The healthiest pattern for avoiding weight gain seems to be eating just two meals — breakfast and lunch — with a few hours between them, and then not eating again until the next morning.

Whether you’re male or female, young or old, or active or not, eating meals at certain times still seems to affect your weight the same way — the pattern holds up for most people.

Each year, these eating habits only change your weight by a tiny bit — but over 20 or 30 years, that adds up to a big difference in whether you stay lean or gain a lot of weight.

People who eat just one or two meals a day tend to gain less weight each year than those who eat three meals a day, even if they’re eating the same amount of food.

For white people, eating the biggest meal at lunch seems to help prevent weight gain more than it does for Black people — suggesting that the same eating pattern might not work the same way for everyone.

Even though people might not remember exactly when they ate, the general patterns of when and how often they eat still line up with whether they gain or lose weight over time.