I grew up with the same mantra as most people regarding meals. You’ve got to have three solid meals a day with a snack fit in somewhere in the middle there. The time line doesn’t make sense to me if you stick to this schedule. Let’s review.

You’re up between 6:00 AM to 7:00 AM. You’re going to eat breakfast between 7:00 AM and 8:00 AM. Let’s say you eat at 8:00 AM. By 12:00 PM you’ve got to be starving. That’s 4 hours! So you eat lunch. By 4:00 PM you’ve got to eat again so you grab your snack. The snack, however, is small, and by 6:00 PM you’ve got to eat dinner. And then you got to sleep between 11:00 PM and 12:00 AM.

Don’t you see a problem here? You’ve got five to six hours of no eating before you go to sleep. That’s why I’m usually snacking away at something by 11:00 PM. Call it 4th meal, a pre-midnight snack, whatever. I need food. And I believe, most people are eating an undefined meal right before they head to bed.

Let’s take this concept and compare it to play and work. Here is how I thought the world worked when I was young. You go to work for 8 hours and then you “play” (not work) until you go to sleep and start the process all over again.

Maybe that is how it worked before the days of cell phones, blackberries, and the internet. Nowadays we’re working from the second we get up (tell me you don’t check your email first thing in the morning) until the second we go to sleep. If we work all day, when are we playing? We’re playing during the same time. Even Internet Explorer has tabbed browsing now.

The fact is that our daily lives utilize multi-tasking to the extreme. We work and play throughout the day without set boundaries for either (well some set boundaries, but none are absolute). Our eating habits should start reflecting our new lives. We should forget the boundaries of three meals a day and eat many small meals throughout the day whenever we get hungry. Whether it’s work, play, or food, I feel like a Audrey 2 from “Little Shop of Horrors.” Feed me!