We tried this with our cat for years. He had a designated feeding time. We never broke it. His internal clock is pretty good but not exact, so he starts to pester for food an hour or two before feeding time.

So he would surely wake us up if fed at 7:00am, so one solution is to feed at night. This results in a cat constantly underfoot begging for food for two hours, which is literally a tripping hazard.

The solution is to feed him from a machine and to make sure he never sees us touching the machine. Now, at feeding time he sits by the machine and stares at it, waiting for it to open.