Every child remembers their parents telling them to lay off the snacks so that they don’t spoil dinner.. and yet many dieting pages refer to the strategy of eating 5-6 smaller meals a day. Not that eating less sugary snacks is a bad thing, but the childhood conditioning of saving ones stomach for a large meal late in the day is probably not helping the chance of success for people adopting this frequent meal strategy. Your parents should have said, “eat now! otherwise you’ll eat too much later.”