lose weight.  other people do diet plans like jenny craig or weight watchers.  

it's up to you to set your goals and then see what works for you.  people here can only give you general guidance.

[Dominique]

Building muscle and losing weight are contradictory goals, as you need a calorie surplus for the former and a calorie deficit for the latter.

More important than the number of times a day you should eat are what to eat and how much.

[MikeInSea]

Meal timing and frequency are pretty much just a matter of preference. To lose weight you just need to eat less than you burn. Issues of shedule, satiety, body recomposition can have an impact on what you and when you eat, relative to your workouts. But if we're just talking about losing weight, it doesn't really matter much. 

How much you eat, and how large your deficit is, would depend on how much you have to lose. If you have more to lose your daily caloric deficit can be larger. As you lose weight, the deficit should become smaller, which is why losing those last pounds can take longer. 

As the poster above pointed out, you aren't going to build muscle in a caloric deficit. You *might* experience some slight newbie gains if you're new to lifting and are fairly overweight to begin with, but any muscle mass gained will be very small. 

You can gain strength, of course. Strength gains are not the same as hypertrophy. 

[Ukase]

Much of what has already been posted is essentially correct.

You have to be very careful about two things.

What goes into your mouth

and

What goes into your brain.

There are a lot of choices for both!

Many people will tell you that you cannot lose fat and gain muscle at the same time.

This is both true and false.

If you're at all like me, wanting to shed a few pounds (or more) yet keep or build muscle, then you would find a great deal of conflicting information about the subject if you were to search for it.

The Bodybuilder Approach:

Eat nutritious foods at certain intervals before and after workouts. Eat a lot of food. The more muscle you have, the more you need to eat to maintain it. When the body is looking for fuel to maintain that muscle, because muscle is more calorically expensive to maintain, it typically pulls the energy from the muscles by breaking them down as fuel. To prevent this, many bodybuilders will eat numerous times per day. But they won't eat just anything. Typically, most of their carb intake is in the mornings and tapers off the closer it gets to evening. Protein is the star of every meal they eat, usually. A bodybuilder eats more calories than he/she burns during the day so that his/her body has enough energy to create more muscle. If he/she eats the wrong foods, or too much food, they'll get some muscle but also some fat. If they don't get enough calories, they'll certainly lose fat, but they'll lose some muscle, too.

One thing is certain, you cannot build muscle without building fat.

And, it is very challenging to lose fat and not lose at least a little muscle.

So, you have to consider a lot of things in establishing your plan.

Can you burn fat while you build muscle? Some say yes. I think this debate is really a question of semantics. A body grows muscle while it sleeps. Can muscle fibers that have been broken down in the gym repair and grow as fat is lost? Not at the same time, no. But, you can do cardio and lose fat during the day, while the drop sets you did break down muscle fibers and get repaired as you sleep. How noticeable these changes are in day to day living are negligible to the scale, but evident in the way your clothes fit and the measuring tape.

In the end, I'm just a quiet voice in this land of the internet, ruled by hedgehogs, kittens and puppies that have somehow learned to write embarassing signs to hang about their necks. The truth is out there, you just have to know it when you read it.

The only 1 verifiable thing that I have learned is that you must burn more calories than you eat to lose weight. This math model applies to all tissue, not just fat. That is the real reason why the 1000 calorie deficit is not the best way to go for many people. The body can get hungry and eat your muscle. This is less likely to happen on a 500 calorie deficit.

Same principle with calorie surplus. As you work out, eat like a teenager (their bodies are growing, changing) if you eat too much, you get fat instead of muscular. You'll gain muscle, it'll just be marbled with fat. So, you only eat a little bit extra to minimize the fat gain. Gaining just muscle is probably impossible. I am not experienced enough on gaining muscle to say much more.

The one thing that is required is discipline. Your body will be sculpted in your kitchen, and it's going to take work.