A lot of this depends on what your goals are and how your past performance has been. If you’re trying to get through tough workouts, that’s one thing. If you’re trying to lose fat, that’s another. If you’re trying to do both at the same time, which many on this forum are, is when things get tricky.
Performance
Are you getting through your tough workouts now? You said you have a high carb dinner and a small snack early in the morning. Is it working for you now? If you find that you’re fueled enough with that, you could experiment with scaling back a little and see what impact it has. Maybe skip the early morning snack and see what the effect is. Or have a smaller portion of the high carb dinner, or move the macro towards more protein and see the impact. You get the idea. The question here is do you need your current nutrition routine to perform well in your workouts, or have they just become a comforting routine? The potential performance gain from moving towards more fasted workouts in the morning is to become a more fat-adapted athlete.
Losing Fat
If you’re trying to lose fat, I tend to think of it like as a pyramid of hierarchy.
- On the bottom, the most important element is just straight out calories. If you are in a deficit, you will lose weight and if you’re in a surplus you’ll gain weight. Simple. Therefore, before you worry about anything else, make sure you’re in a deficit of around 300-500 calories per day.
- Next level is considering the quality of the food you’re eating. A 2,000 calorie per day diet of burgers is going to yield different performance capabilities than whole foods rich in nutrients.
- Then consider your macro proportions. If you listen to the Kona podcasts specials what becomes clear is that you can become a high performance athlete on very different nutrition strategies. A popular one within TR users is a high carb, low fat diet as described in The Endurance Diet. I typically run a 50% Carb, 30% Protein, 20% Fat macro split and that seems to work well for me.
- Lastly, you can make marginal gains when looking at nutrient timing. Pre-workout fueling, post-workout fueling, going to bed hungry, etc all fall into this category. The point is, it doesn’t matter when you eat your sprouted organic tofu if you’re habitually 1,000 calories over your daily needs if you’re trying to lose fat.
For more in depth views, this is a great thread:
Perform and be Lean
This is where things are tricky. If you’re in a calorie deficit, the risk is that you’re potentially not optimally fueled for your key workouts. If you have the building blocks of nutrition in place to get to your target weight, then this is where nutrient timing can make the difference. To directly address your question, that your evening meal should be the smallest of the day I think applies to the general population, but probably not someone looking to do hard efforts at 5 in the morning. Dinner for you will be a key fueling point for your next workout. Then breakfast will be your post-workout/recovery point. So, likely lunch might be the meal that should be smallest for you. This is all going to be individual to you, your goals, how your body responds to nutrition and training. I would say to think about what is important to you, come up with a plan for a week of how your nutrition will support your goals and then see how it goes. Then make small changes if things aren’t working for you. If you’re not losing the weight you want to, where can you cut back? If you’re feeling flat in key workouts, maybe you do need that small meal before you get on the bike?
Best of luck!